“I’m bored.” “How was school today, dear?” “Boring.” “How was the class outing?” “Boring.” “There’s nothing on TV.” “It’s boring.” “There’s nothing to do on Shabbat except read!” “I’m bored.” It is said that Heinrich Heine once wrote that “I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to the sense I have that there isn’t enough talk about God in schools. By this I mean not that you don’t hear the Name being mentioned–certainly in a Chumash or Navi class it is (almost) unavoidable–but rather that we don’t always talk about Him as

Covenant & Conversation: Family Edition is a new and exciting initiative from The Office of Rabbi Sacks for 5779.  Written as an accompaniment to Rabbi Sacks’ weekly Covenant & Conversation essay, the Family Editionis aimed at connecting older children and teenagers with his ideas and thoughts on the parsha. Each element of the Family Edition is progressively more advanced; The Core Idea is appropriate

I’ve been thinking about this article for a while.  Actually, I’ve wanted to write about it for a long time.  It bothers me. “It” is calling me by my first name. It’s happened in my office.  During office hours.  By some of my patients and their parents.  The parents are young enough to be my

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

Covenant & Conversation: Family Edition is a new and exciting initiative from The Office of Rabbi Sacks for 5779.  Written as an accompaniment to Rabbi Sacks’ weekly Covenant & Conversation essay, the Family Edition is aimed at connecting older children and teenagers with his ideas and thoughts on the parsha. Each element of the Family Edition is progressively more advanced; The Core Idea is appropriate

Covenant & Conversation: Family Edition is a new and exciting initiative from The Office of Rabbi Sacks for 5779.  Written as an accompaniment to Rabbi Sacks’ weekly Covenant & Conversation essay, the Family Editionis aimed at connecting older children and teenagers with his ideas and thoughts on the parsha. Each element of the Family Edition is progressively more advanced; The Core Idea is appropriate

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

There was good news but moments into the Jewish New Year. Last week, the day after Rosh HaShanah, our government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that teenage use of electronic cigarettes had reached an “epidemic proportion.”  FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said that more than two million middle and high school students were regular

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