During daily, Shabbat and Holiday morning synagogue services in Israel (and on the mornings of Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur in the Diaspora), the Kohanim (the direct patrilineal descendants of Moses’ big brother, Aaron) walk to the front of the synagogue, pull their tallitot (prayer shawls) over their heads and upraised hands,

One of the cultural stumbling blocks over which I find myself constantly, well… stumbling [that whirring sound you hear is my High School English teacher spinning merrily in her grave], is the tricky decision of what to wear to an Israeli wedding. In the U.S. I had a much better handle on the social niceties,

This Wednesday night, a few minutes before sunset, Zahava and I will put the kids into the car and drive twenty minutes east into the Judean Desert. Our destination: the ruins of King Herod’s mountain fortress; Herodion. We won’t be alone in our journey. Like the scene from the end of the film ‘Field of

One of the more troubling aspects of warfare in the 21st century is that one rarely finds the well-defined battle lines or moral clarity such as existed in early 20th century conflicts. In today’s world, nations don’t make war directly on one another. Armies don’t line up along ‘fronts’ and shoot at one another like

Like a post I wrote last year, this is not really my story to tell… but it is a story that, today, needs to be told: When our older son Gilad was approaching his 3rd birthday (he’s 10 now) he began a one-man harassment campaign to get us to let him have his first pair