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Happy birthday to me! I’m in the midst of turning 50. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was last week, my birthday on the Gregorian calendar is next week. As my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer remarked when I saw him the other day, “Some people refer to that as chol hamoed,” the intermediate days of the festival. Thank you in advance for all your good wishes. Having a birthday in mid-May has long...

One of the challenges of writing a weekly essay on the Torah portion along with a weekly podcast script while also serving as the CEO of a growing organization is that there’s not much time for other writing. My first—and to date, only—book came about entirely because I wrote each chapter for IJS’s annual Text Study program in 2020-21 (and I wasn’t yet writing these weekly reflections). In...

If you haven’t yet listened to the recent two-part debate between Rabbis Sharon Brous and David Ingber on the podcast “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt,” I want to suggest that you do. In addition to being a model of civil disagreement, their dialogue also expresses a debate taking place within much of the American Jewish community, particularly about our individual and collective relationships...

One of the most enduring Torah lessons I ever learned came from a 19-year-old college student named Joey. He was interviewing for a campus "engagement" (i.e. outreach) internship when I was the Hillel rabbi at Northwestern. As part of the interview, we asked the applicants to read Hillel's famous three questions (in English) and comment on them: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When...

In a normal week, I typically send these reflections to Andrew, our wonderful senior operations associate here at IJS, on Wednesdays. Andrew formats them and gets them all set to arrive in your inbox Friday morning (hence the name, “Josh’s Friday Reflections”). Natalie, one of our other wonderful team members, puts them on our blog. And then our communications & marketing team puts them out...

My youngest child recently celebrated his bar mitzvah and thereby became an adult in the eyes of Jewish tradition. And, right on cue, he has also hit his developmental stride as a teenager: he is much more interested in hanging out with his friends than with his parents. (As a dear family friend once put it, the essence of parenting at this stage might be described as being around so your child...

Thirty years ago, in my junior year of college, I fulfilled a childhood dream: not only to conduct an orchestra one time, but to be the orchestra's regular conductor. It wasn't the Chicago Symphony or the New York Philharmonic, of course—it was a student ensemble, the Berkeley College Orchestra (Berkeley is one of the residential colleges at Yale). At the time, Yale boasted more than half a...

“It’s hard to make plans these days.” In the years preceding her Alzheimer’s diagnosis (perhaps in a sign of things to come) I remember my mother saying these words regularly. I’m sure there was truth to it: the effects of aging on the body made it harder to know how she or my father would feel about traveling, or even just going someplace, when the time came. It was harder to make plans. I’ve...

I can remember a period of my life when the melancholy of a waning Shabbat afternoon really hit me hard. This was in my early twenties. I was single, just back from a year studying in yeshiva in Israel, and most often spending Shabbat with friends on the Upper West Side (in a desire to end my singlehood and find a partner). As the sun would sink into the western sky and the shadows of those...

Three of my happiest moments as a parent have come at our local men's clothing store, as I have taken each of my sons to find a suit for his bar mitzvah. For starters, the trip strikes a deep chord of familiarity, as I remember shopping for a suit or a sport coat with my own father at the long since closed Ann Arbor Clothing. That's a warm memory. For another, it has generally marked a...