Photo by Ardi Evans on Unsplash When my daughter was a baby many years ago, I remember being captivated by the ritual of bringing “first...

Photo by raquel raclette on Unsplash On the first day of Elul, I heard a beautiful teaching from Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie on a webinar...

What a journey it has been through this unimaginable year and a half. The loss of so many loved ones, the collapse of our treasured...

During the first week of the Covid shutdown last year, I heard someone say that he had begun to look in the mirror each morning and say...

One of my favorite passages in the Torah appears at the very end of the Book of Exodus. After an extended set of descriptions of the...

At this time of social isolation and fragmentation, whom do you need to draw closer to? Vayigash, one of last month’s Torah portions,...

I’m so grateful that I don’t read the words of the machzor (High Holiday prayerbook) literally. If I believed that there were an...

Not to worry. Rosh Hashana does not begin until the evening of September 18th. There’s still time to prepare. But we have been living...

Tisha B’Av came early this year. We have been mourning and contemplating collective losses since early March, when the pandemic hit.

Who do you want to be when the virus has passed? How will you have changed?

When we have come through this, let us turn our pain, fear and loneliness into a new way of being with others and as citizens of the world.

Ometz lev is a quality of willingness to speak truth to power and also a quality of the heart: strength tempered by love and gentleness.

Ten months after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, I moved to Palo Alto. When our first Sukkot arrived, members of the Jewish community...

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak teaches that with every breath we take, God breathes life into us as on the day of creation.

I have been to many demonstrations at Palo Alto City Hall. But there was something special about the one on Aug. 11, for Tish'a B'Av.

The Israelite spies were sent on a sacred mission and they failed spectacularly. Why? Because they let fear overpower them, overwhelming...

When life is stormy and confusing, wouldn’t it be amazing to have a spiritual navigation system to tell us what we need to do?

(published in Yashar, the Newsletter of The Mussar Institute, January 2019) When my daughter was a little girl, she had an uncanny...