Inspiration 1710 articles

It’s a scary familiar term – one that we invoke to assess the unexplainable and capture the unimaginable. The phrase? Hester Panim and it means that God hides His face from...

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. The week before...

When my high school students at the inner-city public school where I taught asked if all Jews were rich, I said that indeed they were not. Certainly, there would be no...

Louis Ferrante’s Journey From the Mob to the Mesorah Many of us arrive at moments in our lives where circumstances oblige us to reinvent ourselves: the loss of a job, an...

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...

I am my father’s witness. He’s come home after spending two weeks in the oncology unit. Colon cancer is killing him. There is nothing more the hospital can do. He’s been...

Hannah can’t really give us full details of her impressions. She will not elaborate on the connection she feels to the Jewish homeland nor what it means to her to have...

Is prayer answered? If God is changeless, how can we change Him by what we say? Even discounting this, why do we need to articulate our requests? Surely God, who sees...

The daughters of Tzelafchad, those righteous and smart women, petition Moshe for a piece of land in Eretz Yisrael (Bamidbar 27, their father died and why should their family lose out)....

In the old days, when I was growing up, most babies seemed to be born on time, and the bris took place on the eighth day as prescribed in the Torah....