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It has always been easy for me to know how old the United States is. I was a “Bicentennial Baby,” born in 1976. Add 200 to my age, and you get the age of the country. With God’s help, I’ll turn 50 in May, and my country, in turn, will be 250 in July. I don’t know about you, but to me it doesn’t feel like a very happy birthday year for the nation. Two and a half centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson and his comrades, however imperfectly, planted into the Western world’s collective political consciousness the ideas of human equality and government by the consent of the governed. (As David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate in their wonderful The Dawn of Everything, Jefferson and his European...

Many years ago when I was a young rabbi working at Northwestern University Hillel, I went to meet Patti Ray at her home. Patti was the longtime director of Hillel at Loyola University, one of our neighboring campuses in the Chicago area. After this long time, I don’t really remember why I went to her house, but that visit has had a lasting impact—because the day that I came, Patti was having her...

On Monday I had the rare opportunity to attend two funerals of women who died well into their 90s. They happened to know each other, they were both matriarchs of families with whom I've enjoyed long friendships, and they even shared the same first name (though spelled differently: Rheta Shapiro and Rita Mendelsohn). It's not every day such a thing occurs. I have always found funerals in Elul to...

One of the most delightful parts of being a parent has been studying parts of the Mishnah with each of my children. With my older kids, who are now both in college, it has been a little while. But my youngest is still at home, and our synagogue recently began a new collective project to study two mishnayot (individual teachings) per day, with the goal of completing the entire Mishnah in five...

Ever since we moved into our home 12 years ago, we have faced a challenge whenever there's a heavy rain: our backyard turns into a small pond. Thankfully the water has not posed an issue for our basement (though the presence of three sump pumps in the house tells me that it probably did for the previous owners). Mostly it has just been a wet inconvenience. Depending on the amount of rainfall, it...

I was at a wedding the other night when an elderly woman collapsed unconscious on the dance floor. It happened last Sunday. The wedding was beautiful. My wife and all of our kids and I were there together. We sang and danced and celebrated at this wonderful simcha of a family who have been our collective friends for many years. As my father, may he rest in peace, said after our own wedding: "To...

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...