Off the Pulpit Archives

I judge myself from the inside. I know how I feel, how complex are my own motivations and ideas. My view of others is different. Especially when they do something I dislike, I often attribute a single motive, idea or personality trait to...

Two hundred years from now, on a fine spring afternoon, scientists look up at the heavens and tell God that it is all over — humans can stand on their own. The scientist says, “Look, God. You were good in...

When you ask a religious Jew how he or she is doing, the answer is likely to be “Baruch HaShem” – blessed be God. Good news often has “Baruch Hashem” added to it as well, as in, “my children are...

From George Prochnik’s award winning biography of Stefan Zweig, “The Impossible Exile”: “One day in the 1920’s when Zweig happened to be traveling to Germany with Otto Zarek, the two men stopped off to visit an exhibition of antique furniture...

Most ethical dilemmas, like most tragedies, are not a conflict of right and wrong but a conflict of rights. People want different, competing and sometimes worthy things that cannot coexist. The authors of the Federalist papers knew this well. When...

This past week all across the world Jews mourned the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. And they blamed themselves. Yes, there are passages in Jewish literature that excoriate the nations who carried out the destruction. There are even passages that express...

From the Talmud: A favorite saying of the Rabbis of Yavneh was: “I am God’s creature and my fellow is God’s creature. My work is in the town and his work is in the country. I rise early for my work...

We are a society geared toward the gifted. We have programs to enhance people’s natural endowments, special training and tutoring, early identification of people with talent or intelligence. Of course it makes sense; innovators and artists and thinkers should be...

Deuteronomy is the great book of listening. We live in a visual time; our age is saturated with images. Everyone’s cellphone carries a camera and can document the sights of our lives. But over and over in the first chapters of...

Franz Kafka in his famous parable “Before the Law” writes about a man who stands before a door designated only for him, but dies without entering. A very different spirit from Kafka, Ralph Waldo Emerson, nonetheless anticipated the existentialist by...