The disintegrating presidency of Joe Biden is a challenge for our country and so a challenge for us personally. Lies in the arrogant pursuit of power have so characterized the political culture of which Joe is the figurehead that our…

Building a reputation as a moral and trustworthy person is the work of a lifetime. It can be destroyed in a second. It isn’t a trivial thing to build or to maintain. So it’s only natural to seek shortcuts. To…

I heard Bible stories at Sunday school. Especially at the early grades, with Mrs. Goldstein and Mrs. Berkowitz, both of whom were great storytellers. Nothing is more important than telling stories. Real school, public school, began each day with the…

The Constitution and the President In the great debate over the Constitution, the powers of the president were a focal point of controversy. Antifederalists passionately objected to the entire federal system, seeing it as antithetical to republican freedom. The inability…

American poets pioneered free-form verse. Though Walt Whitman did write sometimes in traditional rhyme and meter, he is most famous for his stunning free-form poetry. It was controversial not only for its form but for his candor about the natural…

The people of Israel started out as a family. Israel was the name of the father of the twelve sons who became twelve tribes. The Book of Exodus describes how this family became a nation, in which the covenant that…

I was absolutely baseball crazy. It was 1958, I was six years old, and I was falling in love with baseball. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t play it very well. Even though I would eventually play Little League, I…

Civilization means that officials and authorities, whether uniformed or not, whether armed or not, are made to realize that they are servants and not masters. Thus wrote Winston Churchill in a 1936 article published in Collier’s, a then-popular American magazine….

In the Jewish calendar, this is the week in which the holiday of Shavuot is celebrated. It is called in the ancient prayerbook the Time of the Giving of Our Torah, and the Torah reading on that day is of…

Jefferson wrote of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in his ringing declaration which still speaks to our hearts.  But what these Laws of Nature are is a matter of considerable debate. Jefferson professed the watchmaker God of the…