Blog

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...

Before anything else, I want to say thank you to the many readers who wrote last week to offer their condolences on the loss of my cousin Julian. My family and I have been surrounded in love and support. It means the world to all of us. Thank you. Among the reasons I wish my father was still alive is that I know how much he would delight in observing me coming to appreciate lessons he...

My cousin Julian Newman died tragically last week after a long battle with depression. He was a young 30 years old. Julian and his sibling Rena Yehuda are the two children of my first cousin Heidi and her husband Dave. As a child, I remember my mom talking to her older sister Judy Goldfein, Heidi’s mom, at least once a day—and that was back in the days when you had to pay for long-distance calls...

When folks ask me these days, “How’s your mom?” my answer is still, “She’s the world’s best Alzheimer’s patient.” But her world definitely feels like it’s shrinking. We’re approaching a decade since she was diagnosed. While she has blessedly been spared the kind of major personality change many dementia patients can experience, our conversations don’t have much room to roam. We stay close to...

Years ago, when I was a rabbi on a college campus, I found that one of the most wonderful parts of my job was when a student would come to me with a crisis of faith. “College costs so much,” I would tell them. “If it doesn’t provoke at least one serious crisis of faith, you should ask for your money back.” I said this, in part, because of my own experience as a student. In college, I lived...