This week we joyously celebrate the bounty of our lives during the festival of Sukkot. Even though most of us are not farmers, we think about the cycles of nature and, more specifically, the harvest season.   If we were farmers, while focusing on the...

Philip Roth was a controversial Jewish author, to say the least. I enjoyed reading his writing, and one of his books, in particular, was very impactful in my youth. It was the collection of short stories entitled “Goodbye Columbus.” The title...

When you think about earlier eras in American history, are you nostalgic, or are you relieved to be living today? It’s a generally conservative impulse to feel like life was better in some imagined or remembered past. And it’s a generally progressive...

I recently returned from leading a delegation of 19 students from Washington University in St. Louis to Israel to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This fact-finding mission, called the Campus Leaders Israel Experience, travels through...

On a hard and arduous journey, one plagued by hunger, thirst, conflict and fear, it can be difficult to keep the end in mind. This is especially true of a 40-year journey during which an entire generation lost both the chance to see the destination and...

My earliest memory of prayer is my mother, of blessed memory, tucking me into bed with a kiss and the words of the Shema. To say that God is One, to know that this declaration of faith embraced me in the circle of love and belief of all Jewish souls who...

Noted Torah commentator Robert Adler observed that the Book of Deuteronomy (D’varim) is “… the most sustained deployment of rhetoric in the Torah.” D’varim (sayings or speeches), by virtue of its root association, sets the tone for a series...

Amid this week’s double parashah, Matot-Massei, there are 49 verses, a lot of detail, describing the 42 journeys of the Jewish people through the desert, to the Land of Israel. It is almost like reading the journal of an explorer, with specific details...

In the year since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade as a national precedent for the right of women to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term, 20 states have  passed legislation essentially revoking that right to choose....

As a teenager, I would sometimes (often) turn on the television while I enjoyed a post-school snack. At that time in human history, my options were to watch whatever show was on… or to dig through the cabinets in our living room, hoping that I would...