Painting by Leah Jacobson (copyright). Text from Leah Goldberg: "And Tomorrow we will all go out to the Garden, and there will be great Joy in the garden". The Flood of Simchat Torah 5784 / 5786 The war has ostensibly ended—for now. The living hostages have returned, and as we await the return of the remaining bodies, we find ourselves flooded by a torrent of emotions—joy and sorrow, relief and grief, wholeness and emptiness. On erev Simchat Torah I  could not properly proces

Two years. Tomorrow is the 7th of October — and the first day of Sukkot. Two years since everything came crashing down. Two years since...

I don’t think I thought about God Or self transformation Or return Or love Instead there was guilt and shame Appraisals Scales and...

Matot  begins with the laws of vows. A vow means I can imagine a tomorrow that looks different from today. Masei  lists the stops of the...

לעילוי נשמת מאיר זאב בו מנחם מנדדל הכהן If you've been in Israel lately—or visited in recent months—you’ll have noticed them: hundreds of...

ללעילוי נשמת ישראל סמל נתן בן אברהם חיים וסאם הי"ד In Memory of Captain (Yisrael) Natan Rosenfeld ז"ל Death shatters all illusions of...

Have you seen them? The thousands of Israelis returning home by boat, by special flights, kissing the soil of a land at war? Have you...

This year, as we read Behar-Bechukotai together, their deep interconnection feels particularly resonant in light of the moment we are...

Freud and Adler: Agency and Blame We live in a culture saturated by blame. It is far easier to shift responsibility onto others—our...

Change is a frightening concept. We gravitate towards the familiar—the routine, the ordinary, the comforting rituals of our daily lives...

The transition from Ki Tissa  to Vayakhel - Pekudei holds the key to understanding how failure can lead to growth, adversity to...

The image of Shiri Bibas courageously trying to protect her babies from the monsters has been seared into our consciousness because it...

Over the past 16 months, in the wake of the war with Hamas, Israeli artists have responded through song, reflecting a spectrum of...

I was recently listening to a podcast where Abigail Shrier, an American psychologist and author of Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren’t Growing...

On New Army Officers, Holocaust Remembrance and Pharoah's Amnesia This week, my eldest daughter graduated from officer training school...

Listen to the first words voiced by the three heroines who returned this week from their captivity in Gaza, and you’ll understand how the...

Envisioning a Different Reality This week, I listened to the father of 19-year-old Liri Albag, who was taken hostage by Hamas and has...

For the soon-to-be-released Rabbi Sacks podcast, which I’ve been working on over the past year, I had the privilege of interviewing...

I said to a friend the other day that if I stop and ruminate about what the hostages are enduring or the unimaginable barbarity...

We all dream of ladders to heaven. Whether it’s Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven  or Yaakov’s dream in this week’s parsha, there’s...