While we appreciate your vote in the JIB awards, it’s also a good time to upgrade our look — assuming we’d like to win the Design award, and on merit at that. Maybe Menachem‘s cynicism wasn’t so wrong, after all.

The image immediately above is a concept graphic, to replace the Cross-Currents logo at the top of each page. The responses from our writers have been 50/50 — everyone likes the idea of a photo, but is this the one? [Note that the font of Cross-Currents is not final.] This is a one-person-per-vote democratic effort, so please vote in the comments. [Suggestions for better images will also be taken.]

And if you haven’t voted within the last three days (yes, you can vote again every three days) in the JIB awards, please show your support!

In the early 1930s, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler set himself the task of battling the cult of science of his time. To his private students in London – mostly teenagers from Orthodox homes who attended public school – he first emphasized how circumscribed is the realm of science, and how little it has to say concerning the ultimate purposes of life.

Next Rabbi Dessler would show the inherent bias from which scientists too suffer. As one of his closest talmidim from that period, Rabbi Aryeh Carmell, puts it, “So successful did this method [of revealing the hidden premises and bias] prove that one of his followers, if faced with a conflict between a widely held contemporary view and a tenet of Torah, instead of putting himself on the defensive and groping for apologetics, will immediately endeavor to bring to light the bias, individual, social and otherwise, which has given rise to the divergent viewpoint.”

Rabbi Dessler emphasized how the slightest self-interest is sufficient to prejudice the outcome of any decision-making process, and that this applied no less to scientific judgments than any other. He demonstrated the point by taking what might be a prototypical scientist for his example:

“Think of a person who, by the power of his intellect alone, wants to re-examine some fundamental problem – such as was the world created for a purpose. . . . Let us assume that the person possesses a keen intellect, is well-educated and well-informed. However, so far as character is concerned he is pretty average. He has never seriously tackled his moral failings. . . . [Now let us say that] we are talking about a very comprehensive problem . . . . On the solution will depend whether he will be obliged to struggle constantly with his baser desires, . . . or whether he will live with no restraints on his desires apart from those he deigns to place on them. . . .” Can we seriously believe, Rabbi Dessler asked, that he will arrive at a true conclusion merely by the exercise of his intellectual powers? Continue reading → Darwinism – Science or Secular Religion?

That rabbi being me, a week ago.  A good part of my responsibilities at the Simon Wiesenthal Center (which is where I am when not at Yeshiva of Los Angeles or Loyola Law School doing more conventional things, like teaching Torah) focus on building relationships with non-Jewish religious groups which are friendly to Israel and the Jewish people.  A group of really terrific people in Mississippi took an early lead in fighting the biased and foolish position of the leadership of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which voted in 2004 to move towards divestment from Israeli companies.  The same folks just happened to be spearheading an effective, focused, and moving volunteer relief effort, and I was there to say thank-you in a way they would appreciate. 

My friends located neighborhoods whose residents were uninsured or under-insured.  FEMA funds, when they would finally come, would not be enough to allow them to rebuild homes that their families had occupied for generations.  I use the word “homes” somewhat loosely.  It is impossible to describe or comprehend the horror that Katrina visited upon the Gulf Coast.  Pictures are entirely inadequate to the job.  You only get a sense when you watch … Read More >>