You would think people would get excited about mass prophecy, but alas, there's no denying: Passover, the holiday of the Exodus, is way more popular than Shavuos, when we received the Torah.

Passover, with its plagues and miracles, grabs our attention. Passover is life-and-death, a dramatic escape from doom. But...

One Yom Kippur night after Kol Nidre services, a rabbi decided to throw caution to the wind and confront one of his many "once-a-year" congregants.

"Mr. Goldberg, it's so nice to see you in shul. We're open the rest of the year too, you know." (Hint, hint.)

"Please,...

In Tennessee, a newly enacted sex-education bill, which takes an unabashedly pro-abstinence stance, prohibits public schools from promoting so-called "gateway sexual activity." Unfortunately, the grown-ups who argued in favor of the bill were too polite to define exactly what "gateway sexual activity" is, prompting the opposition to sneeringly...

The Washington Post dubbed it "the temptation of Tim Tebow." A certain website that I do not care to name or even to describe what kind of reprehensible service they provide has made news by pulling a clever PR stunt. It all started at a press...

This year, sloppy eaters everywhere are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the invention of the sandwich by its eponymous Earl in 1762. As part of a yearlong celebration of the quarter-millennial, a food-makers guild known as the British Sandwich Association (no joke) has even launched an...

In her first televised interview ever, Gloria Cain, wife of GOP candidate Herman Cain, defended her husband against recent allegations of improper conduct in his past. Said Mrs. Cain:

"You hear the graphic allegations and we know that would have been something that's totally disrespectful of her as a woman....

If you haven't heard of Angry Birds, then to tell you what it is by saying that it is the most successful mobile web app ever doesn't really give you an idea of how huge it is. I mean, how long have apps even existed? No, to give...

Have you ever considered that true greatness is not in the doing but in the not doing? It's a paradox of life, but who you really are and what you truly hold dear are not so clearly proven by the things you accomplish but by the things you choose to...

Back in the old country, there was a rabbi who invested his life savings in timber. When a forest fire broke out and his finances literally went up in smoke, the rabbi's friends worried about how to break the devastating news to him. They hemmed and hawed until the rabbi...

Saturday night, just after Shabbos ended, I found out that Amy Winehouse was dead at 27. My first reaction was to do what I, as a Jew, do whenever I hear such news. I said the Hebrew prayer Baruch Dayan Emet -- Blessed is the True...

Call me a cultural bigot, but every aspect of the way I view reality is affected by my identification with the country in which I was born and raised. I am a Jew, but American ethnocentrism is embedded in my synapses.

That's why today (June 30) is...

"The story is told in countless versions. Somebody -- a saintly rabbi, a mystic caught up in holy ecstasy, even in one version a lost astronaut -- chances to see God face to face and lives to tell about it. 'What is God really like?' asks an anxious crowd back...

As a recovery rabbi, I often attend seminars for addiction professionals. At one such conference, self-help guru John Bradshaw made a point about recovery from addiction by recalling a favorite scene from an old movie, "The African Queen."

In the movie, Katherine Hepburn plays a missionary in...

Religious people, myself included, like to say that God's law is absolute, that it transcends the subjective, arbitrary and hence fleeting quality of human law. But how do you test a thing like that?

I've found a way. I call it the "Canary in the Coal Mine...