This week’s parsha feels very personal. Exactly Three years ago, as Meital (my daughter) entered the IDF, I wrote about Ki Tavo, the story of the Bikkurim, and what it felt like as a mother to offer my own “first fruit” to the larger story of our people. Today, exactly three years later, on the same Parsha, she finishes her service as an officer. I find myself returning to those same verses but standing in a very different place. It’s strange how the same Torah can speak to us differently as...

To My dedicated Readers and fellow students of life, Elul is the season of return. But perhaps the deepest return is not to who we once were, but to who we are still capable of becoming. There is something unusually hopeful about the Jewish calendar: it never allows the past to have the final word. Each year Elul arrives and reminds us that however far we have travelled, however distracted we have become, however many promises we have made and failed to keep, we are always invited to begin...

Printable PDF below What happens when a world loses its boundaries? We're watching it in real time. The images of migrants storming the borders between Morocco and Spain shocked even the most liberal commentators. But those scenes were not an anomaly. They were the physical manifestation of a cultural revolution that began decades ago—the slow erosion of every kind of limit. First the boundaries of truth became "perspectives." Then the boundaries of identity became "fluid." Then the...