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Kingdom of Priests

For those who think that finding evidence of design in nature is a Christian preoccupation, not a Jewish one, the hits just keep coming. Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164) is one of a handful of the most important classical commentators on the Torah. Explaining the first of the Ten Commandments, “I am the Lord your God Who…

The item in the bombastic journalist’s biography that sticks with me is conversion to Catholicism. The story illustrates a general rule I articulated in Why the Jews Rejected Jesus. While non-Jews who convert to Judaism often come from seriously religious Christian backgrounds, Jews who adopt Christianity nowadays almost without exception are people who never connected…

A surprising if indirect affirmation of the Darwin-Hitler connection has been offered by the Darwinist faithful over at Panda’s Thumb. Yes, you read that right. The argument made by scholars like Richard Weikart and Benjamin Wiker traces an intellectual genealogy from Darwin through Ernst Haeckel to German biology more generally to German popular culture to…

At Tablet, Victor Navasky has a warm recollection of rambunctious journalist Sidney Zion, about whom, in describing him, it would be a literary challenge not to use the word Runyonesque. At the end of the piece, Navasky notes that at Sid’s funeral, the rabbi pointed out that while not outwardly religious, Sid Zion put on…

Some readers doubted my characterization of Epicurean philosophy as, among other things, advocating masturbation over sexual love between men and women. Perhaps it would have been more strictly accurate if I had attributed this teaching to Epicureanism, rather than to Epicurus. That’s the idea that’s at stake here, after all. It’s what is meant by the heresy…

Last week some readers of this blog had a hard time accepting that the rabbinic term “apikoros,” a kind of heretic, denotes someone who rejects — if I may use the contemporary term — intelligent design. One fellow, by a rigorous Google search, even believed he’d found Internet-based proof that an apikoros designates a Christian!…

My wife and I went out for dinner tonight and spent much of our conversation mulling over the challenge to religious belief posed by…well, religious belief and religious believers. I’ve often said that no obstacle to faith, for me, compares to that posed by other Orthodox Jews, even by Orthodox Judaism itself. I’ve been let…

Today and tomorrow mark the 40th anniversary of the murders that made Charles Manson an icon of evil. In Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi writes about his interviews with talent scout Gregg Jakobson, who spent many hours, over the course of a year and a half (1968-69), talking with Manson about his philosophy. Manson foresaw…

Sometimes the hollowness of contemporary conservatism gets me down. An earlier figure in the conservative tradition, Whittaker Chambers, began his journey up from Communism one morning when he was feeding his little daughter and he noticed her ear. Suddenly he felt the power and beauty in its evident design, and this transformed his whole view…

A profound message in the week’s Torah reading, Eikev, reminds us there is really no middle ground between adhering to God and adhering to idolatry. On the verse, “Beware for yourselves, lest your heart be seduced and you will turn astray and you will serve other gods and prostrate yourselves to them” (Deuteronomy 11:16), Rashi…
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