Question:
I tell my nine year old son that people who work hard will progress in life and have what they need.  Now I have a dilemma.  There is a new electronic game which costs $499 plus megabucks for each game.  His cousin has one, his friends have it but we have no intention of buying him one. We don't have the money, and anyway it is not one of our priorities - there are far better things he could do with his time than play violent video games. He does everything properly, listens to us, puts in the effort at school and is now devastated that he has done it all ...

By Jason Guberman-Pfeffer

In trying to understand the Holocaust, the inexplicable, it is comforting to think of the perpetrators not as human beings but Übermenschen—the fanatical, technologically advanced “Aryan master race” that the Nazi’s believed themselves to be. The perpetrators of the Holocaust, however, were not just members of the SS and their bureaucratic enablers. They were, rather, ordinary Germans and their rather ordinary collaborators. As Leonard Cohen reminds us, Eichmann was of medium height, weight and intelligence, and without any distinguishing ...

What is pleasure? We use the word in relation to so many and diverse things. What do a steak, a musical composition and an idea have in common? Yet “pleasure” is our word of choice in describing our experience of a meal, a concert, or an intellectual revelation. For as different as the sensations derived from these things may be, they share a common essence: the capacity to impart a sense of fulfillment to the human soul.

Indeed, all pleasures flow from the same font. The teachings of kabbalah describe the created reality in terms of a “chain of evolution” (seder hishtalshelut), whose uppermost link is G-d’s pleasure in His creation, which spawns the divine desire to create. ...