Israel’s national clock is about to strike on the ‘Days of Awe’, a time of soul searching and reckoning. This is most clearly expressed in the classic confession – “We have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have slandered” – the main theme of the Yom Kippur service. The confession, a deliberate self-criticism, is based on two…

The Jewish calendar should guide our lives not only as individuals and a community, but also as a society and a state. If we want to preserve our identity as a distinct cultural and national group, we must make the effort to shape the cycle of time in our own way. In our daily lives, the clock is set to…

Generations of rabbis and scholars have endeavored to understand the reason for the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. The Talmud and Midrash propose a wide range of solutions, all of which assign the blame to the behavior of the generation that experienced tragedy. One of the most fascinating of these interpretations is found in the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Metzia…

So here I am, sitting in my car, crawling at a snail’s pace in the midst of a traffic jam on Begin Boulevard, the cross-Jerusalem highway. Around me are hundreds of frustrated drivers. The mountains around me are covered with densely built-up neighborhoods. Jerusalem of 2018 is a vibrant and thriving city in Israel. These are the days of mourning…

It is important to distinguish the job of a private attorney from that of an attorney in the public service. The former is beholden to a single client, who has hired his services; the latter has two clients — the government ministry to which he is appointed, and the public. In addition to legal advice, an attorney in the public…

The locomotive of the “rule of law,” which is supposed to lead to a verdict in the Netanyahu cases, screeched to a brief and dramatic halt this week, at “Police Recommendations” station. From there it is supposed to continue to the next junctions down the line—the “State Prosecutor,” the “Attorney General,” and perhaps even its final destination, “the Courts.” The…

Since pre-state times, the founders and leaders of the State of Israel have been secular. As a result, the state is not run according to halacha or to a religious vision, but according to principles of modern Western law. This being the case, those who have a religious vision for the state have had to resort to religious politics. Judaism…

This article was originally published in the Sunday Guardian, India   On January 14th, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in India, for a four-day state visit that will take him to Delhi, Gujarat, Prime Minister Modi’s home state and Mumbai. At the airport Modi gave him a royal welcome. No living Israel leader has done more to forge a…

On the one hand, Jews have never been stronger and more influential, and have never had a state with such power. On the other, in terms of maintaining Jewish identity and of the relations between the Jewish communities (and not in terms of physical threat, of course), it would seem to be the worst of times, at least in comparison…