The Sensible Jew

Turf Wars, Tradition, and Innovation: The Case of the Soft Matzah
The recent entrance of a soft Matza into Melbourne’s kosher-for-Passover marketplace has brought the sort of furious controversy that seems to follow almost any religious innovation or attempt at doing something outside the “authorised leadership” in the Jewish community.
Matzah, for the uninitiated, is the “bread” [...]

Hi everyone. As mentioned in earlier posts, the Pessach (Passover) festival begins tonight and lasts for eight days. The next post will be up on Thursday.

Alex’s Note: For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Jewish festival of Passsover (known in Hebrew as, Pessach), it is more than a simple commemoration of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt and liberation from slavery. The celebration lasts eight days, with the first two nights devoted to elaborate, ritualised dinners. Even devoutly irreligious Jews [...]

Over the past week a number of people (off-line, of course) have praised my “courage” in writing about homosexuality and Judaism. They all assumed it must have been a very difficult post to write.
In reality, little courage was required for that. It’s actually the subject matter of this post that makes my heart heavy with [...]

Rabbi Motti Elon was once Israel’s great hope for bridging the highly charged secular/religious divide.
A man of enormous charisma and limitless reserves of energy, he was Orthodoxy’s most powerful advocate among Israel’s irreligious.
He was also the head of a key yeshiva (seminary), from which have now emerged allegations of his “sexual misconduct.”
The case is steeped [...]

By Malki Rose
Over the last few days since my piece “In the Absence of Loving Kindness,” I’ve received a great number of emails from many different people, from all sectors of the community. Some disagreed intensely with my account, suggesting that what the messianists did was so clearly outside of what is permissible in Jewish [...]

by Rabbi Yaron Gottlieb
When I recently attended one of the AC/DC concerts in Melbourne, I  would never have guessed that an event featuring a middle aged man in a school uniform could illuminate some of life’s mysteries.
But during some of the songs and while singer, Brian Johnson, was delivering his barely intelligible patter between sets, [...]

Two Fridays ago, I received an email – almost by accident.
A non-Jewish woman, thinking I was a member of the left-wing Australian Jewish Democratic Society, contacted me to ask for assistance.
The nature of this blog is that for every comment written by a reader, tens of private emails come my way. A number of these [...]