What could be cooler than having mentored Lewis Carrol? How about C.S. Lewis calling you his “master”? Being friends with Mark Twain and Walt Whitman? Being amajor inspiration to J.R.R Tolkien? All of this is true of a little known Scottish mystic, poet and writer named George MacDonald (1824–1905). MacDonald…

Several weeks ago I taught on the Torah portion where Yaa’kov (Jacob) wrestles with a mysterious figure in the night-time, and I though I’d share what I taught here, a meditation on forgiveness, reconciliation, and trauma as the year ends. Several weeks ago Jews read the weekly Torah portion “Vayeitze,”…

In the last month, according to Combatants For Peace, there were over 100 attacks by Jewish settlers in the occupied territories against Palestinians — and these attacks occurred in just over 10 days. …

What happened between the exile of the Jews and the Zionist return? “Palestine” is a very old name for the region that more or less maps onto what Jews called Eretz Yisrael, one that goes back to 12 century BCE Egyptian inscriptions which call the area Paleset. …

Both warfare and the rhetoric of war were brutal in the ancient Near East. Yet as Christian theologian Preston Sprinkle points out in his excellent book on violence in the Bible, Fight, “Israel was less violent (than surrounding cultures) and had a stripped down- almost absurd- warfare policy.” In the…

This is an article I have wanted to write for a long time. The massive tension between the current Zionist Israeli state and traditional Jewish ethics and belief is not a new thing: it dates back to the very start of the Zionist movement in the 1890s and the early…

The Holy Land Before Zionism Jews lost all power in our homeland in 136 CE after the Bar Kokhba revolt was crushed by the Roman Empire. By then it had been some time since Jews had ruled the region the Hebrew Bible says was promised to us by God. The…

A Satire Note: In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, Chelm functions as an imaginary town of fools. The following piece, which I wrote in February of 2017 after Trump’s election, continues in that tradition. …

Things like that don’t come along very often. When has the next Kate Bush come along after Kate Bush? There hasn’t been one. -Elton John When I was a teenager I was living with a crew of ex-street punks who had left the mean streets for the beauty of Denman…