Michael Balinsky

Rabbi Michael Balinsky is the Executive Vice President of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, an organization representing two hundred rabbis of all denominations. Previously he was Director of Faculty Development for the Florence Melton Adult Mini-Schools and was a Hillel director for twenty- two years, over nineteen of those as the director of the Louis and Saerree Fiedler Hillel Center at Northwestern University, after two and a half years as the Associate Director of Hillel at the University of Michigan. He is a long time member of the Jewish Catholic Scholars Dialogue in Chicago and is an executive member of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago. Rabbi Balinsky is a graduate of Yeshiva University where he also received his ordination. He is married to Dr. Myra Rapoport and they are the parents of three daughters.


Articles by Michael Balinsky

Give Me Some of that Old Time Blasphemy

There is much discussion currently about imposing limits on blasphemy. It seems clear that the vast majority of those in ...

Do You Remember Me?

One of the things that sometimes is embarrassing and/or sometimes frustrating, is when someone comes up to me and says: ...

The Command to Forget

Deuteronomy 2419. When you cut down your harvest in your field, and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you ...

Where Were You?

The first two weeks of August my wife and I visited the Canadian Rockies which are magnificent. Most of the ...

Does Prayer Work?

This week’s Torah portion begins with Moses’s request to enter the Promised Land.Deuteronomy 323. And I pleaded with the Lord ...

Hanging in the Air

Numbers 30.2. And Moses spoke to the chiefs of the tribes concerning the people of Israel, saying, This is the ...

Which Reminds Me of ….

There is an old joke about the itinerant maggid (preacher) who would go from town to town and give a ...

Woe to Their Wives

When stories are told, we sometimes see them through the lens of the characters, sometimes from the vantage point of ...

Not My Concern…

President Obama’s comments on gay marriage provoked much comment and consternation.  In the Jewish world, while one national Democratic leader ...

There Are Places I Remember…..

An Orthodox rabbinic colleague Rabbi Zev Farber recently posted on Morethodoxy a piece on the experience of place women have ...