Month: March 2017

If you have children, and travel by car, then ‘Are we there yet?’ may well be a very familiar cry. It is not easy to answer when you are maybe 30 minutes into a journey you know is going to take 4 hours. Finding things to keep ‘little people’ occupied and avoid the fractious “she hit me”, “no I didn’t”, “yes you did”, “well he hit me first”, scenario takes creativity, imagination and potentially frequent intervention.

So spare a thought for Moses. He ended up leading, not a family that could be counted on

Read more

If you have taken the challenge to read through the Bible in a year, and started on 1st January, it is possible that you have just finished reading Leviticus. Did you manage to read through all the rules and regulations? What about rules regarding skin diseases or what to do if a mouse falls in a water jug? With that sort of detail it may seem surprising that a Jewish website should say, “Though sometimes viewed as a collection of arcane laws of animal sacrifices and ritual purity, Leviticus is very much valued in Judaism. In fact, traditionally, the first Torah verses that children learn are from Leviticus. We read in the Midrash¹, “[When] we start the children with the book of Vayikra², G d says, ‘Let the pure ones come and involve themselves in the pure [laws], and I will consider it as if they brought a sacrifice before me.’”” ³

Why was Leviticus seen as so important and what can we learn from it? I want to offer just a few thoughts that I hope will

Read more

It seems that there is no end in sight for the current amplified political discord in the USA. Just when one hoped the volume could not get much higher, accusations of ‘wire tapping’ came trumpeting over Twitter. And even in the 140 characters allowed in a tweet, the attack was seemingly against character and not just about actions.

In the UK, controversy over Britexit (is there really such a word?) rumbles on. The future of Europe, without Britain, seems unclear with a wide range of options being floated by Jean-Claud Junckers in a speech at the beginning of March.

So whether you live in the US, the UK or Europe there is a level of turmoil at the start of 2017 which probably could not have been predicted in early 2016. What then, could be (or maybe should be) the principles that influence your

Read more

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

How could it have happened? How is it that the foresight of the Simpsons in the year 2000 could have come to pass? The reality however is that Donald Trump is president of the USA, but this is NOT a political blog. What I want to do, is to look beyond the surface of the events that surround us be they global ones or personal ones and ask some questions about how the world works.

The world in which we live seems so confused that

Read more