Beit Warszawa – The German Government has just done something really quite remarkable as I write these words – but I am sure anyone interested will find still on the Internet the relevant items under ”www.bundesregierung.besonderehelden” or similar. They have produced three short 90-second videos in which elderly people look back to ”the Corona winter of 2020” and how they were then young students behaving as young students do (this is SO funny and so realistically portrayed) and how they were ”especial heroes” in that[…]

For Beit Warszawa, 12th December 2020 – This week’s sidra starts off with a calm, reassuring verse about Jacob feeling at last that he can settle down in peace in the land where his fathers were only wandering foreigners. ”Vayeshev Ya’akov be’Eretz megurey Aviv, beEretz Canaan.” It is, sadly, about the last calm verse in the whole sidra. Ironically, before the chapter is over Joseph, […]

Thoughts on Parashat Vayetze

We live in a world that is so deeply divided ideologically that it is commonplace to rationalize the concept that people live in different, parallel realities. We see ideas of tolerance and pluralism, that were born from the Enlightenment, proliferated during the last 20 years – expressed in slogans like “agree to disagree” or[…]

Thoughts on parashat Toldot

Some people accuse the Hebrew Bible of containing fiction or idealizing certain events or phenomena, especially when it speaks of incredible or miraculous events. The main problem with this critique is that the Bible contains testimonies that are to a large extent non-falsifiable. The proposed “methods of verification” of the biblical stories often consist in[…]