The relationship between world Jewry, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel has never been simple and it has a long history. In 1897, Ahad Ha-Am (aka, Asher Ginzberg) published an essay in Ha-Shiloah, the Hebrew monthly he edited from Odessa, entitled, “The Jewish State and the Jewish Problem”. In the essay, Ginzberg argued […]

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about angels. That may sound surprising coming from a Reconstructionist rabbi. After all, I have said many times from this bima that I do not believe in a supernatural God as described in the Bible—a God who can suspend the laws of nature, who is all-knowing, all powerful and ever-present. It […]

When Yale historian, Timothy Snyder, published On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century soon after Donald Trump assumed the U.S. Presidency in 2017, there were some who thought that this was yet another example of the political left overreacting to the election of a Republican president. Snyder’s less than subtle parallels between the rise […]