Rabbi Moshe Pitchon

Passover

A Gut Yomtef

Pessah 2024 The incommensurable suffering

Rabbi Moshe Pitchon April 21, 2024

TaNaKh

The miracles reported in the Bible were supposed to strike the reader as miraculous. Even if some natural phenomena can be found at the heart of the Ten Plagues, the theology rather than the natural history of the plagues intrigued the biblical authors and inspired them to tell the tale of the plagues as they did.

Rabbi Moshe Pitchon April 18, 2024

TaNaKh

The unpredictable, inexplicable help that we encounter

all through Jewish history, from the Exodus to the Maccabean Revolt to the rising from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust to the creation of the modern State of Israel, the end result was not the to-be-expected consequences. It was something that surprised even the most optimistic speculations about human capacity.

Rabbi Moshe Pitchon April 18, 2024

TaNaKh

Let’s Talk About Miracles

To paraphrase Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jews do not keep their faith because of the miracles they experience. It is their faith that leads them to interpret their life as miraculous.

Rabbi Moshe Pitchon April 13, 2024

TaNaKh

An Incident in a Small Middle Eastern Tribe

What really happened that night, on that day hundreds and hundreds of years ago, when the Book of Exodus tells us that

Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt… And he called for Moses and Aaron by night and said: ‘Rise up, get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. Take both your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone; and bless me also.’

Rabbi Moshe Pitchon April 13, 2024

Israel Politics

Is Demography Destiny?

Though Israel is still a secular country where secular Jews account for 36 percent of the population
it is estimated that by 2059, the Haredi community will constitute 35% of the Jewish population in Israel.”