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 are, and how much you wish it wasn’t. The Talmud tells us that someone who hears crying at night will cry along , because night is a time to cry— in fact, the very word,

Awoman 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 and quadruple the prestige of his current job. The only catch was that they would have to move to a small Midwest town with a non-existent Jewish population. “At the time, my son was about five

“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 rose looked just like you—the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone, she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses; because it is she that I have watered… she

Awoman 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 bee-keeping, horseback-riding and fencing clubs her kids belonged to, and yes, even the personal meditation and yoga coach who attends her. “What do I need that ever-present and guilt-inducing item on my to-do list: ‘work on

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 are we supposed to do about that? Western society seems to think that the solution is to just give up on commitment and let boys be boys. I thought about

Amamzeir, contrary to popular misconception, is not a child born out of wedlock but a child who is the product of an invalid union, (such as a child born to a married woman from another man). Halachically, being born as a mamzeir is an indelible blemish; a mamzeir can never marry into the Jewish people and his descendants retain this status forever. It is hard to reconcile our Western sensibilities with the idea that a person can be put in a spiritually intractable situation through no fault of his own.