A daughter’s religious observance pains her mother. Death, birth and G-d’s apparent hand help this mother believe.

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. “Les gayn mein

“I don’t see how you do it,” someone said when I mentioned I was a hospice volunteer. Fear hung in the air. Death. How can you be so close? Why would you want to? Many think the work depressing, but my hospice work isn’t grim. Each situation has come with its own hidden gift be

Bernie Madoff has just agreed to plead guilty. Even if he were to live out every year of a 150-year sentence he could not make restitution to the scores of people he has betrayed. The aftershocks will have no limit. Save a single life and you save an entire world. Destroy a fellow human being’s

“Etz chayim he..l’machazikim ba….” I sing these words in Heberw each week as the Torah is returned to the ark. Without fail the English translation — its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace — echoes in my mind, sung by Sara Ochs, the president of my youth group back in

Spring cleaning and summer cleaning are completely different animals. Spring cleaning throws open windows to let in sunlight and fresh air still tinged with winter. Spring cleaning looks forward. There’s that mad scramble to get the matzot in and the last of the chametz out before Pesach. Spring cleaning is frenzied, carried upon the crest

There’s a phrase that’s popped up in recent years — “Let go and let God”. Perhaps it is this decade’s version of the oft-quoted Serenity Prayer asking for the wisdom to differentiate between the things we can change and those we cannot. Given the recent “Aha” moments in my life, these two phrases have begun

Never thought I’d say it but I miss the bar mitzvah circuit. I miss that three-year stretch of our lives where it seemed we were living the Jewish version of the old movie, If it’s Tuesday This Must be Belgium. Yes, during those years I began to pine for my home shul instead of spending

“Mom!” my son calls to me from his room. “C’mere! Look at my six pack!” “Huh?” I think as I climb the stairs. I’m sure he isn’t boasting about beer. What else comes in six? Batteries? Egg rolls? Fresh eggs? “See?” he crows when I enter his room. “Look at my abs! Muscles! A six

The Darvick household is knee deep in breaking away. “Do you realize, Mom,” Emma said one day as we drove to school, “that soon you will have two teenagers, and then you will have two kids in high school?” Realize it? What else have I been consumed with for the past eighteen months but that