There is a well-known story about a woman who attended a lecture, and heard the lecturer say that the universe was going to self-destruct in a hundred billion years. The woman fainted immediately. After being woken up she was asked whether the reason she fainted had to do with the hundred billion years mentioned. She […]

Jerusalemites suffered two disasters during the recent few days. In one of them, a building exploded due to a gas leak. A whole family – a father, a mother and a little baby – were killed. The other disaster involved a poorly-carried-out extermination of pests, which also resulted in the poisoning of two little baby […]

(Original version in Hebrew: http://hofesh.org.il/articles/halacha/talmud_logic/talmud-logic.html, using http://www.daatemet.org.il for many resources) “New generations are inferior to older ones” – this is a common idea in Judaism, somewhat reversing the known facts of human and cultural development. According to this idea, the ancient sages are said to be “closer to God” in spiritual power, so they surely […]

This week Israel lost one of its leading singers and actors – the late Arik Einstein. Apart from being extremely talented, Mr. Einstein – especially in his recent years – was almost the embodiment of “religious morality”: He was known for his modesty, his avoidance of big money, his pleasant attitude toward everyone else, and […]

It hit me. The solution to all our problems. And it’s all based on a mathematical attribute named ‘Transitivity’. Quoting Wikipedia: In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is transitive if whenever an element a is related to an element b, and b is in turn related to an element c, then […]

This morning I watched the Israeli Channel 2 morning program. The interview that caught my attention hosted two known figures, Dov Halbertal and Emily Amrusi, allegedly representing “left” and “right”, eagerly discussing “from both sides of the fence” the future of the Jewish nation and the State of Israel. Two people who believe that some […]

The art of inventing excuses is an old art. Most of our ancient “sacred” texts contain a myriad of contradictions and conflicts, but being “sacred” – these contradictions and conflicts must be resolved… How can the gods be mistaken? The good news is that it’s relatively easy to come up with solutions to practically everything. […]

Before killing seven CIA agents in a suicide attack in Pakistan in 2009, the terrorist Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi took a video of himself, in which – among other things – he expressed satisfaction with the fact of soon meeting his victims, when he is in paradise and they are suffering in hell. The planned […]

So the Israeli elections are behind us, or so it seems. The media is super-busy with coverage, providing occupation for tens of local analysts and commentators, not to mention hundreds of comedians and other jokers making fun of our elected representatives, often rightfully. Most of the statistics we hear about refer to allegedly “important” things: […]

Whad’ya know, it’s election time again in Israel. And in election time, the rules of nature change. While nearly everyone tends to look at things from the traditional “political left and right” point of view, it seems that almost every major political party tends to place at least one religious figure in its list of […]