Blog

There’s a wonderful story about the great Hasidic master, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. One day, he arrived in Lviv and approached the home of a wealthy, distinguished resident.   “Might I find a place in your home to spend the night?” he asked, without revealing his identity. “I have no room for wayfarers. Go to an inn,” the wealthy man replied. “A small corner in one of your rooms will be...

This past summer I found myself in a writing partner relationship with Rabbi Zvika Krieger who, among other things, is in our Marbeh Fellowship for Senior Jewish Mindfulness Teachers at IJS. Zvika is working on a book and sent me chapters to read and comment on (it’s about God and it’s fantastic), and he made me commit to sending him 5,000 words of the book I’m trying to write about at-homeness....

For reasons that aren’t worth getting into, this week I found myself on the phone for 30 minutes with an insurance broker. It was time for new home and auto policies. In the age of automated everything, talking on the phone with my new friend Brad felt positively quaint: we kibbitzed a bit, he talked about how different insurance companies work, we commiserated about a terrible weekend for...

On a fairly regular basis, I engage in a mundane but profound practice of home-making. In these moments, I find I am highly aware of boundaries—what is inside my home territory and what is not. Aware of that boundary, I am also aware of when I may have stepped over the line, when I bend the line or even dissolve it as an act of generosity. And, as I return to my home from this practice, I find...

Maybe it’s because I come from a family of three boys. Or maybe it’s because I’m the father of three boys. Or perhaps it’s because I spent so much time in the Boy Scouts as a kid, or that I went to an Orthodox rabbinical school whose students were all young men. Whatever the reasons, I’ve long cared about masculinity and the experience of men. I can remember already as a college student noticing...

For the last couple of years, it has felt at times that our youngest child, who turns 14 in a few weeks, has needed his own social secretary. Between school and camp, he has attended a veritable parade of coming-of-age celebrations (bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, b-mitzvahs—or as the van of a local non-kosher caterer that nevertheless does a lot of Jewish events puts it a little ironically,...

Over the summer I sat my eldest son down for an important conversation. “Listen,” I said, and proceeded to play a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the closing section of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. Jonah was a film major in college and, former music major that I am, I have taken it upon myself to ensure that he knows something about the classical roots on which movie composers like John...

In recent days, several friends have forwarded me an article from The Atlantic. It’s by Olga Khazan and it highlights the work of Willoughby Britton, a former academic researcher who has raised questions about potential negative health effects of meditation in some individuals. For Britton herself, and it would appear for some other folks too, meditation—most often in large doses of hours a day,...

I had a couple hours between the end of a senior staff offsite meeting in Atlanta and my flight home to Chicago. My colleague Firkins wanted to visit the National Center for Civil and Human Rights before, so we went together and spent 90 minutes there on the way to the airport. This was my second trip to the museum. My first visit was eight years ago, before I began a regular meditation...

Two decades ago, after leaving the Wall Street Journal, one of my wife Natalie’s first jobs in the Jewish world was working for a nascent project at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to send Jewish children’s books to families every month. The idea was brilliantly simple: Children want their parents to read to them at bedtime. If they get a book in the mail with their name on it, they’ll run to...

The dramatic high point of Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey comes when, after 20 years, Odysseus speaks to his wife Penelope while disguised as a traveler. He does not reveal himself—not openly, anyway—but, after three hours of movie-watching, he finally opens up about what has kept him from coming home all these years. I was so struck by this scene that I bought the screenplay when I...