All too often, events in our lives or the lives of those we love reminds us that we are not able to shape life at our will.  The world proceeds without consulting our preferences or desires, and people come in and out of our lives based on their own complex needs, not our own.  When the world doesn’t go according to our plans, our response is often one of sorrow or of frustration.  Read more...

This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Tazria, deals with a range of afflictions and illnesses that the Torah labels as tzara’at. While commonly mistranslated as leprosy (the illnesses actually have very little in common with Hansen’s Disease), Rabbi Jacob Milgrom translates it as “scale disease” and understands the illness as pine retribution for a moral sin or a sin against God. For moderns, we read this week’s description of the afflicted person, the metzora, against at least two different back-drops: the old Bible movies of Cecille B. Read more...

Our leaders often have a sense of their own dignity and self-worth that is far removed from the estimation of the common folk. Periodically, in the United States, we endure the eruption of this dichotomy as legislators try to justify a wide range of privileges and benefits that the rest of us--with much smaller incomes--don't enjoy. Writing checks when they don't have any money, free health club membership, free mailings, cheap haircuts, and a slew of other privileges make them look more like royalty than like elected representatives of the people. Read more...

Our leaders often have a sense of their own dignity and self-worth that is far removed from the estimation of the common folk. Periodically, in the United States, we endure the eruption of this dichotomy as legislators try to justify a wide range of privileges and benefits that the rest of us--with much smaller incomes--don't enjoy. Writing checks when they don't have any money, free health club membership, free mailings, cheap haircuts, and a slew of other privileges make them look more like royalty than like elected representatives of the people. Read more...

Throughout antiquity, most people assumed that illness was a punishment from the gods. Incensed at some infraction of ritual law, pagan gods were forever visiting terrible diseases, sometimes to the point of death, on their worshipers.   In fact, this tendency to attribute divine disfavor to any manifestation of sickness runs rampant in our society as well (although only for the illness of someone else!).   Read more...