The Torah portion for this week is not a fun read. Let’s just be really honest about that. Nearly all the verses, which span the length of two chapters in the book of Leviticus, talk about skin lesions. In great detail. “When a person has on the skin of the…

I’ll be completely honest, this Torah portion is a hard nut to crack. It spans the length of three chapters in the book of Leviticus, and it’s basically all just rules about sacrifices. What goes into a burnt offering? How many cows should one sacrifice to atone for a certain…

My baby is no longer a baby, and this is very difficult for me to accept. I still call him angel-baby when I stroke his hair or hug him. I still murmur ‘sweet baby,’ to him as I comfort him. But language cannot hold the truth at bay: My child…

The Torah portion this week takes us to the end of the book of Exodus and, wow, it’s been a journey (pun intended). The Israelites started off as a band of lost folks just setting out into the wilderness, led by a guy they had basically never seen before and…

I’ve been writing this blog for over a year now and, during that time, I’ve always written about my own confusing moments in the joyful mess that is parenthood. …

Parenting is hard. Of course, it’s also joyful, and awe-inspiring, and wondrous. All of that. But it’s okay to say that it’s hard, too. Anything you do day in and day out, especially anything you’re learning on the job, would be hard. Parenting, though, is a special kind of hard…

I used to teach a lot of Bar and Bat Mitzvah lessons, but these days I only have one student left. As I made the shift out of Jewish education (although I still lead services in a clergy position) and into professional writing, these lessons just kind of petered out…

Since about mid-December, our toddler hasn’t been sleeping very well. At first, it was the jet-lag (we had traveled to Berlin over the winter recess), then he was missing his aunties (with whom he’d been hanging out on our travels), and then he just got used to Mama or Ima…

When I opened up this week’s Torah portion to see what the text had in store for me, my first thought was that I really shouldn’t have written about rules last week. This week is basically all laws and more laws, with a light sprinkling of punishment and consequences to…