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 […]

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 […]

I didn’t get the top IDF training. I haven’t jumped out of planes, steered wartime ships or detonated drones. But, I feel like I’ve been through a battle of my own, and I’ve lived to tell the heroic tale. I fought in the battle for Danny and Kylie, a jaded ex-Orthodox Jew and a hopeful […]

I recently learned a lesson in kindness from a complete stranger, and it profoundly affected me. It was Thursday evening before the 1st of January that we discovered our inspection sticker was due to expire. The 31st of December. Being that the only business day left to take care of the inspection was on Friday I […]

‘I am done’ ‘I give up’ Those were the thoughts that sent me to a psychiatric ward when my depression relapsed. It was there that I realized that the life I was living, pretending and living for others was not a life I could live. It was there that I decided that I could no […]