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Ammos ChornyThe Times of Israel (Blogs) |
I have lost count of how many times people have come to me with the inevitable question: W.I.F.M.? – What’s in it for me? It is one of the...
Every Thursday afternoon, after the week’s visits have been made, emails answered, sermons revised, and the rhythms of synagogue life begin to...
Every Sunday morning, my phone presents me with a report. It tells me how many hours I spent looking at the screen during the previous week. It...
Parchment to Pixels: Recovering Beauty in Jewish Prayer There was a time when the arrival of a new prayer book was an event. A skilled scribe copied...
There are certain feelings we never entirely outgrow. The other night, just before turning off the bedside lamp, I kissed Aviva goodnight and said...
Ancient Wisdom, New Technologies, and the Art of Becoming Present One of the greatest obstacles to prayer is not disbelief. It is distraction. We...
Few observations about history have become as familiar as George Santayana’s famous warning: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to...
There comes a moment in every stage of life when we find ourselves opening an old box. Inside are photographs whose corners have curled with age,...
When we tell the story of our lives, we usually begin with the milestones. We graduated. We married. Our children were born. We moved. We changed...
Not long ago, I found myself watching a family at a nearby table at a restaurant. Just before the food arrived, they reached across the table, held...
On July 2, 1978, the day I turned seventeen years old, I left my childhood home in Bogotá, Colombia, and boarded a plane bound for New York. I was...
A few days ago, my wife looked up from the living room and asked: “So, I’m alone again today?” I was puzzled. She was watching television. I was...
At my age, and having grown up in a Latin American country where fútbol is more than a sport, I have watched hundreds, perhaps thousands, of matches....
The Sacredness of Remaining Time: Hospice, Jewish Ethics, and the Moral Meaning of Time at Life’s End There is a moment I have witnessed many times...
Rethinking the Art of the Sermon Several years ago, I began noticing something uncomfortable about my own preaching. People would compliment a sermon...
In 1950, during a lunchtime conversation at Los Alamos, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked a deceptively simple question: “Where is everybody?” He...
In recent months, I have found myself listening to lectures on artificial intelligence and quantum computing with a mixture of fascination and...