My illness recently left me in the Neuro-ICU of one of New York’s finest hospitals for over a week. The medical care I received there was truly exceptional. That was the good news. All too quickly, it became clear that mine was no ordinary hospital room. There was no bathroom to speak of. There was […]

  I like to think of myself as a kind person who gives others the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes I need small reminders to improve; recently, I got one from a rather unexpected place! Last Saturday night, a friend sent me a text message telling me that she had left her dorm key and student […]

Recently, as I daven (pray), there is something that continues to leap out at me. Each time I say a bracha (blessing), I think about the fact that it begins by addressing God in the second-person, Baruch ATAH (Blessed are YOU). As I utter those first two words I am speaking to God, rather than about Him, […]

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 […]

“I recently learned that my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish,” she wrote in her email. Apparently Cynthia’s grandmother had converted to Catholicism before World War II as anti-Semitism was rising. (Her great-grandmother had perished in the Holocaust.) Cynthia understood that although she was raised Catholic, according to Jewish law, she was considered a Jew. Despite […]

Sorrow. Anger. Numbness. Disbelief. Those are the emotions that have been swirling around inside me ever since I heard the news two nights ago that a group of men who were praying in a synagogue in Har Nof (a neighborhood I lived in for a year when I was nineteen) were literally butchered to death […]