Of all the fresh hells we face in our long, chaotic slide into civilizational decay, the rise of the flat-earthers is the most encouraging. Take a moment to appreciate that a whole small demographic has united with the power of the Internet to rebel against the curvature of the earth. This initial blow alone sometimes […]
I once heard an explanation for why students of Chassidus seem to write fewer works of original Torah thought than those who do not study it. Without Chassidus, you learn a text, find what seems to be a flaw in it, study more, and write an essay rescuing the author from his apparent error. With […]
What A Jew Wants (Doesn’t Matter)
In a sense, an anti-Semite might be forgiven for attributing all evil to the Jews, as there is no evil we will not learn, argue about, contemplate during Shmoneh Esrei, dream about on Shabbos, and master. The anti-Semite thinks the Jews want to conquer the world. Like all good ideas, he stole this from the […]
Spirituality and Intelligence Are Not Opposites
It’s not my fault that I often end up saying, “The whole system is broken.” It takes a cracked man to know a cracked time, and I was born in the correct season. One such fissure in what, at some time in the distant past when dinosaurs weren’t sexist and the President was literally just […]
If You’re Hungry, Eat Yourself
The truest things cannot be understood, because they themselves understand, and what understands cannot be understood. Take a man or woman. We peel off their star chart or Spotify most-listened tracks of 2017 and we see them for what they are in their complexity, and we tell them, “In this, I think I see you.” […]
My Thoughts When You Quit Observant Judaism
Why We Eat Sufganiyot On Chanukah
Kislev, time of darkness, month of light. We celebrate the flames of Chanukah and the warmth of Pnimius HaTorah, the secrets, the soul. As the Ten Commandments were given in the third month from Nissan, so was the Alter Rebbe freed from prison in the third month from Tishrei, thereby initiating a new epoch in […]