Off the Pulpit Archives

In the years when I played tournament chess I would wander over to the boards of the top players and was often surprised to spectators with lesser skills (like myself) make whispered pronouncements about the play of the masters. I...

The book of Deuteronomy begins by telling us that Moses spoke these words “to all of Israel.” As the Vilna Gaon points out, it is obvious they were spoken to all of Israel, but the phrase is included because there are...

Can one combine Torah and secular study, religious devotion and participation in the world? In a letter written shortly before his death, Rabbi Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) put it this way: “It should be interpreted in the vein of Franz...

“From the crooked timber of humanity” said Immanuel Kant, “nothing straight can be made.” This famous shot of pessimism from one of history’s preeminent philosophers makes an interesting contrast with the rabbinic comment in the Talmud: “Thunder was created only to...

The first thing that strikes a visitor to the Dalai Lama is the absence of majesty. You walk up bare concrete steps, past some trees and a building and hear street sounds. This is not the Vatican, or the White...

For over twenty-five years I have written the weekly “Musings” column for The New York Jewish Week, which for more than a decade we have sent out as “Off The Pulpit.” Now, after some 1,300 weekly columns, I am taking...

As a nation we suffer from imputing bad intentions. Too many people on the left assume that those on the right must be racist, and those on the right too often assume those on the left must hate America. We have never...

Billy Wilder, legendary Hollywood writer and director of such classics as “Sunset Boulevard” and “Some Like it Hot” was a refugee who left Germany for Paris as the Nazi party gained power. He made it briefly to America but had to...

We live in an age of unprecedented wealth. Do we therefore live in an age of unprecedented charity? Many studies have demonstrated that paradoxically, rich people give a much lower percentage of their income to charity than poor people. As wealth accumulates,...

Jacob fools his father Isaac, disguising himself as Esau and taking the blessing. How does the Torah itself regard his action? The subtle critique can be found later on in Jacob’s story. He works for seven years to marry Laban’s daughter Rachel. At...