Exactly six months to the day after congregants at Tree of Life, a Conservative Synagogue, were gunned down by a White Supremacist, another of his ilk, on the other end of the country, showed up at a Chabad House, an Orthodox Shul, with the same intent: to kill as many Jews as possible. As the […]
I never really appreciated the concept of freedom until I felt that I had lost it. So when my husband left the marriage after 10 years, slamming the proverbial door behind him, I was wholly unprepared when he refused to give me a get and trapped me in a marriage neither of us wanted to […]
In the merit of the righteous women who were in that generation, [the children of] Israel were redeemed from Egypt. (B. Talmud Sotah 11b) This midrashic statement gets a lot of press. Many people are intrigued by the idea that women played a central role in such a massively significant event as the exodus from […]
Dear JITC- Where does the custom of hiding the afikomen (and ransoming it, children from parents or vice versa) come from? Thanks, Lisa Dear Lisa- As you note in your question, there are different customs regarding how to play the afikomen game. In some families, the parents hide it and the children win a prize […]
I recently tweeted a joke that went viral, and I believe it did because of a deep truth it contains about Jews.
No longer confined to yoga and meditation enthusiasts, modern society is attuned to the benefits of mindfulness. Yet what does it have to offer the Jewish spiritual seeker? Jon Kabat-Zinn, a mindfulness-practice teacher, and developer of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique, defines mindfulness as an “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in […]
