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Many years ago, when my oldest son (now 21) was little, he asked for me to read him stories from a children's bible on our shelf. It had belonged to my wife as a kid, and I was excited that Jonah wanted to hear these stories.   But of course it got complicated, because these stories are not, in fact, children's stories for the most part. They talk about some pretty adult topics.   I particularly...

I was riding in a Lyft at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, en route to LAX to make a flight home in time for my son's 12th birthday party. My driver, a middle-aged African-American woman, asked me where I was headed. "Chicago."    "Chicago?! Take me with you! That's where I'm from."   "Oh, where in Chicago did you grow up?"   She proceeded to name what felt like 25 different neighborhoods: First she...

Even though I went to bed early on Tuesday, before the election outcome was clear, I didn’t get much sleep. Try as I might — sleep meditations, visualizations, every trick I know—I couldn't get my mind to stop spinning: so much uncertainty, so much at stake for so many of us. I just couldn’t settle down, and I tossed and turned all night. I know many of you felt that way too. When I finally got...

Here’s a historical tidbit I love to recite: Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706. Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the founder of Hasidism better known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, was born eight years earlier, in 1698. Which is to say, Franklin and the Besht were contemporaries. I often mention this factoid when I teach Hasidic texts because I think that, while they emerged in different political and...

In the part of the Jewish world I live in, we are approaching the third and final cycle of what are lovingly (well, maybe not entirely lovingly) referred to as "Three-Day Yontifs." An explanation: Since ancient times, Jewish communities outside the land of Israel have observed not one, but two days of yom tov--holidays on which work is prohibited--at the beginning and end of Passover, on...

Last week I wrote about Yom Kippur as a quintessentially adult holiday. This week we arrive at Sukkot, a holiday very much made for children.   Aside from the assembly and decoration of the sukkah itself, which many kids love to do, there's the basic notion of the sukkah that I find engages children. "You mean we build a hut and eat our meals in it? I have so many questions!" How many walls does...

Years ago, when he was 7 years old, my son Micah couldn’t sleep. (He's now 19.) After a fitful hour of tossing and turning, he finally came downstairs and lay down on the sofa. And of course he was asleep within seconds. Half an hour later I picked him up to carry him back upstairs to his bed. At age 7, Micah was reaching the point where I could no longer comfortably carry him. But, perhaps...

About ten years ago, I discovered an album of the poet David Whyte called "Solace: The Art of the Beautiful Question." At the time I was leading Ask Big Questions, an initiative of Hillel International I had helped to found, and so the title intrigued me. Yet even as I've transitioned to new work and new stages of life, listening to this album has become an annual ritual, part of my practice of...

My father, may he rest in peace, used to say that there were two vistas, two views on the road, which made him feel like he was coming home. One was driving south on US-23 towards Ann Arbor, where he lived most of his adult life, as the road slopes down towards the Huron River yielding a view of downtown and the University of Michigan. The other was heading east on Highway 1 in Israel, coming up...