Imagine a most delicious waterfall of forgiveness, cascading over Mrs. Mistake, caressing her wounded, crippled soul, cleansing her open wounds, smoothing out wrinkles of worry and lines of despair, loosening the layers of smallness and pettiness inscribed in her heart, dousing the burning coals over which she has raked herself — and you can easily […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Recently, at the Shabbat table, my husband asked the children what gifts in their lives make them feel loved by God. It was an interesting question and produced answers from the children which were particularly illuminating for us as parents to hear. But the question also got me thinking and helped me articulate one of […]
Way back in the Jewish day school I attended, where some of us ate only food with the most stringent of heksherim (certified kosher stamp) and others of us didn’t keep kosher at all, we were all part of one (sometimes) happy class. Baltimore was small then, with just one Jewish girls’ day school. It […]
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