Blog

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 across the street from the Hillel building. I have always been an early riser. Put those two facts together and it was easy for me to be a mainstay at morning minyan. I went dutifully every day for my first three years. But in the fall of my senior year, in a moment I can still feel in my kishkes, I...

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...

Conventional wisdom tells us you shouldn't make too many big life changes at once. Two weeks after I finished rabbinical school in the summer of 2005, Natalie and I welcomed our second child. And two weeks later we moved halfway across the country so I could start a new job. We bought our first home, we bought a new car. All to say that we made a lot of big life changes all at once. Sometimes,...

This week I remembered an event from many years ago when I was a young Hillel rabbi. I was in a session at the annual Hillel staff conference led by Rabbi Jim Diamond z"l, the sagely longtime Hillel director at Princeton. Jim was sharing some of his war stories, one of which went like this: One year, the president of the student body turned out to be Jewish. Jim didn't know this student, but he...

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...

This week I'm thinking about three walks. I'll talk about them in reverse chronological order. The First WalkOn Tuesday I was walking the dog and listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdal, which he had given two days earlier. Gil prefaced it by saying that it would be a challenging talk, and it was clear he was going to address questions of citizenship and activism in the wake of the killing of Alex...

I don't know about you, but for me it's been a stressful time of late. Not at work so much, but in life. There have been the normal stresses that come with being the "sandwich generation"—parenting kids, caring for aging parents. It's been oppressively cold in Chicago, which means spending less time outside, and thus feeling more cooped up. And then there's witnessing what's happening in my...

There's a classic Yogi Berra-style Jewish joke that goes something like this: A woman walks into her local butcher shop and sees a sign for chicken at $1.50 a pound. (Note: You can tell just how old this joke is by the prices mentioned here.) She looks at the butcher indignantly and says, "A dollar-fifty? The butcher across the street is selling chicken for only 30 cents a pound!" The butcher...

In the last few months, my wife Natalie has launched a new business called The Story Archivist. (This is not meant as a promotional email, I promise--you get plenty of those from me for IJS courses already!) Natalie is a journalist by training, a published author by experience (five young adult novels), and an educator by career. Her work today brings that all together by helping families...

Earlier this week we held a beautiful celebration of IJS's first 25 years. Below is a recording of Rabbi Josh Feigelson's speech from the event.