WHY MOSHE? Open a Jewish Encyclopedia and you will find many individuals, over the course of Jewish history, who are called Moshe. Look more carefully, and you will see that apart from the first Moshe or Moses, the name doesn’t occur again for more than two thousand years. It seems that for a long time,...
THE PATRIARCH, PELE, AND THE POPE. From opposite sides of the world, tens of thousands of people have been paying their tributes this week to mourn the deaths of Pope Benedict XVI and football legend Pelé. Both the Vila Belmiro Stadium in Santos, Brazil, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome were thronged as the faithful...
REVERED OR REVILED The blurb on Niall Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger (Volume I: The Idealist, 1923-1968) reads: “No American statesman has been as revered or as reviled as Henry Kissinger. “Once hailed as ‘Super K – the indispensable man’ whose advice has been sought by every president from Kennedy to Obama – he has...
CHANUKAH POWER The festival of Chanukah commemorates the military victory of the Maccabees over the vastly superior Greek army as well as the miracle of the jug of oil in the Temple, with the seal of the High Priest, which miraculously lasted for eight days, instead of just one. The great Chassidic leader, Rabbi Levi...
DO YOU RECOGNISE YOURSELF? A key phrase in this week’s parasha, is used in two startlingly contrasting contexts. When Joseph’s brothers want to communicate to Jacob that Joseph is lost, they kill a goat, dip Joseph’s coat in the blood, send it to their father with the words, Haker na – “do you recognize this...
