For a Shabbat Friendly Printable PDF scroll to the bottom. Every few weeks another story surfaces about cyberbullying — a teenager, sometimes younger, who took their own life. Words weaponised to minimise another's humanity, that in instances such as these, literally kill. The Talmud, centuries before the internet existed, had a term for this: kol hamalbim pnei chavero b'rabim  — one who shames another in public, it is as though they have shed their blood ( Bava Metzia  58b). Humiliation...

Pesach is not a story of simple redemption. It is a story told in the language of the bittersweet. The women of the Exodus, in whose merit we were redeemed, understood this intuitively. Miriam — mar yam  — carries bitterness in her very name. And yet she is the one who picks up the timbrel and teaches the women to anticipate redemption before  it arrives. She is the one who teaches the nation how to put words to unimaginable pain through song. Redemption, in the Torah, is never pure. It is...

A Shabbat Friendly printable version attached at end of the page.  A student came to see me recently, visibly overwhelmed. She was bright, capable, the world genuinely open before her — and completely stuck. Every path felt like a loss. "I have so many options," she said, "but every time I choose one thing, I'm giving up everything else. How do I choose?" I found myself pointing her to a word. In Hebrew, the word for choice is bechirah  — ב-ח-י-ר-ה. Hiding inside it, if you look carefully, is...