There are calendars which provide the convenience of viewing one day at a time. At the end of the day, the day’s page is torn off and disposed of. When the year ends and all the days and pages have been discarded, all that is left is the pageless, empty cover.

One fateful Rosh Hashana Day, the soul of Gershon Kleinbard stood in an endless line of living souls, each waiting to appear before the Master of the Universe for the moment of judgment and reckoning.

Every morning, when the radio alarm wakes me up with the Shema and a chapter of Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), I know why I made aliyah.

As I drove down the highway, music blasting and screaming in exhilaration, I felt – for the first time – like I had arrived at adulthood...

I am frequently “inappropriate for the Shabbos table.” I make people laugh and cry. Sometimes, I make them stop talking altogether...

Louis Ferrante’s Journey From the Mob to the Mesorah. His friend went to a bookstore and told the clerk he needed books for a friend who was “short and bossy.” The clerk picked out a biography of Napoleon, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and Mein Kampf.

I grew up with vastly conflicting images of Russia. It was the place my maternal grandfather fled to avoid conscription into the Czar’s army. A czar whom my paternal great-grandparents mourned because, my grandfather once told me, “they looked to him as a father.” Russia was a place of poverty and hunger. But also a place of great delicacy. Russia was dangerous.

I jam the math notebook, into my bag. I've been hearing her repeat that question since forever. Suddenly my hand stops in mid-air. The thought jumps into my mind. She needs me to forget things. And she needs me to be weak, so that I will need her. I stand there a moment, weighed down by the intensity of the realization.