Rabbi Claude's Scribbles

In loving memory of my father Yitzchak Asher ben Yechezkel Shraga zl who would have celebrated his 95 th birthday yesterday The sky could not have been a more perfect shade of blue.   With a few white clouds to add some contrast, it looked like a recreation of the wallpaper from Andy’s room in the first scene of ‘Toy Story’. With the warm breeze bathing our faces, this was as close to paradise as I can recall.   We walked arm-in-arm, me on her right-hand side and her mother on the left, as we approached the beautiful chuppah in the middle in the field.   My eldest daughter in a stunning wedding dress looked positively radiant with a smile that was so bright we could have measured it in kilowatts!   Her handsome Chatan came forward to lift the veil over her face for the Bedeken and I blessed them both before she joined him under the Chuppah, circling her bridegroom seven times, enacting the Jewish tradition that we are so familiar with. It's not every day that a father has th

 In just over a week, on 28th August, we will commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of one of the Twentieth Century's most remarkable and important speeches.  Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, before a crowd of 200,000 people, Dr Martin Luther King Jr spoke about the dream he had to see a society where Black and White people could live together peacefully as equals. He described the persecution that Black people had faced in the century following the end of the American Civil War and how they were segregated in Southern States such as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina. Towards the end of his oration, he said the following: "So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.   It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.   I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are

בס"ד Unusually, I will begin this Drasha with a warning, the kind you hear when you’re about to watch a controversial news story.   I would like to let you know that some people here today might find the following topic disturbing and quite un-Rabbinic in nature.   In fact, this could possibly be the most inappropriate sermon I have delivered, granted that the subject-matter seemingly focuses on the most un-Jewish of topics. I am of course, talking about...pigs. When I say ‘pigs’, I am not referring to those cute little four-legged creatures in a derogatory fashion.   No, perish the thought.   In fact, I am quite in awe of them.   After all, did they not inspire some of the most famous stories that we grew up with? Think about Piglet from ‘Winnie the Poo’.   Let’s not forget the ‘Three Little Pigs’.   How about Wilbur from ‘Charlotte’s Web’?   And who can ignore Old Major, Napoleon and Snowball from ‘Animal Farm’?   More recently, we have ‘Babe: The Gallant Pig’ (or better