Around Shavuot, my children come home from school with projects about the Jewish people accepting the Torah. Holding their sweet drawings, I am transported beyond the mundane routine of my life to my own unexpected decision many years ago to accept the Torah. Raised in a nice Midwestern non-Jewish household, I regularly attended church and […]

Mother’s Day is here, and I’m already preparing for an emotional rollercoaster. This year, the holiday arrives the day after one of my children’s bar mitzvahs, and it’ll be his first time wearing tefillin with a blessing. But it’ll also be our first Mother’s Day without my maternal grandmother, Frances, who died just before Passover […]

Sixty Senior Rabbis Call for End to ‘Evil Crime’ of Live Animal Shipments One of Israel’s most senior rabbis has ruled that anyone buying meat from animals shipped from overseas to Israel for slaughter in cruel conditions is a partner to a crime. In a letter released Thursday by animal rights activists, Rabbi Yehuda Deri, […]

If God Himself made open miracles to tell you that it was time to return to the land of your forefathers would you listen? The Biblical commentator Rashi asks (on the first verse of parshat Yitro) what it was that Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, heard that motivated him to leave his homeland and idolatrous proclivities in order to join the […]

What if you were genetically screened before you and your spouse got pregnant, but then gave birth to a child with a severe illness that could have been prevented? You might despair and lose hope, but if you were Randy Gold, an Orthodox Jew from Atlanta, you’d vow to make sure this never happened to […]