A conundrum: If before the beginning of time God occupied the entire universe, then how could there possibly be room for Creation? If He was there, everywhere, then how could there be space left for us? The answer, according to one ancient mystical tradition, is that God withdrew into Himself, as it were, contracting sufficiently

Rabbi Goldmintz’s young grandson was seriously injured just before Sukkot and needs your tefillot. Please daven for Aharon Meir ben Yael Miriam. This article is dedicated in the merit of his refuah shelaima. How different is Shabbat from any other day of the week? Is it just a day where the food is better than we

I vividly recall sitting in Rav Soloveitchik’s class one day near the beginning of the year when, rather than starting to teach the gemara, he began to speak about his inability to think about anything else before Yom Kippur but the upcoming encounter with the Divine. He said that there were two days that stuck

There is a very old ritual, reported more than 700 years ago, of children learning the alef bet for the very first time. The child would be brought to the synagogue or to the teacher’s house where there was a tablet waiting for him upon which could be found each of the letters of the

I received the following email in response to a previous column on doing battle with your child over observance: “I found your article very interesting. If your child is surrounded by people whose dress code i.e. length of skirt is not how you dress or how you want your child to dress what is the

There is a famous dispute in the first Mishnah of Bava Metzia about two people who find a garment and each one claims that it belongs to him. “If two people came to court holding a garment, and this one, the first litigant, says: I found it, and that one, the second litigant, says: I found it; this one says: All of it is mine, and

We’ve spent the last few weeks considering the impact of genes on one’s religious nature. The claim is that we are a combination of both nature and nurture, and the way that we in turn nurture must take into account our own child’s nature. Push too hard and you get a robot; push too little

Debbie was 45 when she learned that she was adopted. Not only that, but she learned for the very first time that she had a twin! Although separated as infants, the two girls grew up with different families only 45 minutes apart in New Jersey. Debbie was eventually reunited with her twin sister Sharon with

The issue of nature versus nurture in religious development was driven home to me when I reread a famous Rashi one day about Rivka’s pregnancy. The Torah simply tells us that she was troubled by some unusual kind of agitation within her that was caused by the fetuses. Citing a midrash, Rashi provides an explanation:

I’ve received a number of responses from readers who claimed that kids who text on Shabbos or who stray off the path religiously do so primarily because of a home environment that was somehow lacking. I answered them, as I will repeat many times, that it is certainly true that the home is the most