Korbanot Pregnant with Meaning – Parshat Tazria 2024

Pregnancy is objectively difficult. The experience varies from woman to woman and from pregnancy to pregnancy, but there are common challenges that apply almost universally even if everything is going as expected. During the first trimester, a pregnant woman may have extreme nausea, cravings, and just a very weird relationship with food. I remember that …

White Shirts and New Moons – Parshat Bo 2024

For as long as I can remember, I have always worn a white shirt, suit, and tie on Shabbos and Yom Tov. There were a few years in high school when I often wore blue or pinstriped shirts, but otherwise, it’s always been white. When I was in yeshiva in Israel for the year, most …

Broken Heart Syndrome – Parshat Vayigash 2023

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a medical condition in which the left ventricle of the heart changes shape and becomes larger and blood stops pumping with the same force that it should. It has symptoms that can be indistinguishable from a heart attack. That is what it felt like to Capt. Sivan Sekeli Ben Zichri, when, about …

Wrestling with Ourselves – Parshat Vayishlach 2023

On שמחת תורה, when we first learned of the unfathomable scale of the Hamas attack on Israel, many of us were at a loss about how to respond. Should we cut parts of the שמחת תורה davening and dancing? In that moment, I concluded, the only way we could help our families and friends and …

Unlocking the Side Door – Yom Kippur 2023

נעילה means locking, as in נועל את הדלת, locking the door. What is being locked during נעילה? And who is locking the door, us or הקב״ה? And what happens if we need to open it up again? The תלמוד ירושלמי cites a debate between two prominent אמוראים about the basis for the name תפילת נעילה, …

How to Serve G-d – Parshat Eikev 2023

The 1950s and 60s were an era partly defined by anxiety and skepticism about technology, the Cold War, and the Space Race. All of these themes appear in one of the most famous works of science fiction of that time, the 1950 short story by Damon Knight called “To Serve Man.” Unlike in the version …

Power and Being Good Neighbors – Parshat Chukat-Balak 2023

There was a great baseball movie for kids that came out in the early 90s called, The Sandlot. It’s about a group of kids growing up in the 1960s who play baseball in an empty lot next door to a junkyard with an enormous dog they called “The Beast.” The central challenge of the movie …

Open Up the Gates – Yom Kippur 2022

There are few doors in life that, once closed, they cannot be reopened. But as Dr. Erica Brown records in her book, Return, there is at least one example of such a door: the gates leading to an airplane. She tells the story of a man that she witnessed on the phone, pleading with whoever …