I am my father’s witness. He’s come home after spending two weeks in the oncology unit. Colon cancer is killing him...

My husband doesn’t like my mother so much. This was not evidenced by an outright declaration or even a private conversation, but by the fact that he will very obviously avoid their street while walking to and from synagogue on Shabbat. My parents live a few blocks away, and he will walk an extra ten minutes to avoid their house, in fear of her lurking by the front window.

Question: If you order a babysitter, taxi driver or any other person to work for you, may you cancel the arrangement before the job begins, and what are the financial consequences if you do so?

My eldest granddaughter turned eight years old this year. I have not seen her or spoken to her in more than six months, and wonder what new achievements and milestones she has attained... I have a picture on my refrigerator of her and her younger brother smiling into the camera, which I look at each day... There are people who tell me to stop thinking about these two precious grandchildren.

Since the birth of faith, people have turned to God “who heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds” for strength and recovery in times of sickness. Many of the psalms are supreme examples of such prayers. There is a deep connection, still not fully understood by medical science, between “healing of the spirit and healing of the body.” Prayer, said the Sages, is not a substitute for medicine, but neither is medicine a substitute for prayer...

Hannah can’t really give us full details of her impressions. She will not elaborate on the connection she feels to the Jewish homeland nor what it means to her to have spent the last ten days on a bus with Jewish peers seeing the most meaningful places in Israel, going to the top of Massada, riding camels or floating in the Dead Sea. She may not articulate these feelings but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them.

Prayer changes the world because it changes us. At its height, it is a profoundly transformative experience. If we have truly prayed, we come in the course of time to know that the world was made, and we were made, for a purpose; that God, though immeasurably vast, is also intensely close; that “though my father and mother may reject me, God will gather me in”; that God is with us in our efforts, and that we do not labor in vain.

The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chaim 551:16) records a custom practiced by Ashkenazim of not bathing or showering during the Nine Days, from Rosh Chodesh of the month of Av until the end of the Tisha B’Av mourning.