Dear Friends, I’ve spent this week in Bratislava, taking a bit of a break to do some writing and prepare for the High Holy Days. Bratislava is an amazing city, with a lot of history, and a renewed life. Today, the tech sector and foreign investment have turned once quiet and sleepy Bratislava into a […]
Dear Friends, One of the benefits of getting older is suddenly realizing that the rest of the world is using words which make absolutely no sense. ‘Woke’, ‘normie’, ‘mansplain’ – thankfully English has never suffered from a lack of creativity in coining new and wonderful words. I even learned a new one today: ‘balconing.’ Starting […]
*content warning: discussion of mental illness/suicide* Dear Friends, This past week I saw, on Facebook and elsewhere, a sudden influx of posts about Robin Williams, who died by suicide four years ago. I think for many people in my own life, particularly my peers in age-terms, Williams’ death was a tremendous eye-opener about the danger […]
Dear Friends, This week I want to open with a quote from R’ Bradley Shavit-Artson, the dean of the Ziegler School for Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles: “We have what to share with the world: our values, our stories, our traditions and guidelines, our love of a place, our ways of sanctifying time and family, […]
Dear Friends, When I was a kid, one of my favourite activities was the inevitable ‘scavenger hunt’– the more baroque and complex the clues– the better. The absurd combination of puzzles and geography was extremely satisfying. As I got older, the ubiquity of global positioning system (GPS) technology meant that there were new avenues of […]