Haim Watzman One of the problems with the liberal Orthodox Jewish Zionism that we live by here on this blog is that it delays young people’s entry into adulthood and marriage. When I graduated from a public high school in the U.S. in the 1970s, the path before me was four years of college and [...]

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I’ve waited too long to recommend “The Brisket King,” an essay by my friend Andrew Gow on Jews who dismiss Judaism and go looking for “spirituality”: We go shopping, literally, for new ‘spiritual’ experiences, as though one could isolate and purchase ‘spirituality’ via retreats, healing sessions, etc. – as a commodity. New Age, Wicca and [...]

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Haim Watzman I remember a high wind and driving rain. Night is darker here, I thought, as the bus’s engine expired in a series of knocks that sounded like the final beats of a broken heart. We pulled our duffel bags and backpacks from the luggage compartment and dragged them in the direction of the [...]

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Haim Watzman Penitents are like voters. They face critical choices, ones that will set the course of their lives, and must make them in a situation of uncertainty. Committed voters try to grope through the fog of rhetoric in order to understand the true wills and predilections of the candidates they must choose from; penitents [...]

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Haim Watzman Jeremiah the prophet, bound in chains in the convoy of Judean exiles the conquering army was taking to Babylonia, is freed by the captain of the guard. Jeremiah goes to Mitzpa, near destroyed Jerusalem, where Gedalya, whom the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar had appointed governor over Judea. Jewish idealists and patriots who opposed the [...]

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Haim Watzman A cool wind blows through the vineyard in Yavneh late in the month of Elul. The sun, obscured by large but unthreatening gray-blue cloud, has passed the sky’s pinnacle. Rabban Yohanan Ben-Zakkai’s students, who until just a few minutes previously had been engaged in a heated debate over whether the shofar could be [...]

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Haim Watzman When do religions based on text and revelation turn fundamentalist and extreme? When their adherents take their holy books and divine messages to be sources of infallible wisdom that needs no human mediation. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other creeds can all inspire their adherents to take individual responsibility for weighing competing moral values, [...]

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Haim Watzman Y. Ben-David, South Jerusalem’s most intrepid commenter, writes, in response to my previous post on anti-Semitism in Islam, that a significant part of the Muslim world today subscribes to theologies that demonize the Jews, as well as to outlandish conspiracy theories. I’d like to declare here, on the front page of this left-wing [...]

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An afterword to Haim’s post on screeds about anti-Jewish attitudes in Islam: A few months ago I wrote an article about anti-Muslim and anti-Christian prayers in Judaism. The anti-Christian prayers are medieval (I urged excising them.) The anti-Muslim prayer I cited is apparently a fake antique: It’s written in a medieval style, and it follows [...]

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Haim Watzman Joseph Licht, a religious Israeli with a devoted wife, five young sons, and a budding academic career attends a Torah class in Jerusalem given by a young rabbinic prodigy. The two men fall in love and conduct a passionate affair, leading Joseph to abandon his family and his religion—on the same day that [...]

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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) [...]

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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 [...]

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