Rabbi Avi Shafran
By Rabbi Avi Shafran
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Opinion How Prayer Can #BringBackOurBoys
Sad and frightening events can summon exemplary reactions, as we have seen in the recent coming together of diverse parts of the Jewish world to express collective anguish over the three boys who were abducted in Israel, and unified prayer for their return soon to their families, to us all. Less inspiring, though, are the…
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Opinion Shavuot Is Holiday That Speaks of Love And Freedom
The contemporary notion of freedom is twisted, at least in Judaism’s eyes. Many moderns feel fettered by — depending on the particulars of their lives — their jobs, finances, parents, children or spouses, and they imagine that cutting whatever bonds they find bothersome will make them free. But freedom isn’t shaking oneself loose of human…
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Opinion Rejoicing at the Presence of the Wicked Son at the Seder Table
In the varied depictions, he’s a medieval knight; a dandy in a zoot suit; a boxer with fists held high; an aloof fellow with a Hitler moustache or a mischievous one who looks like Groucho; a jester; a boy with a mohawk and a yo-yo (really!), and (as once depicted in the pages of the…
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Opinion When It Comes to ‘Ultra’ History Speaks for Itself
Getty Images In a recent essay in the Forward, I made the case for jettisoning the time-honored (if, to me, less than honorable) term “ultra-Orthodox.” I argued that, like “ultra-conservative” or “ultra-liberal” in domestic politics, the prefix implies extremism, something that isn’t accurate about most Haredim. What best to replace it with is less obvious,…
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Opinion Don’t Call Us ‘Ultra-Orthodox’
My religious group is routinely referred to by a pejorative. That the name we are called is negative in only an indirect way doesn’t alter the fact that it is disparaging. It telegraphs a subconscious bias (and may well spawn from the same). I’m not quite Howard Beale-mad about the subtle slur, but I’m peeved…
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Opinion The Benefits of a Woman’s Place
It’s probably because I’m male — and Haredi, or “ultra-Orthodox,” to boot — that, much as I try, I find it hard to relate to Jewish women who feel religiously unfulfilled unless they can lead services, read from the Torah or otherwise take up public roles in synagogue life. But there’s another reason, too: I…
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Opinion ‘Open Orthodoxy’ Is Not Really Orthodox At All
The perils of religious self-definition became amusingly apparent in the recent Pew survey of American Jews. One category of “Jews” was “Jews by affinity” – Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish background who simply choose to call themselves Jews; more than one million people so identified themselves. Similarly suspicious are the survey’s self-described…
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Opinion ‘Feminists of Zion’ Scapegoat Orthodox Jews
A lengthy piece in the New Republic asserts — or, more accurately, hopes — that “an unlikely alliance between Orthodox and progressive women will save Israel from fundamentalism.” The latter word, of course, is intended to refer to traditional Orthodox Judaism. Heavy on anecdotes about Haredi crazies harassing sympathetic women, the piece, titled “The Feminists…
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