January 12th, 2025
Joseph did so much for the Egyptian kingdom but after he was gone “there arose a new king… who knew not Joseph”.
It seems to happen often that people get forgotten and it is as if they had never been.
A depressing thought. You work so hard but then a new age brushes the history aside.
Doesn’t this all seem to suggest that no-one should exert themselves because it will all recede anyhow?
The answer is a firm No. We must each use our energies, talents and time to enrich society even in the tiniest way.
The legacy never entirely vanishes. We leave something behind on which others will build.
So what if you don’t get a vote of thanks, if the histories don’t devote a chapter to you?
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Parashah Insights, Sh'mot | 
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January 12th, 2025
The Torah readings from Sh’mot to V’zot HaB’rachah focus on the work of Moshe Rabbenu, “Moses our Teacher”.
Moses is the first rabbi in Jewish history. His legacy is studded with great rabbis, not excluding those of the present generation.
But from the time of the Emancipation, the Jewish people has confused and conflicted the role of the rabbi.
We have produced two types of rabbi – the rabbi who is a rav and the rabbi who is a minister. Sometimes the two roles are successfully merged but in many cases the rabbi has become a split personality.
He wants to be a rav, a student and scholar, but circumstances (and the need to make a living) have made him into a congregational functionary who conducts services, solemnises marriages and delivers eulogies, for most of which rabbinical knowledge is unnecessary and even irrelevant.
In 1966 an American rabbi, Morris Adler, who was shot and killed in his synagogue on a Shabbat by a demented youth, wrote – it turned out to be his last article – an essay called “Who is the Modern Rabbi?”
He said, “The rabbi is the heir and teacher of the longest continuous history and tradition in the Western world. From early childhood he has trained to look at life from the vantage point of a millennial history. He now sees himself as stranger in a land not his, witness to the discontinuities and the escalation of transitoriness.
“Jewish tradition defines the rabbi as a layman, yet to his parishioners he is a clergyman.
“His is essentially a life of pathos. He suffers a score of alienations and must daily battle for his faith and hope. For he is isolated at the very centre of the community he ‘leads’ and serves as the spokesman of a group-tradition when the group has become all but traditionless…”
A rachmonus auf Moshe Rabbenu.
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January 12th, 2025
Q. In Jewish law, is artificial insemination by donor (A.I.D.) regarded as adultery on the part of the woman?
A. The Jerusalem Beth Din headed by Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg ruled some years ago that a woman who accepted semen from a man other than her husband had betrayed him, even though artificial insemination by husband (A.I.H.) had been tried on three occasions.
There is a famous case reported in the Talmud (Chagigah 14b) of a woman conceiving in a bath into which a man had discharged semen.
Apart from the question of the feasibility of conception “sine concubito”, the issue is whether in the absence of physical intercourse the woman is forbidden to her husband.
A number of authorities, e.g. Rabbi Benzion Uzziel and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, argue that adultery does not result without physical contact.
Others such as Rabbi Waldenberg and Rabbi Yehudah Leib Zirrelsohn regard A.I.D. as adultery; in the case of the woman in the bath-house, the impregnation of the woman took place passively and by accident, whereas with A.I.D. there is active participation by the woman, the doctor and the donor, and is halachically prohibited. (See “Jewish Bioethics”, ed. F. Rosner and J.D. Bleich, 1985, chapter 7: “Artificial Insemination in Jewish Law” by F. Rosner).
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January 12th, 2025
Q. What is the point of reading Biblical verses about animal sacrifice?
A. Hermann Gollancz says the sacrifices “impress upon the people the idea that they had to sacrifice themselves, to sacrifice their unholy wishes and their wicked desires, in the task of serving their Creator and God, and leading a pure, useful and holy life”.
Isidore Epstein writes that the sacrifices “are designed in all their parts to foster in the mind of the devotee a sense of the awfulness of a religious offence in that it creates an estrangement alike between man and God and between man and man”.
Summarising Mordecai Kaplan’s view, Max Arzt says that “to be qualified for God’s presence, the Sanctuary itself had to be cleansed of the impurities caused by the sins of the people. Even religious institutions need to be cleansed of corruption.”
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January 12th, 2025
Rabbi Dr Raymond Apple z”l passed away in January 2024. As an archive of the Rabbi’s written contributions across his many fields of interest, this site is a tribute to the man and his work. More information about his life is available in the About section. Y’hi zichro baruch.
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