With the fast of Tisha B'Av approaching, I wanted to put out a quick and simple thought to my readers: Take care of those around you - your family and friends, the strangers you meet -- even your enemies.
Personal Growth
July 15th, 2010
Mi Casa Es Su Casa
Although my knowledge of Spanish does not exceed the vocabulary used in Dora the Explorer, this past Friday afternoon, when we arrived at Rabbi Bentzion Klatzko's house for Shabbos and he told me, "Mi casa es su casa," even I knew what he was talking about.
July 9th, 2010
Lindsay Lohan and the Blame Game
Whether or not you care to keep up with the latest gossip coming out of Hollywood, doing something as simple as logging on to email basically guarantees that you will. Which means that almost everyone at this point has heard the recent news in the ongoing saga of actress Lindsay Lohan who has been sentenced to ninety days in jail for probation violations.
July 1st, 2010
Pour Out Your Kindness Like Water
I’ll call her Lindsay in order to protect the innocent; the only one really guilty of anything was me. You see, I found Lindsay to be annoying -- like really, really annoying. The very sight of her drinking water made my skin crawl. Well, it wasn’t just the way she drank the water, it was also the way she poured it. She always poured it into the same orange plastic cup inside which she always placed a straw. As I’d watch that straw bob up and down with the water’s glub, glub, I’d scream in my head, “why aren’t you drinking straight out of the bottle like the rest of us?”
May 5th, 2010
Gratitude Without Attitude
My parents made me a big bat mitzvah – like black-tie-affair-on-a-yacht-cruising-around-Manhattan-harbor-with-a-hundred-and-fifty-of-our-closest-family-and-friends big. But they weren’t just the people that planned the party and paid for it. They saw me through all my years of Hebrew school and bat mitzvah lessons. They helped me write my speeches and made me practice them. And although we had our fights like all parents and teenagers do, they were (and are) pretty terrific people who taught me values, imbued me with self-esteem, and sacrificed for many years to give my sisters and me every opportunity in life.
April 14th, 2010
Out and About (and the Benefit of the Doubt)
They call it m'yam l'yam which literally means from "sea to sea;" and when I agreed to do it, I was surely suffering from a bout of temporary insanity. Israel's really narrow, I told myself. How cool would it be to hike across [read: tell people I hiked across] an entire country?!
Continue reading Out and About (and the Benefit of the Doubt)
February 2nd, 2010
Birthday Musings
When I was a kid, I assumed that my grandparents had been old forever. When I was a kid, I never understood why people lied about being twenty-nine. Why make up such an old age if you're trying to sound young?
