"Would take your only son?Be sure to read the comments as well.
Would you lay your answer down?
Would you bind him to the stone?
Would you take your only son?"
A Simple Jew has written a sweet post about his daughter singing Yom Tov songs.
Heichal HaNegina posts about the Modzitzer Rebbes Yom Tov compositions.
LIFE-of-RUBIN has some thoughts on new Jewish music.
Here's a Jerusalem Post article about pianist Yaron Gottfried.
Rabbi Yitzchak Adlerstein has written a post for Cross-Currents:
And the words of the prophet they are written on the subway walls… – Paul SimonRead the whole thing!
So many of those seers came forth after Katrina, that the walls of the 34th St Station could have run out of room fairly quickly. Some of the reverse prognostications even came, to the embarrassment of some of us, from pretty well placed persons within the Torah community. (My favorite, however, comes from outside of it. It is the one that holds George Bush personally responsible, since he refused to sign on to Kyoto. That, of course, directly produced enough global warming to cause the current spate of tropical storms.)
Many of us skeptics suffered in silence, as we listened to a march of authorities tell us what everyone else was doing wrong. My son Peysi reminded me of two levels of irony in the rush to judgment.
The first concerned the suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv. Some holy figure told the world that the reason for the tragedy was undoubtedly Divine retribution for the Shabbos desecration of the patrons of that disco. A few months later, a bomber struck at the entrance to Emmanuel, a haredi town with no Shabbos desecration to speak of. A writer in Haaretz couldn’t resist the opportunity to announce that the tragedy certainly was Divine retribution for the sin of being haredi.
The more serious error in the spate of finger-pointing, observed my son, was that it run completely counter to the way Gedolim always reacted in the past, pointing the finger of guilt back at ourselves, rather than towards others. Our leaders used to offer no reason as to why the victims of cataclysmic events were swallowed up by them; they did, however, point out that if we were doing a better job of things, the world would be a more perfect place, and tragedies would not strike in the same way. Horrifying headlines became platforms upon which to deliver mussar talks that urged us to take stock of our own houses, rather than burn down those of others.
