One of the Jewish world's most beloved voices - unfiltered, on just about everything.
Rabbi Berel Wein has opinions. He is the first to admit it.
Over more than half a century as a rabbi, historian, and columnist - including years writing for the Jerusalem Post - he has weighed in on the questions that occupy the Jewish world and the ordinary moments that fill an ordinary week. In
In My Opinion, more than a hundred of those essays are gathered for the first time in a single volume.
The range is the pleasure of it. Rabbi Wein writes about Kristallnacht and about lost luggage. About the future of Modern Orthodoxy and about the impossibility of finding a parking space in Jerusalem. About antisemitism, rabbinic responsibility, and the price of eggs; about Israeli taxi drivers, old magazines, half-birthdays, and a sore back. Whether the subject is momentous or mundane, he brings the same thing to it: a historian's long memory, a rabbi's moral seriousness, and a wry, unmistakable voice that has made him one of the most widely read Jewish writers of our time.
Inside, nine sections of short, readable essays:
- "Here in Israel..." - life, weather, politics, and people in the Jewish homeland
- Israel and World Opinion - the Jewish state and the eyes of the nations
- A Jew in Today's World - belief, spirituality, victimhood, honesty, and identity
- In the Diaspora - Jewish education, campus life, unity and disunity, and an uncertain future
- Contemporary Issues - from democracy and skepticism to texting and alcohol
- Human Nature - extremism, hypocrisy, certainty, frustration, and doing favors
- Holidays and Special Days - Elul through Tisha B'Av, and the ordinary miracle of erev Shabbat
- Lessons from History - what the past keeps trying to tell us, and how reliably we ignore it
- Jewish Heritage - gratitude, charity, prayer, argument, and the calling of a lifetime
What binds the collection together is Rabbi Wein's candor. In his introduction he confesses that some of the pieces no longer reflect what he believes today - and that he kept them in anyway, to offer his readers a diversity of thought. He allows that there may be a touch of hubris in publishing one's opinions on so many subjects, then notes that he has never suffered from false modesty.
Written to be read a few pages at a time - on Shabbat afternoon, on a flight, at the kitchen table - and guaranteed to start a conversation at yours. Because the point was never that you would agree with him. The point, as he learned from a lifetime in the pages of the Talmud, is that Jews have always thought out loud together.
