Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel
Reformations are good for the soul. They keep the religious leaders and faiths in check. In the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, people began to read the Bible critically for the first time without having the local priest spoon-feed it to them while they sat on their Church pews. Of course, the spread of literacy made a huge difference—thanks to the Gutenberg’s printing ...
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My history with Rabbi Shlomo Riskin goes all the way back to 1977. He visited a Hillel Academy in Binghamton, New York, where I taught Talmud many decades ago. At the time, I knew he was already a well-respected rabbi who had brought many Jews back to Judaism when he served as the founder of the Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan.
Rabbi Riskin has often taken considerable heat from the Orthodox establishment, which always criticizes the maverick Modern ...
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The Golden Age of Islam extended from the 8th century to the 13th century, when much of the historically Islamic world embraced a flowering of scientific, economic and cultural prosperity until the time of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258 CE , when the Islamic Golden Age officially ended. Before that time, Islam was vastly ahead of their counterparts in Europe, and excelled in just about every ancient secular and ...
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It isn’t every day I come across a theologically provocative new story headline like the New York Daily did this morning in the terrible aftermath of the mass shooting that took place in San Bernardino, California—which claimed the lives of fourteen people, while injuring over twenty.
The headline said, “God isn’t fixing this,” which referred to the many lawmakers who offered up their prayers for the victims, but failed to act when it ...
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Book Review: God and Politics in Esther-
Yoram Hazony: Title: God and Politics in Esther 2nd Edition. Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 2nd edition (2015)
ISBN-10: 1107583454; Price $18.27 on Amazon. Rating ***** out of 5 Stars.
Reviewer: Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel
Yoram Hazony’s exposition of the Book of Esther is priceless. In my Judaism 101 class, everyone read a little bit from God and Politics in Esther and the discussions that ensued made the ...
Learn More ShareCategories: Anti-Semitism, Bible, biblical theology, Current Events, Political Commentaries, Talmud, Zohar, and Midrash