The title of this article is “From Bear Stearns to Bava Metzia” but it’s really about some life lessons I’ve picked up over the last few months since my company – that I was with for 20 years and that was in business for 86 years – disappeared in the midst of a financial crisis and panic – making me a “Bear Stearns refugee” but more importantly a “kollel boy”.

The 19th century poet Emily Dickinson penned these lines in the early-American, churchgoing town of Amherst, Massachusetts --surely a time and place as far away as one can get from the Middle East, and from the 21st century’s Jewish State. But every year as summer approaches, those words have come to life again in the mind of this Jerusalemite...

Snow is always exciting in Israel.And this past winter was quite an exciting one in the Holy Land! As we settle into summer, a look back at this past year's snowfall in Israel, to cool off. Because sometimes the snow comes down in... July.

What do sinks have to do with Mashiach? The answer is: a lot! Needless to say, the month of Av is not a time for undue flippancy. It is heavy with past calamities, dragging us back to Babylonia and Rome...

He becomes a man in the eyes of the Torah. At the age of 13 a boy becomes responsible for his own actions. The reward and punishment for his deeds goes on his account, not his parent's. As such, he can now be counted in the quorum of ten, read from the Torah, put on tefillin and more.

Orthodontics was his profession of choice. His first smile into the mirror the day his braces were removed convinced him that he too wanted to bring smiles to peoples faces. Diligently he studied his way through university and was accepted to dentistry school. And that’s as far as he got....

We reached our destination, but I was not ready to get out. “Please just leave the meter running and keep talking,” I asked my cab driver. Those words are a dream come true to any Israeli cab driver, and mine was only too happy to oblige. So we pulled over to the side of the road and he continued his fascinating story...

Some people strive to summit a big mountain. Others try to move them. For one group of Jewish travelers, a 10-day journey to East Africa achieved both...This past February, I was privileged to accompany seven courageous trekkers, one from New York and six others from Israel, as their escort to the Roof of Africa, Mt. Kilimanjaro. Alongside their discovery of personal endurance, they found an equally challenging opportunity: how to help a poor, yet amiable young man realize one of his dreams.