Blog

For those of you who are in the area and interested, I'll be giving a talk on Judaism and sex at the Hillel of San Diego this Thursday (November 1st) at 7pm. It's at 5742 Montezuma Rd. in SD. Come if you're around!

My friend Justin is reading The Travels of Rabbi Pesachia of Regensburg, the travel writing of a 12th Century Ashkenazi rabbi who journeys from Prague to the Mediterranean and Middle East. He sent me the following excerpt, which I thought might be of interest to some...

I learned last week that if you are not feeling well, it is permitted to nurse from (but not actually milk) a goat on Shabbat.* That's right, you must suckle the goat itself. In less benignly creepy, more genuinely worrying and scary news, here's a GoogleMap of the...

The NYT reports on the latest activities of the American justice system: A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court...

Christina of ElegantHack has a frustratingly on-target post up now about the ongoing gap between men's and women's pay, promotions, and abilities to break into the highest echelons of the business world. She quotes an article from Harvard Business Review with some...

Is it too much to hope that the current Supreme Court would outlaw lethal injection? As the NYT observes, it's unfortunately unlikely that they'll outlaw the death penalty altogether, though it would be a very good thing if they did. (You will note from this map that...

Here's your happy blast for today.

There's a lot that I could say about this text, but I'm not going to. I'd rather leave it open. G'mar chatimah tovah. Rav said: You know the secrets of the universe. Shmuel said: Out of the depths of [my] heart.... Rabbi Yochanan said: Master of the Universe! Rabbi...

Well, the year is now new. My erev Rosh Hashana was lovely; I led part of services, gave a sermon, and went to a lovely dinner at friends'. Rosh Hashana morning, however, I woke up feeling... off. After five hours of davvening and leading Torah discussions and running...