This Friday night begins the joyful minor holiday of Tu b’Av, the fifteenth of the month of Av. The Talmud says besides Yom Kippur, there was no other holy day as happy for the Jews as Tu b’Av. In the times of the Temple, unmarried Jewish women would dress in white and dance in the vineyards, […]

The culmination of the Three Weeks, an annual time of mourning the destruction of The Beis HaMikdash (Holy Temple) is Tisha b’Av. It is the saddest day of the Jewish year and the most calamitous in our history. So great was our pain on this day as a nation, that each year we commemorate it […]

Although it was only a pretend cell phone it came really close to hitting my father’s head after my three year old son slung across the room the day we arrived in Israel for our yearly Passover trip. It played annoying music and had no volume control, but I had bought it the day before […]

It was the first week of the war. The second shiva house that I attended. It was held in a Jerusalem hotel, because the hero who had died defending people in the Gaza envelope was a lone soldier from France. His name was Binyanmin Lev. Binyamin’s mom spoke about how Binyamin had left the safety […]

When I was young, my mom brought me with her to a shiva house for a woman whose husband had died. I didn’t really know the woman or her husband, but for some reason, when I got there, I decided to make a joke. It got a big laugh, so I continued. Before I knew […]

lim·i·nal (ˈlimənl/) adj. 1. 
of or relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. 2. 
occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. limen noun (plural limens or limina |ˈlimənə|) psychology a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or distinguished from another. ORIGIN -mid 17th century: […]