terrorists

We spent our Thanksgiving weekend in Minnesota, which was thankfully warm (up to 20 degrees on my early morning walks).  One of our destinations was the bar mitzvah of my mother-in-law’s cousin’s grandson (the shtetl lives on in the frozen mid-west) in the comfortable Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka.  The rabbi of the reformed congregation was proud of the new synagogue, not least because, as he explained to us, their Torah scroll, the handwritten copy of the five books of Moses, has a unique significance, as it was obtained from a defunct temple in Hibbing, Minnesota, where it was in a

Defining freedom is simple to do with words, but words forever fall short. Freedom is living your life the way you wish to live it. They are simple words but they do not illustrate the varying degrees involved. They do not account for culture and perception. Freedom to a Cuban is likely different from freedom to an American. H.L. Mencken once stated, "The average man doesn't want to be free, he wants to be safe." Judging from the 2008 primary election results, Mencken looks like a genius.