My daughter, Atara, is five going on six, going on twenty. She sits at my kitchen table in her pink striped sweater, coloring endless pictures of hearts and rainbows and talks to me about life. Mostly, I am interested in listening because much of what she says comes as a big surprise to me.

As a Jew in the Diaspora, I remember thinking of Hevron as the place where we remember our important dead. As a Jew in Israel, I experience Hevron as the beating heart of the Jewish people. Here, Jews come to daven for that which is closest to their hearts, to learn Torah, to celebrate their rites of passage...

I don’t think the diamond shone this much when I first put it on my finger 36 years ago. I kept twisting it this way and that, amazed by its brilliance and clarity. It had looked so dull just a few days before, sitting on my finger like an old steady companion, unobtrusive but always there. My daughter had offered to take it in for a cleaning and polishing at the jewelry company where she works, and I blithely handed it over, not realizing what a transformation was about to take place.

I have seen the writing on the wall… and it is colorful. There are blue and orange streaks all across one wall of our dining room. That was my daughter's attempt to make a mural of people eating a Shabbos meal. We have some bright pink scribbles at the bottom of the stairs that probably mean to say, "Here are the stairs, can you pick me up and carry me!?" We have a whole lot of pen marks on the walls by my five-year-old's bed, its must be the inner poet

'There must be a word in German for Excuse me ..." I muttered as I bent down to gather the boxes out of the way. Suddenly I saw the picture. I was bent down on the floor, she stood above me, with that cane in her hand. I stood up, and walked away. There are just too many collective memories between us...

On November 9th, we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom during which hundreds of synagogues were burned down...

Many of you can remember the preschool drawings you made, or your children brought home...

Sentence fragments hang out in some corner of my brain popping up like hand puppets in the form of one person or another from my past. Because of this idiosyncrasy each week invisible loved ones pray alongside me.