Blog

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 can ignore you—which, in my experience, is both true and important.) Yet, miracle of miracles, Toby still likes us to read to him before bed. And before the window on childhood closes completely (which I presume will likely happen when he comes home from camp this summer), this year we’ve been...

Peter Salovey, who is stepping down this month as president of my alma mater, Yale University, was my freshman psychology teacher thirty years ago. The course was popular. Hundreds of students took it. Salovey was always quick with a joke. Before the final, I remember him telling us the story of a huge lecture hall full of students writing their exams, much like the one we were about to take. As...

On my podcast this week, I shared a bit about my recent struggle to walk our dog, Phoebe, in the midst of all the cicadas that now line the sidewalks of our neighborhood. (Folks, the cicada invasion is real, and it's here, at least in Illinois.) While it's okay for her to eat a number of them, too many could cause her to have stomach issues. We've tried a muzzle (she hated it and got it off)....

The last couple of weeks have been one of those moments when I pinch myself and ask, "Really, I get paid to do this?!" Because over the last two weeks, I have spent a total of eight days on IJS retreats--first for our Sustainers Circle and, this week, for our staff, both of which are extraordinary groups of people. My days have been filled with reflection, thoughtful conversation, study, and a...

I want to tell you about my amazing Shabbat last week. It came on the third day of a five-day retreat we held for about 25 members of our IJS Sustainers Circle, a group composed of former board members, alumni of our Kivvun program, and major donors. The retreat was full of meditation sessions, rich and musical prayer tefilah (prayer), mindful movement, mindful eating, and a lot of love. But...

My sons never knew their maternal grandfather. I never knew him either. He died of a brain tumor while my wife Natalie was in college, which was before we met. By all accounts Peter was a wonderful person. He loved chess and theater and active life outdoors. He loved his daughters and, no doubt, would have doted on his grandchildren. He was beloved by his extended family. While all of that is...

In recent days I feel like I've been living in a world suffused with the word camp. The encampments on college campuses, which are themselves reflective of ideological and political camps, have occupied our collective attention. As the parent of one student in college and another about to graduate high school, I have been following events with concern. As a scholar of the history of Jews and...

"All revolutionaries are patricides, one way or another." That's a line from Yuri Slezkine's classic of modern Jewish history, The Jewish Century. The book was published in 2006. A few years later, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, that line became a powerful lens as I reflected on the intergenerational conflict in American Jewish life in the late 1960s and early 70s. My thesis was...

One of my favorite parts of Shabbat is reading the New Yorker. It's the only time during the week I can sit for an hour or two and just read, uninterrupted by demands of work or family. And as I told my eldest son recently, while college certainly helped with my own writing, it was in reading the New Yorker that I really learned how to write. So I find those Shabbat mornings when I'm sitting at...

Nearly twenty years ago my family and I moved to Evanston, Illinois. I had just been ordained a month earlier, our son Micah had just been born two weeks prior, and we moved into an empty condo apartment two blocks from the Northwestern University Hillel, where I had taken a job as the campus rabbi. Natalie and I had rented apartments in New York up until then, and this was the first place we...