Rabbi Mark Fasman

My laptop is dead. Or so I was informed this evening. Great. This is in addition to my iPhone that has recently messed up my calendar and contacts, and that has somehow resisted more than twenty hours of time with tech support specialists, both online and by phone. My hands-free Bluetooth [...]

Tikkun Leil Shavuot
We all know how important education is to Jews.  How far back does this go?  Beginning with our Exodus from Egypt, our survival as a people has depended upon our success in transmitting culture, history, and behavioral norms to the next generation.  Torah commands us to teach our children.  For example, we are [...]

This month begins with Pesach. It is a great story, the story that is at the very foundation of Jewish identity. The haggadah makes it very clear that all of the events of the exodus from Egypt are because God made them happen. The Egyptians are punished. The sea splits. We are free. We are [...]

Early in my Israel year of rabbinical school, I was at the Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem one morning. I was trying to daven, to recapture the experience of my first visit five years earlier. Every couple of minutes a man in a black hat (a different man each time) would come and stand next [...]

Why did my parents’ generation so believe in public schools? They were a gateway into American culture and opportunity. And these first-generation American children (the “greatest generation”) succeeded beyond anything in Jewish history.
Their success was due in large measure to the public schools.
But that generation grew up in Jewish neighborhoods. All of [...]

The Maccabees live. At least, their battle goes on.
Here are two passages from the First Book of the Maccabees (as translated in the New English Bible):
At that time [after the ascension of Antiochus IV to the throne in 175 BCE] there appeared in Israel a group of renegade Jews, who incited the people. [...]

With the possible exception of the first part of Exodus, the Genesis stories are probably the best known texts of the Torah (and perhaps, of the entire Hebrew Bible). In Sunday school and at bedtime we tell our children these stories: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, Abraham and Sarah, [...]

Recently a woman came to my office to ask me a question regarding the upcoming birth of her first child, a son. She is not a member of any congregation, but was hoping to speak with a rabbi about brit milah (that is, ritual circumcision; Ashkenazi pronunciation is bris). She explained to me [...]

Buckle up! In the coming weeks, we will be moving through the heart of our primary Festival season. Two days of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, two days of Sukkot, and two days of Shemini Atzeret (the second of which we call Simchat Torah)—and we get off lucky this year as six of those [...]

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