A recent New York Times feature about a troubled World War II veteran has inadvertently shed fresh light on the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz. The story also implicitly undermines one of the major themes...

Isn’t it interesting how buzz words become popular? Somehow someone somewhere coins a catch phrase, blabs it to everyone who owns ears, and then it gets repeated over and over until it becomes part of regular conversation. Often people use these...

Viewpoints expressed in letters, commentaries, cartoons and other opinion pieces reflect those of the writer or artist and not those of the Light.  For the past few weeks, we have watched with anxiety as American healthcare takes a backseat to...

The religious philosopher Mircea Eliade speaks about religion as attempting to transform the chaos in our world into the cosmos. Essentially, he says that we take that which is unknown — that which can be different and scary — and try to make it known. We...

We must have become numb to gun violence. Hardly a day goes by without another mass shooting in a school, shopping center, place of worship or public square. We don’t even know what qualifies as a mass shooting these days. Deaths attributable...

Sometimes you have leftover food in the fridge for too long and you have to clean it out. Or the photo roll on your smartphone is jam-packed so you have to remove a few pics.  In the same way, my brain is filled with all kinds of random thoughts, so...

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,” wrote Robert Browning in his poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” imagining the wisdom of a real 12th century scholar counseling us to recognize the challenges of youth and the possibility of true maturity and...

We marked Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Memorial Day, on April 17-18. I don’t remember the details of the story, but I do remember some of the names. He was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. We met him on sabbatical to Israel, mid-’90s. I was studying music...

What moment was the G.O.A.T. in Jewish history? We often focus on our “lachrymose history,” tallying up tragedies, expulsions, destructions, and slaughters. It might be harder to come up with good moments. There is a certain intense relief and...

When I was a financial planner, we helped individuals and families address their sequential financial needs and priorities at each stage of their lifecycle.  There are three major stages of one’s financial lifecycle: 1) Learning years –birth to-age...

When society lacks any common code of morals or ethics, values become a philosophical free-for-all.  But in a culture built on the bedrock of core principles, a system of absolute values will naturally emerge. The proliferation of ideas, philosophies...

I recently received a text from a St. Louis friend that made my heart drop. It happened again. He sent me photos of antisemitic flyers left at doorsteps in the Brentwood area. The group responsible: the Goyim Defense League. This was not the first time...