Judaism

Every day as a Jew, three times a day, we say a lot of words. In the morning we say a whole lot of words, and call it Shacris. In the afternoon we say less words, and call it Mincha. In the evening we say more words than in the afternoon, but not nearly as many as we do in the morning, and we call it Arvis. Saying a lot of words, the same words, every day, can become tiresome. Understanding what we’re saying makes this daily practice more interesting. The traditional liturgy is in Hebrew, so understanding begins at the most basic, literal level. Past that, there are myriad sefarim which give insight into the words we say every day, covering the full spread of Jewish thought and tradition, from the classical commentators to modern anthologies, from the simplest explanation to the more sophisticated, to the insights of Kabbalah and Chassidus. ...

A framework for animal moral status that doesn’t collapse into sentimentality or dismissiveness The previous essay argued that human dignity is grounded in kind-membership — that belonging to a kind whose nature is constitutively oriented toward self-transcendence is what makes a human being worth protecting, regardless of what any individual has personally achieved or can currently do. What do you do with the edges? Gorillas. Elephants. Dolphins. Animals that are clearly doing something cognitively that a cow isn’t. Do they just get lumped in with livestock? ...

The previous part lays out the idea from first principles: beauty is a kind of power — it acts on people before they consent — and the grown-up thing to do with power is to carry it with care, neither flaunting it nor burying it as shameful. That argument is deliberately narrow: it only speaks where power is in play, and it generates no dress codes. This part turns to a specific application: the place of modesty in Jewish life, and a failure mode the principle predicts. ...

The Innocence of Children Picture an isolated village in the hills. The children there have found little nuggets of gold in the streambed, and they play with them — flick them, trade them, leave them in the dirt. You watch and you smile. They are holding something that could build a house or buy a field, and to them it is a pebble that catches the light. That is innocence. It is not knowing the value of what you hold. The child who throws a heavy object at his brother’s head and misses, breaking a window instead, is guilty of the broken window and the thrown object both. And he is still innocent, because he cannot yet feel the weight of what he nearly did. He doesn’t see how close he came. The depth of harm, the full meaning of being responsible for another person — these are things a child develops into. Empathy at that depth is earned, not issued at birth. So a child can be guilty and innocent at once: he did the thing, but the thing has no real size to him yet. ...

The same Sam means one thing at eight and something entirely different at fifteen. The risk curve is not flat across childhood. The social stakes escalate as a child grows, and the escalation is not folk wisdom — it is documented. What happens to the peer world of an American teenage boy between eleven and eighteen changes the calculus completely. Romance becomes the social currency, 11–14 Between roughly eleven and fourteen, romance moves from the periphery to the center of adolescent social life. It comes to dominate the internal world and the conversations with friends; ethnographers and developmental researchers describe dating and romance as one of the organizing principles of adolescent peer structure, not a side activity within it.1 The peer world physically reorganizes to match: kids stop socializing only within their own sex and begin forming mixed-gender groups that bring boys and girls together in joint activity.2 ...

When I was a kid I had a friend who lived nearby. He wasn’t Jewish. He was, by any measure, a good kid — kind, easy to be around, more mature than his age. We played the way children have always played. Hide-and-seek with walkie-talkies and some elaborate set of rules I no longer remember. Pretend games. Pulling bamboo out of the strip behind his backyard, which for some reason felt like the best thing in the world to do on a given afternoon. ...

Relocate the question The primary question was never “should my child have non-Jewish friends.” That question can’t be answered in the abstract, and trying to answer it in the abstract is the error. The real question, the one that determines outcomes: What is the child’s home-based identity actually built on? Because that is what decides whether outside exposure is a minor wind the child leans into and walks through, or an existential threat. Same friend, same Sam, same team — the meaning of the exposure is set almost entirely by what the child is bringing to it from home. ...

The childhood friendship — the neighbor, the walkie-talkies, the bamboo — cost me nothing Jewish. The wrong lesson to draw is “non-Jewish friendships are fine.” The right one is narrower: that particular kind of friendship was fine. “Non-Jewish friend” is not one thing. It names several structurally different situations that get lumped under a single phrase, and the lumping is exactly where the bad thinking happens. A parent who has decided the question in the abstract — for it or against it — has already made the mistake. The situations differ enough that they deserve different answers. ...

A Close Reading of the Dearborn Heights Mayor’s Statement on the Temple Israel Attack On March 12, 2026, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali — a 41-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon and resident of Dearborn Heights, Michigan — drove a truck loaded with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, the largest Reform synagogue in the United States. He exited with a rifle and opened fire. Approximately 140 students and staff were inside, including young children in an early childhood center. Security guards engaged and killed him. The FBI is investigating it as “a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” ...

A Street Interview A college student with a phone camera spots a Jewish man on the sidewalk and approaches him. Anthony: Hey man, you got a minute? I’m doing street interviews for my YouTube channel. I’m just gonna be straight with you — I’ve met a few Jewish people who have this vibe like they think they’re better than everyone else. There’s this whole “chosen people” thing, and some of them have been pretty condescending about it. Is that actually a Jewish belief, or am I just running into jerks who happen to be Jewish? ...