Posts Tagged: Pini Dunner
A Message from the Front: We Must Aid Ukrainian Refugees Now
I have just spent the week in Poland with 25 rabbinic colleagues, traversing the country, and visiting various Jewish community centers that are taking care...
Is Man Good, Evil, or Something in Between? A Response
The question of man’s innate goodness has been debated recently in The Algemeiner, beginning with a column by Rabbi Pini Dunner arguing both that man’s...
Human Beings Are Not Basically Bad or Good, We Choose
These pages have recently seen a rather impassioned debate on one of the more fundamental questions of human existence: are human beings essentially good or...
Yes, Human Beings Are Inherently Good
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article titled: “Being good is in our nature.” The underlying theme was that human beings are essentially...
The Music That Made Me Weep
Earlier this week, without warning, I found myself weeping uncontrollably. Allow me to tell you why. On Sunday night, a few guys came together in London...
What Truly Matters Is How We Treat Our Fellow Men and Women
One of humanity’s most ancient tensions is the choice between our duty to God and ensuring that our behavior towards others is the paradigm of...
Do Wealthy People Believe in God?
The 19th-century business behemoth John D. Rockefeller is often touted as the “wealthiest American of all time.” But although he was a relentless capitalist, he was...
Esau, Jacob, and Poetic Justice
One of my favorite films as a teenager was the Robert Redford/Paul Newman classic -- "The Sting." It’s a complicated film, in which all the...
Great Rabbis Make the Torah Relevant Today
This week, I was privileged to participate in an international event that stretched across the globe, starting in New Zealand and Australia, and then finishing...
If You Don’t Put Others First, You’ll Harm Yourself
A favorite assignment topic of history lecturers is to ask students to compare and contrast two great historical figures, to see where each of them...
Aleph and Beit
This week, an article in The Atlantic grabbed my eye. It described the enigmatic sacoglossa sea slugs that harvest energy from the sun’s rays, by photosynthesizing ingested algae cells....
Why We Need Sukkot
After watching the recent Afghanistan debacle unfold, I could not help but be reminded of the Suez Crisis of 1956 — with a sense of...
Why Do Jewish ‘Days’ Start at Night?
Every Yom Kippur, in synagogues across the world, there are people you never see the rest of the year. In my view, this is a...
The Greatest Act in the World Is to Do Someone a Favor
There is no question that the primary focus of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as well as the intermediate days, is “teshuva.” Usually translated as...
