Rashi

Some years ago, the immediate past Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Ismar Schorch, publicly called for the elimination of the office of the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbinate in Israel. If memory serves me correctly, the New York Times called him on it, referring to his suggestion as rash and impolitic. At the time, I agreed.

But I have to admit, Rabbi Schorch's suggestion is looking better to me by the day.

I slowly walked down the stairs, brain still half asleep, eyes half-closed. I saw my dad seated at my dining room table, wide awake, staring intently into his Kindle. My parents were in town for the High Holy Days, a time of year we hadn’t spent together in a long time. “Whatcha reading?” I mumbled, mid-yawn, and he promptly told me that he was enjoying his early morning Rashi. Rashi – on his Kindle! And then he was planning on studying a bit of Talmud before continuing with his day.

Q:  My teacher thinks I plagiarized an essay, but I didn’t. True, I looked at Cliff Notes about the assigned book, Moby Dick, but I also read much of it and only used the notes as a guide. So what’s wrong with that?

When Norman Mailer set out to write about Marilyn Monroe, he kept a bottle of her perfume, open, on his desk, a writerís stimulant.Ashley Lazarus, director and co-producer of the new film ìRashi: A Light After The Dark Ages,î opens any Chumash and there he is, Rashi, a fragrance still wafting through Jewish life from almost a millennium away. Lazarus, a South African ÈmigrÈ, studies Rashi with a blind rabbi who fingertips the Torah in Braille. Lazarus reads Rashi aloud and the blind can see.