In honor of my bat mitzvah anniversary, and in memory of Stan Lee. When I began learning and studying Torah and other sacred Jewish texts as an adult, I had some trouble realizing and coming to terms with the fact that our biblical heroes were flawed, human...
This week we read the third portion in the book of Bereshit, Genesis, Lech L’cha, from the first sentence. Lech L’cha means, “go, go forth, go for–or to–yourself.” As Freud is famous for saying, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and while from a...
The story of the Tower of Babel takes up just 10 verses in this week’s Torah reading, sandwiched in between two long genealogical lists; the descendants of Noah preceding, and those of Shem following. If your eyes glaze over when you read these lists, you’re not...
When I was young, “doing tashlich” meant walking down to the little brook in our front yard and throwing in bread crumbs. Whether or not that water was actually moving was unclear, but we performed the mitzvah the way we knew how. Over the years, I’ve “cast my wrongs...
In 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed into the Empire State Building between the 78th and 80th floors, killing 14 people. It was clearly an accident, so 17 years ago when I received a call at work that an airplane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers, I comforted...
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