Some things just can’t be forced. One of them is love. The most powerful person in the world, even if he owns all that money and talent can buy, still cannot force someone to love him. While he may be able to coerce someone to act as if they love, no one can control another’s […]
No Cynics Need Apply
Purim is such a happy day, but amidst all the merrymaking, gifts of food and charity to the poor, lurks the seemingly incongruous mitzvah to eradicate the memory of Amalek. Historically, Jews don’t seem to be able to muster up a lot of aggression even in the best of circumstances. The happy, slightly besotted and […]
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Did you ever come across an idiot? An irredeemable, irrevocable, complete, and total fool? Stupid beyond belief, obtuse as a wall, dumb as a doorknob? Meet Mrs. Mistake. She just earned the Nobel Prize for stupidity, First Class Award for Blockheads, Championship of Foot in Mouth, Outstanding Award for Idiocy. And boy does she know […]
Men are from Weekday, Women are from Shabbat
This blog was written for the Shabbat Project website. Apparently, with all the beauty of the Challa-baking aspect of that project, the organizers wanted to emphasize other aspects of the female connection to Shabbat and asked me to write an article on that. The article was subsequently published on aish.com. Is a pregnant woman one […]
Insightful New Review from Bookofbooks, and from The Forward
GENDER AND JUDAISM: A SOPHISTICATED VEIW FROM THE HAREIDI CAMP Review by Sarah Rinder Recent debates about women and the Orthodox rabbinate yielded a range of interesting, impassioned and also banal observations by various Jewish professionals and laypeople. Although sociological and legal arguments abound, a broader philosophical discussion of the nature of gender roles within […]
CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK
There is a reason why people who cry are called cry-babies. Crying doesn’t make sense and we assume children are most prone to irrationality. Children do things like crying over spilled milk, which everyone knows is not so rational, because what is crying going to help? The milk is gone no matter how sorry you […]
Closeness Over Comfort
A woman I met who was devastated over the fact that her only son had married a non-Jewish woman shared with me what she considered to be the defining moment of that scenario. She and her husband were happily residing in New York, when her husband was offered a position with about double the salary […]
How Cleaning the Refrigerator Helps us Come Closer to Hashem
“You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”[the prince said to the garden of roses]. “… To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my […]
Where Have All the Good Jewish Women Gone?
A woman I met recently told me that she was seriously considering divorce. “It’s not like my husband is a bad guy,” she said, “I am just beginning to feel like he is more trouble than he is worth.” She went on to describe her fast paced life—her high in the three digit salary, the […]
Where Have All The Good Jewish Men Gone?
Every year an equal number of Jewish boys and girls are born – but twenty-something years later, there are far more chuppah-minded women than men. The shortage of marriageable Jewish men is well-known, but the mystery of their disappearance remains unsolved for most of us. It’s called the “c” word, and men are supposedly notoriously afraid of it. So what […]