Charles R. Lightner

My teacher, Rabbi Bernard Zlotowitz (zekher tzadik livracha) told us often that ‘all translation is midrash’. I have had occasion recently to spend time with the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch both in Hebrew and, thanks to a first-of-its-kind recent translation[1], in English. At a dinner in Israel just before Pesach, I brought up an issue involving the Samaritan community and the r...

In June of last year I decided to change course for a bit. I put aside the ethics book to concentrate on the "Bones of Israel" idea with the expectation that I could complete and publish something on that in a few months. The process has taken longer than I thought and I now expect a full draft of a book-length exploration of that idea by the end of the first quarter of 2019. The adde...

I ran across a reference yesterday to the “group mind” phenomenon documented by Thomas D. Steeley in his decades-long study of honey bees. Having no particular interest in honey bees but a long-standing interest in the potential power of group consciousness, I bought a “Kindle Shorts” version of one of his books to see if it might help me understand his findings. Seeley, Thomas D.. Th...