Our five-year-old doesn’t like stories from books anymore. “Read me a story from your mind,” Yehuda instructs us these days, but many times there didn’t seem to be anything going on in our minds to tell him. One evening, after I gave him his old, worn, beloved blanket and said the Shema, I drew the

If you ask me why he laughed, I’ll say: your guess is as good as mine. Who am I to understand a tzaddik? At the time, I thought I must be missing something. I was. Then he laughed more, and I thought he must be seeing this question from some larger perspective. He was. A

You and I know what it’s like, because we’re both human: the sense of innocence, and of having been wronged. The keen desire to craft some put-down that will diminish the other person as he has diminished us, to put him back down and ourselves back up; to restore our dignity as it must be

We couldn’t have found a more fitting symbol for the twentieth century’s close than the failure, in 1999’s last days, of NASA’s mission to the Red Planet. “Mars Lander’s Apparent Loss Dashes Spirits and Raises Fears,” read the headline in The New York Times, when the expensive little robot designed to relay data from Mars