A hypothetical situation: I am going downstairs to throw away the garbage. The alarm siren is heard again. A Hamas rocket hits the apartment upstairs. I am saved – I wasn’t in the apartment. Now, should I thank God? (Alternatively, should I thank my good luck?) Here are two different reasons for why not: Firstly, […]

This one really pissed me off. All this talks about the “Chosen People” always makes me feel uncomfortable. I am a Jew but I am not “chosen” in any way. Either I am the only person aboard (and all the rest are products of my imagination, a la Descartes) or everyone else is similarly “chosen”. […]

Last Saturday, while walking in some known Israeli town, I couldn’t help noticing the renowned pattern of an El Al plane passing above in the sky. An El Al airplane? On Saturday? For a moment I thought the Messiah was already here, and then I remembered the old airline trick of “On Tuesday my name […]

About six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The ‘Shoa’ – as it is called in Hebrew – is a true terrible historical event which we all know. Many of the survivors still live among us, some carry on their skin the mark of the death camps. There is plenty of documentation in the […]

Our mind has evolved to grasp the world as having absolute rules and definitive purposes. In our day-to-day life – things must have well-defined locations, events must occur at well-understood times, movements have clear directions. The reasons for this tendency are easy to explain. For millions of years, our survival has been depending on a […]

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 […]