In “To Life, L’Chaim” from “Fiddler On The Roof,” the villagers of Anatevka sing, “God would like us to be joyful even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.” And as we head into Shabbat and Tisha B’Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, these lyrics certainly...
Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av, is a day of national and collective mourning for the Jewish people. On this date in 586 BCE and again in 70CE, Jerusalem, and her Holy Temples, were destroyed and the people exiled; first to Babylonia and then...
A record (remember those?) I used to listen to was called “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish” by Bob Booker and George Foster. At about the 12-minute mark is a sketch called, “The Presidents.” LBJ welcomes “the President of Israel” who acknowledges that Johnson is president...
It’s time for a new pair of glasses with a new prescription, and that started me thinking about this week’s Torah reading, Shelach Lecha. It begins with God telling Moses to send 12 men, one from each of the tribes, to see or scout out the land that the Israelites...
This Shabbat, we read from the prophet Zecharaiah, whose prophecy occurred during the time of King Darius of Persia. At this point in our history, some of the Jews who had been living in exile in Babylonia had returned to the land of Israel–rejoining the small remnant...
A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, a place neither of us had been since childhood. Based on many of the exhibits we saw, I’m not sure how much has changed since then, although Pluto was still considered a...
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