Haim Watzman
There’s a canard that religious people hear again and again from their non-religious acquaintances: “I’m jealous. It must be such a comfort to be able to believe in God.” They haven’t read Psalm 27, which observant Jews recite twice daily from the beginning of the month of Elul (which began earlier this week) throughout [...]

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Haim Watzman
All year I work hard to reinforce my Jewish-Zionist-Israeli conception of myself and to instill it in my children. I talk to them about the importance of serving their country, by serving in the army or by going to college in Sderot; about how we must preserve our heritage and traditions. And about why [...]

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Haim Watzman
Last month I published an essay in the Jewish Chronicle of London in which I asserted that something is missing from most of the literature being produced by and about Jews today: “What I seek are books that, without being bound by conventions of religion and history, nevertheless use familiarity with and respect for [...]

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Haim Watzman
In his recent post on the conversion obstructionism of Israel’s established church, Gershom wrote: “We need to define a civic Israeli identity not dependent on halakhic status.” He’s right, but it’s sad that he is.
The secular Israeli state’s way of determining who is Jewish—and therefore who belongs to the state’s majority culture and ethnic [...]

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Haim Watzman
In response to my post The Torah-Who Needs It, “Haskalah” asks:
Can a Jew “think hard about every action, about what it means and what its consequences will be, without the Torah?” Did no one do so before the first Sha’vuot? In short, is it possible for a Jew to be moral and ethical and [...]

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Haim Watzman
So what do we need this Torah for anyway? Why should our lives be bound by a collection of tales and precepts that claims to have been conveyed by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai, seven weeks after the Exodus? It’s a legitimate and important question as we embark, tonight and tomorrow, on Shavu’ot, [...]

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What could Israel look like in 20 years, if we do things right? My article looking forward is now online at the National Post in Canada:
In Israel, 2028, Ibrahim Abdullah Hapalit is the reigning literary star. His first novel, Sinai, is based on his childhood escape from Darfur, across Egypt and the Sinai desert to [...]

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Poor God. You created the world, you are the power and glory, but everyone thinks you’re a Republican.
But the association of the Most High with the most right-wing doesn’t stand up to philosophical scrutiny. Conservatives, after all, love order. They want today to be like yesterday, and tomorrow to be like the day before yesterday.
But [...]

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Reading your last post , Haim, I suspected that you’ve been hacking into my thoughts. Not about swimsuits per se , but about Daniel Pipes’s curious belief that swimming in mixed company is a democratic duty.
Strangely, I spent a day once with Pipes. A dovish friend of mine with an interest in the Middle East [...]

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Mondays are women’s nights at the Jerusalem Pool, where I swim every day. From the hours of six to nine p.m., this South Jerusalem pool is closed to me simply because I’m a male. On Wednesday nights, women get the same treatment.
Daniel Pipes spends some of his no doubt precious time chronicling swimming pools in [...]

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Contrary to the common wisdom, the Israelites were not liberated from slavery at the time of the Exodus. Many midrashim and commentaries stress that what actually happened was a change of ownership: they had been slaves to Pharoah, and then they became slaves to God.
When I was younger, this interpretation rang false to me. The [...]

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“Ancient Jerusalem Safari” said the sign on the side of the open-sided bus. It was parked this morning in the lot at the end of the promenade that stretches from UN Hill almost to Hebron Road. The promenade is an arc of stone walkways and stairs, of lawns and landscaping with a [...]

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