Lifelong Learning
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over…
Category: Intellectuals
The Way It Looked in 1970 (Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will)
What can we do to affect the events that are to come? First, we must not make the mistake of placing trust in the government. The large upsurge of antiwar sentiment can be an effective…
A Second Bible by Melech Ravitch
Why shouldn’t a second Jewish Book be put together and edited and canonized, on the lines of our Bible? 377 A Bible is not an anthology, nor a history, nor a collection of documents. It…
The Way It Looked in 1988
Take a look at this morning’s New York Times (I had fifty cents to kill, so I bought a copy). There’s story about Israel, John Kifner, a pretty good reporter, is reporting about attitudes in…
Responsibility
“But we all learn from the Midrash the essential lesson of human and social responsibility. True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. …
Dear Isabel (Letter/3)
Monday 22 June 2015 Dear Isbaelita Page 3 This page inspires me to offer you the following writing topics to add to your comprehensive list, unless you’ve already exhausted each of them by writing at…
The On-going Task: Challenging Illegitimate Authority
At Northwest Coffee, I was having a conversation with Theresa Schafer about women’s ordination and clericalism, and I paraphrased what Noam Chomsky once said about any hierarchy or authority needing to justify itself. Later, I found…
The Way It Looked in 1996
The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
For L.K. Lapinski
When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: “Why do I care if my high school’s team wins the football game? I don’t know anybody on the team, they have nothing…