Weekly thoughts 2017

There are lines that leap out of our daily prayers and speak to me during these days of dismay and dissonance. They give me strength, they give me solace. I’ve said them a thousand times, but this time, in these times, they are strangely, eerily resonant. And being able to say them in the solitude, quiet space and measured pace of home pares them down to their essence. There’s a power and wisdom in these ancient words; they speak of...Read more...

We really are living in “meshuggah” times – our certainties overturned, unpredictability at every corner, panic in the supermarkets, fear in every heart. The Talmud tells a story of Joseph, the son of the sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who became deathly ill and was thought to have died. Then he suddenly regained consciousness. It was as if he had returned from some far-away place. As he regained...Read more...

The “C” word conjures up so many fears and strong emotions – it’s usually about cancer, but of late it’s also about climate change. Now we have another “C” word to add to our fearful lexicon and it’s called Coronavirus.

There’s widespread fear across the world, huge media coverage, paranoia, conspiracy theories, racist attacks and deep economic anxiety. It’s been pointed...Read more...

Money can have a huge impact on our relationships. According to our report on the nation’s relationships, The Way We Are Now, money worries are actually the biggest strain on couples across the UK - with over a quarter saying they experience this pressure. 

Yet research also shows that, despite its influence on how happy we are in our relationships, a large proportion of us feel unable to actually talk about money with our...Read more...

Darcy Howard is a 16-year-old student from Bowral who has a passion for agriculture and enjoys spending time on his grandparent’s farm in NSW. He has many friends from the farming community whose families are gripped by depression and suicidal thoughts as a result of the drought: “I’d say a lot of people are thinking they can’t keep going when there is no rain”.

It felt natural for Darcy to write a poem for an English...Read more...

I woke up this morning to find my car covered in a sludge of red mud, the swimming pools in Melbourne, like the Yarra River, had turned a dirty orange. It was all apparently a gift from the north and dust storms in the Mallee drifting our way.

After the smoke haze, the golf-ball (or were they tennis-ball) sized hail stones and the torrential ran (not to mention...Read more...

One of the most difficult of moral dilemmas is knowing when to be silent and when to speak out. The wise King Solomon understood this well when he said “There is a time to speak and a time to keep quiet” (Ecclesiastes 3:7).

There are occasions when silence is the best response such as a conflict when a misplaced word can...Read more...

My younger son, Yoni, recently introduced me to a marvellous poem of Maya Angelou.

It begins like this:

“When great trees fall,

Rocks on distant hills shudder,

Lions hunker down

In tall grasses,

Read more...

I’m not a cricket tragic, but I was struck by the 16 year old Pakistani wunderkind Naseem Shah, currently playing Test cricket in Australia. By all accounts he’s an extraordinary young man and the youngest player to make his debut in Australia at the Wacca. He’s certainly challenging the Australians.

Naseem has only been...Read more...

Kol Nidrei or Coles

I received this text message last week…

The...Read more...

On the first of February 2003, the Space Craft Columbia was at the end of its two-week shuttle into outer space. At 8.59am as it entered the earth’s atmosphere, it burst into flames killing all its seven crew members. Among the seven was the first Israeli astronaut, 48-year-old Ilan Ramon, a Colonel in the Israeli Air Force.

Ilan’s death left a deep mark on Israeli society as did the premature death of his oldest son Asaf some six...Read more...

So what’s the most pressing question today? What’s the most urgent, compelling question? I know that for me there is one and only one: what does it mean to be human in an age of bewilderment. If I phrased it more narrowly it would be: What does it mean to be Jewish in an age of such anxiety?

We are living through one of the most exciting epochs but we’re also living through one of the most confusing of eras. It’s the best of...Read more...

And every day we are assailed by words from the moment we wake till we lie down at night. We all use about 20,000 words a day and despite the myth, women don’t actually use more words then men.

I love watching my grandson, Ezzy, roll words around in his mouth discovering their beauty and power, their capacity to connect, to impress, to capture the essence of a moment, to amuse and bemuse.

And how I love words, delving into...Read more...

We had a power outage at our house this morning and my PC, laptop, TV, DVD. IPad, and my new surround sound music system were all shut down. Then I discovered that my mobile phone battery was dead and to top it off it was raining outside, so I couldn’t play golf. I went into the kitchen to make coffee and then I remembered that this also needs power, so I sat and talked with my wife for a couple of hours. She...Read more...

Since I was a teenager in high school and initiated the “Yeshivah College Ecological Society”, I’ve been acutely aware of the preservation of our natural environment and how cavalier we are about it.

The society was the idealistic passion of an adolescent and a dismal failure. My teachers indulged it, my fellow students ignored it; most were probably bemused by it.

Since that time, the damage we have done to our...Read more...