Category: July 2021

An unintended lesson By: Rabb Dr David Fox As a teacher of Talmud, he fit the stereotype. Poised, intellectual, focused, serious. His lectures in the yeshiva were intense and deep, pushing the young men to concentrate and to absorb his explanations and contemplate his questions. I found it a challenge to get to know him, because he was self-contained, in his own league. He modelled authority, was candid and perceptive, but in our one-on-one interactions, I found him self-assured and not engaging. As a post-high school student, far from home,…

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By: Adrienne Bogatie To try and keep my grocery bill down, I am always looking for alternatives to meat. In my home, black bean burgers are a big hit and actually taste really close to meat burgers. Working odd hours also means I want food that is quick to make. I chose these recipes because they are so easy and convenient. Even though technically the boerewors kebabs aren’t really a recipe, they are a quick, easy, and different way to serve your boerewors. I love Chinese food, but don’t always…

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How Social Media is Really Affecting Your Kids By Ilan Preskovsky Considering its humble origins as an interactive platform through which creators could connect with audiences (Myspace) and as a student project that was initially just a collection of basic information of the students at Harvard (Facebook), it’s staggering to see how far social media has come in just fifteen short years. The current social media heavyweights, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (along with video sharing platforms like YouTube and, heaven help us, TikTok), aren’t just ubiquitous in our current cultural…

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The little things we do…add up By: Maria Beider As an old man walked the beach at dawn, he noticed a young boy picking up starfish and putting them into the sea. He asked the boy why he was doing this. The boy answered that the stranded starfish would die if left until the morning sun. “But the beach goes on for miles and there are thousands of starfish,” countered the old man. “How can your efforts make any difference?” The young boy looked at the starfish in his hand…

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Tuning into the pain of others and asking for help By: Robert Sussman If we look at the davening that we do each day, we’ll notice something interesting – it’s almost entirely in the plural, in particular the focal point of our davening, where we ask for the many things that we need – shemoneh esrei [lit: eighteen, referring to the number of blessings in that prayer, to which one blessing was later added making for a total of nineteen blessings (while the name eighteen was preserved) and which is…

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Why the Correct Values are Everything By Ilan Preskovsky This probably isn’t entirely surprising to the average reader of this magazine, but South Africa has one of the worst savings cultures on the planet. That is to say, South Africans, on average, put away far less of their salaries or other monthly income towards their savings than the citizens of most other countries. And this is a reality that existed long before the current (but, hopefully by now, receding) pandemic wreaked havoc on the personal finances of most people worldwide.…

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