Thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy in Singapore suffers the worst of the recessions in Southeast Asia, reports the Washington Post. Singapore is an ep...

One of the tragedies of the modern church is that we just don't seem to understand a lesson the Moses learnt from his father-in-law. Sadly we fail to realise that not every godly Christian leader should aspire to be the so-called "number one" leader of a church. Many churches are started and do not ...

Boring, boring, boring. That's both a review of this snoozer of a parsha and a warning about the notes you're about to read. Caveat lector. Crux Alert For my money this is the most troubling crux in the whole Torah. Read more External Parallels In 21:10 we're told that a man who takes a second wife ...

You might be asking, “Where the hell is Matt? He hasn’t made a post in, like, forever.” My little gay butt has been working overtime the past two weeks as the whole of the gay world (or, at least, a good portion of it) descended on Charlotte at exactly the same time. I worked with ...

With this issue of ParshaNotes, I'm up-to-date. It's amusing to me each week to see which individual notes generate the most interest and anger. As I compile the post, I usually guess which one will make Bray most irate, or which will generate the most thoughtful commentary from the others in the co...

Needy people need professional help and need to leave your life. Just think of what you could be doing without all this high maintenance behavior surrounding you.Think hard! Is this the life you always wanted or is it time to leave what's not working for you anymore?Emotionally healthy people symbol...

Exodus 32 is in many ways one of the lowest points of the Old Testament. Merely days after Israel has been wonderfully rescued from slavery in Egypt they break commandments, forget Moses, and fall down to worship an idol. Whether they thought the Golden Calf was YHWH, or whether it was to replace Hi...

Better late than not all... Echos Compare: Exodus 10:3: Thus says the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, 'How long will you refuse to humble yourself before Me? כה־�מר... העברי� עד־מתי מ�נת לענת מפני with Exodus 10:7: Pharaoh's servants said to him, "How long will this man b...

Parshat Bo The New Calendar This week's parsha contains one of my favorite comments in Chief Rabbi Hertz's classical Torah commentary. He argues that the plague of darkness was a total solar eclipse and therefore, using a calculation of when ancient Egypt experienced a total solar eclipse, he says t...

This weekend I heard part of a This American Life episode. I think it was about competitions or something. The segment I heard was from a Jewish guy telling about a “Blessing Bee” he was in when he attended an Orthodox Jewish school. What was fascinating to me was to hear him talk about ...