By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
A family mystery
Matt Goldman is best known for his wise-cracking Nils Shapiro detective series. However, as “Carolina Moonset” (Forge) shows, Goldman also excels at portraying family connections. Although the narrator, 46-year-old Joey Green, prefers using hu…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Can we truly understand the past – not only the stories of our relatives, but our own actions – if we don’t know everything that occurred? Can learning a different side to events from years before change the way we view the world? These ideas are explored in t…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
Searching for the true meaning of the biblical text
In 1944, at the age of 21, Segundo Villanuena sought to avenge his father’s murder. His only real inheritance was a trunk, which he hoped would hold either an inheritance or a message from his father. What he d…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
When considering major Jewish literary figures of the past 100 years, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Amos Oz certainly qualify, even though they represent two different traditions. Singer has been called a master of Yiddish literature (something with which the Nobel Pri…
By Rabbi Rachel Esserman
A new genre of biblical commentary has appeared over the past few years. Rather than doing a line-by-line discussion of the text, these commentators use the text as a starting point to explore contemporary moral and ethical problems. One recent example is “The Bo…
