Min haMuvhar

To our members and friends

To our members and friends,

Our University Network continues to grow and thrive on campuses throughout North America, and we recently signed up a new member in Bangladesh!

It is the persistence of this gap between ideals and actual behavior that has fueled religio-moral research into human behavior for millennia. How can it be that an otherwise observant person and pillar of his/her Orthodox community has been embezzling funds, breaking federal lobbying laws, or committing sexual improprieties, to name a few of the real-life examples of the gap we’ve seen over the past several decades?

I recently read of a phenomenon known as “inattention blindness.” When people are focused on a particular thing, they tend not to see anything that interferes with their concentration. For example, psychologists asked a group of people to watch a film of a basketball game and to count how many times team members passed the ball to each other. While the people were engaged in viewing the basketball game and concentrating on their assignment, the tape showed a person walking right through the center of the picture in a way that would obviously be noticed.

Our Institute provides various learning opportunities--our online learning center, our youtube channel, our website, our publications etc. We also have upcoming classes/programs in East Brunswick, Teaneck, Boca Raton and Manhattan.

A review of programs--past and upcoming--in New York, Philadelphia, East Brunswick, Teaneck and Boca Raton. A reminder of the conferences and shiurim available on our website and youtube channel.

Beruriah’s revolutionary insight was to notice the importance of detaching sinner from sin. Only when we resist the urge, ultimately rooted in our competitive desire to feel superior, to spend our energy blaming bad actors and instead recognize the systemic factors that produce bad behavior will we be able to abolish sin from the earth.

Whistle-blowing in our daily professional life is a real issue.  Examples of purposeful misrepresentation, hypocrisy, and malfeasance can be found.   These are problems for individual conscience to solve when confronting injustice and evil.  Can we rely on our own conscience to choose correctly and to  regulate the personal impulses that might drive ourselves or others to commit  unfair, unjust, and even,  criminal actions?

Sunday, February 10 | 10:00am - 12:30pm

at Lincoln Square Synagogue

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch is a classic example of the knowledge-lishmah school of thought. Not only does he extol the spiritual value of secular studies, he explicitly derides those who see knowledge as a tool to advance one's career.