Extended Interview: Rabbi Shira Stutman Discusses the Amidah Prayer

 

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Angus found me a date at a cocktail party Part 2

The Portobello was a charming Notting Hill hotel with charming interiors and an accurate Victorian style.  Many of the ‘rich and famous’ spent time there thus the staff know to turn a blind eye to the comings and goings of their guests, as well who their guests come and go with.  Plus, since some winning Univision band stayed there, all the rooms now had sound reduction equipment.  I could make this woman squeal at the top of her lungs and even the pigeons on the window sill wouldn’t hear her.

Angus finds me a date at a cocktail party - Part 1

“Doesn’t it bother you when he does that?” Whitfield discreetly whispered under the chatter of the surrounding cocktail party guests.

“Does what?” I asked, already knowing to what he was referring.

“Flirts with women like that!” answered my former physics professor turned friend and returning crew member for our most recent MI-6 assignment.  “It’s rather salacious, don’t you think Deetz?  I mean the whole Crown knows you and Angus are married some four years now.  Won’t this give the appearance that there is ‘trouble in paradise’?”

Tad Whitfield, albeit older and certainly smarter than I when it came to science and engineering, was a complete idiot when it came to relationships – in part due to a descriptive diagnosis of Asperger’s – but I relished his concern.  “For Angus, flirting is like Olympic fencing.  And unlike an Errol Flynn movie, nothing real untoward is going to happen.”  I put my glass of water and lemon on a nearby coffee table, only to straighten and to look down at Whitfield’s scrunched up nose. 

Why Donald Trump Exists and liberals can't stop him

What if the current sentiment that is fueling the Trump campaign and supported the Tea Party and other hyper-conservative movements in America (as well as their counterparts on the left) is the result of the unresolved trauma of 9-11 and the 2008 recession (differentiating it from other recessions where you didn’t see your two neighbors across the street simultaneously lose their jobs and their homes)?  If we see the American public as individuals who were abused as children, we can understand why now many of them dream of a prince charming who will magically save them instead of looking at the reality around them that is saying “the trauma is over and we survived, albeit with some serious bumps and bruises, which in time and with a little innovation, can heal”.  Instead, we’re like the older teen who runs away from home to live with the 27-year-old “bad boy” who promises us the world, only to get us hooked on drugs (pre-Trump) and pulls us into a cycle of domestic violence (post-Trump). 

Lessons from Kohelet - A Sukkot shiur by Rabbi Sacks

On 26th September 2016, Rabbi Sacks delivered a shiur (Shiur (/'ʃiː.ər/, Hebrew: שיעור‎‎ [ʃiˈʔuʁ], pl. shiurim, שיעורים [ʃiʔuˈʁim]) is a lesson on any Torah topic, such as Gemara, Mishnah, halakha, Tanakh, etc. - Wikipedia) to officially launch the Koren Sacks Sukkot Mahzor (The Gross Family Edition). The video was recorded in Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue in London and the event was jointly sponsored by the United Synagogue and Koren Publishers Jerusalem. The sources used have been incorporated into the video.