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Last Shabbat fell on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Marcheshvan, exactly a month after the tenth of Tishrei—which is better known as Yom Kippur. And while it was entirely a coincidence that last Shabbat was the culmination of a weeklong silent retreat I attended at the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz, CA, the voice of Albert Einstein is chuckling inside my head, saying, "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous." At a certain point, it started to occur to me that this kind of retreat was a lot like an extended Yom Kippur. How so? The Mishnah lists five prohibitions we observe on Yom Kippur: 1) No eating and drinking. Okay, we do eat and drink on these kinds of retreats....

I think it's safe to assume that you've heard of Yoda. If you're not of a certain age, it may be a little less safe to assume that you've heard of another great animated spiritual master, Oogway. He's a tortoise who appears in the Kung Fu Panda movies. But he has one of the best lines about spiritual practice in contemporary popular culture: "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but...

If you’re a full-fledged grownup in a relationship with a younger member of GenZ (born mid-1990s to early 2010s) or GenAlpha (born since then), you may find yourself, like me, sometimes at a loss when it comes to language. Some of this is normal generational churn: words like “rizz” and “sus,” phrases like “no cap,” are just as foreign to me as the incessant interjection of “like,” or the casual...

If you're a regular reader of these Friday reflections, you have probably noticed that, like a Law & Order episode, they follow a pretty predictable form: I start with an engaging personal story, pivot to a lesson drawn from the week's Torah portion, and then bring it home with a message about how Jewish spiritual practice can help us lead a more meaningful life. This week I feel a need to...

I was blessed to grow up in the same house my entire childhood. My parents moved into 1258 Crosby Crescent in Ann Arbor in 1969, and my mom only left the house after my dad died 49 years later. I have no memories of moving during childhood; the first time I packed a moving box was when I went to college. My father, God bless him, had a hard time parting with material things, and by the time he...

I was recently watching a television interview with a woman in her 60s. Her husband, about the same age, still works long hours, though they’re already quite financially wealthy. “If he says to me on his deathbed that he regrets working too much,” the woman said, “I’ll kill him.” It’s a funny line, of course. What makes it funny is that, in this imagined scene, the man is dying, so the words,...

Earlier this week, my middle son and I woke up bright and early in order to beat Chicago rush hour traffic and make it to Champaign, Illinois in time for his orientation/registration day. While our older son is also a student at U of I, the new student process then was entirely online because of the pandemic. So this was a new experience. Having grown up in another Big Ten college town (Ann...

If you were in band class at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor in the 1980s and 90s, you probably had Robert Albritton for a teacher. And if you had Mr. Albritton for a teacher, you probably remember some of his many colorful sayings. More than 30 years later, my brothers and I still find occasion to recite them to each other. One of our favorites was what Mr. A would occasionally say to a...

A few months ago, my dear friend and synagogue rabbi Ari Hart delivered a sermon that opened with a critique of an aspect of some (perhaps a lot?) of contemporary mindfulness practice: nonjudgmental acceptance. Now, I hasten to add that Ari is a participant in our Clergy Leadership Program cohort that launches next month, and he was not offering this critique to knock Jewish spiritual practices...

Like millions of people, earlier this spring I binge-watched the second and final season of Andor, the Star Wars TV series starring Diego Luna as the titular character: a reluctant, yet willful and highly effective agent in the growing rebellion against the Empire. For many Star Wars fans, Andor is probably the greatest thing the 48-year old franchise has ever made. The quality of the scripts,...

One of my favorite jokes in the (heilige/holy) Big Book of Jewish Humor is the one about a man from Warsaw who is in Chelm on a business trip. As he walks down the street, he's stopped by Yossel the chimney sweep. “Zalman!” cries Yossel. “What happened to you? It’s so long since I’ve seen you. Just look at yourself.” “But wait,” replies the stranger, “I’m—” “Never mind that,” says Yossel. “I...

On erev Shavuot 1993, a Volkswagen van pulled up outside our house in Ann Arbor. I was finishing my junior year in high school, and we were preparing for the holiday. An unfamiliar older couple exited van and came to the door. I honestly don't remember the interaction that followed, but the long and short of it is that this was my father's brother Arthur and his wife Kate. They had driven from...

Last Friday our family experienced a mini ingathering of the exiles: Our oldest came home for the summer, our middle one returned from nine months on a gap year program, our youngest didn't have a classmate's b-mitzvah to attend. And so, for the first time since last summer, our whole crew was around the table for Shabbat dinner. However briefly (I left on a business trip Sunday morning), we got...

Last Thursday and Friday were, hands down, the best days in Chicago social media history. Why? Because, in the words of the ginormous headline in the Sun-Times Friday morning, the papal conclave had elected "Da Pope." Robert Prevost, born on Chicago's south side, became, overnight, Pope Leo XIV--and Chicago, where I live, was here for it. The memes were flying: The Wiener Circle, one of...