Briefly, I’ve mentioned that I had a fire in my apartment on Rosh Hashanah. My new column in Moment Magazine tries to make sense of that timing: I’m a rationalist. My grandmother’s mumbled imprecations against the evil eye seemed silly by the time I was seven. I don’t believe in omens. When I read ancient [...]

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South Jerusalem wishes all our readers–those who love us, those who hate us, those who agree with us, those who disagree–a happy Jewish new year. Here in South Jerusalem we’ll be celebrating the two-day holiday with our families and engaging in examining our own faults and forgiving those of others. And we’ll be contemplating how [...]

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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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