My friend came to visit from Florida, and rented a bright yellow Camaro. He claims that it was the only car available, but we know the truth. Little did I know how much I would benefit from his rental car:
A stranger stopped me in front of my house, and said, “I understand that you are [...]

Rabbi Peter Grumbacher is a Reform rabbi in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1995, Rabbi Grumbacher’s mother passed away in New York City. So the next day he and his father were sitting with the funeral director. The man was taking professional notes on the information the Grumbachers were giving him. At one point, the funeral [...]

Let us keep in mind what Thrasea, the mildest of men and for that reason also the greatest, often used to say: “Who hates faults, hates mankind.”
- Pliny the Younger, Letters 8.22.2-3
Especially our own faults!
I picture the moment when Chana stoop up to Eli, and defended herself from his confused accusations, as the moment when [...]

Checkerboard pieces are indifferent. Dice are indifferent. How do I know in what way they will fall? But once the dice have fallen, to use that cast carefully and skillfully –that is indeed my business.
So also in life, the central task is this: distinguish things, stand them apart, and say, “externals are not in [...]

The preacher Harry Williams believed:
“We all have experience of two types of feeling. There is the feeling which unites us to our world and makes us rejoice in it, an experience of love, of acceptance, of communion. And there is the other kind of feeling which separates us from our world and makes us hate [...]

There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…
– Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
As wonderful as my children are, the only time they were perfect was the first time I held them in my arms. It was before they ever woke me up. [...]

A group of Jewish children with a teacher in Samarkand, (in modern Uzbekistan), ca. 1910. (Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/LOC)
My Cheder teachers dressed differently, but they look very similar to the rabbi in this picture. Dress up the children in a 1960’s wardrobe, and they will look just like the kids with whom I went to school.
We study [...]

How a pile of pillows taught me how to repair my Tzitzit:
Debbie and I had to be in the airport at 6am, and we had worked until 2am, so we shoved the basics into our suitcases and rushed to the airport. I unpacked this morning to find that I had stuffed the wrong Tzitzit [...]

A more earthbound version of the Devil appears in Dostoevsky’sThe Brothers Karamazov. His character Ivan had a very strong sense of the earth’s evil. Unable to bear the thought of being his father’s murderer, he is overtaken by a bout of fever. In his delirium Ivan meets the Devil in person:
“He was a gentleman, [...]