The Shabbos Project: an initiative which began in South Africa a year and a half ago and aims to encourage every Jew in the world observe one shabbos together, has gotten quite a bit of buzz. But how did it all begin? Not how you’d expect! Dan Ariely – a behavioral psychologist whose Wall Street Journal […]

There was a video going around yesterday – people warned me that it was gruesome – but I was en route to a speaking engagement and wasn’t really paying attention. Before I boarded the plane, I quickly checked Facebook and the video started playing on my feed. I saw a car ram into people. A […]

A few months ago I boarded a plane to Australia, psyched for my speaking tour, but dreading the fourteen hour ride that awaited me. I had planned to finish writing my book on the flight, but the minute I sat down, it became apparent that all I was going to do was procrastinate. Fortunately (or […]

Last month my husband and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. It made me wonder if I had any wisdom to impart – any lessons based on Jewish philosophy I had discovered over the years which help us keep our marriage strong and recover from challenging times when they arise. Was there something to say about giving? […]

Last week the Forward published this first person article where a secular Jewish man described his Jewish divorce in a rabbinic court. It was seething with such palpable hatred of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox Judaism that I read it on edge, waiting for the big reveal – for the grave offense that the beis din (rabbinic […]

On the occasion of my eldest’s bat mitzvah which took place this past Sunday, I got to thinking about what it means to be the parent of a child who becomes a bat mitzvah – and an Orthodox one at that. In my pre-observant days, my bat mitzvah was mostly about memorizing the Torah portion, […]