The Ansche Chesed blog is a place where you can find enriching material to read about God, Torah and the Jewish People.
New York’s mayoral race has many Jews on pins and needles. The Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani – whose anti-Zionism is among his core personal commitments – is very likely to become mayor of the second most Jewish city in the world, after Tel Aviv. More Jews live in the Big Tapuach than in Jerusalem, Haifa,… Read more »
סוף סוף בשורות טובות GREAT NEWS AT LAST On this morning of homecoming, as we greet living hostages whom we, perhaps, never dared to dream would return, let us follow the Sages’ teaching [Berakhot 58b]: אָמַר רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן לֵוִי: הָרוֹאֶה אֶת חֲבֵירוֹ לְאַחַר שְׁנֵים עָשָׂר חֹדֶשׁ, אוֹמֵר: בָּרוּךְ מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים. Said R. Joshua b.… Read more »
The people closest to me have asked over the years how I maintain my optimism – my calm certainty that in the end, all will be ok – even during my hardest moments. The truth is, I’m not sure how this happened, but I’ve thought about it a lot. Is it just something I was… Read more »
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is, “Are there really Jews on Rikers Island?” This question says nothing about the asker, but everything about how we have positioned incarceration and the incarcerated as out of sight, out of mind. It’s a “bad” place for “bad” people. Or, as more than one of… Read more »
For me, and I suspect for many people, the most moving moment in the Jewish circumcision ritual, the Brit Milah (or more commonly in the Yiddish pronunciation, the Bris) is the moment when the rabbi or the mohel after the circumcision itself says the phrase ze ha-katon, gadol yihiyeh— “may this little one become big.”… Read more »
