This past summer, I had the privilege to participate in two OU solidarity missions to Israel—the first with fellow members of OU communities and the second with rabbinic leaders from across America. Over the course of these missions, I was able to meet with families living in southern Israel who were subjected to a constant […]
There is a fascinating debate among the Tannaim in Tractate ta’anit regarding an issue that at first glance seems purely academic, since it is about an institution we no longer practice today. However, upon taking a closer look, we find that the debate, which is so extreme in its positions, is actually extraordinarily relevant to […]
I write this just as my sixteen-year-old son is returning from Israel. He was fortunate to participate in one of the OU’s most spectacular programs, Yad B’Yad. Yachad/NJCD (National Jewish Council for Disabilities, an agency of the OU) brought seventy typical high school students to travel the length and breadth of our homeland, literally “hand-in-hand” […]
It is a sad but well-known statistic that the largest and fastest-growing bloc of American Jewry is the unaffiliated. Depending on where in the United States you live, anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of the Jews in your city ages forty and under have no affiliation whatsoever to Judaism—they don’t belong to a synagogue […]