What would you say about proposing to a girl that is in a relationship with someone? Tafadzwa Dear Tafadzwa, What would we say? We’d say “Go for it!” Or we might smilingly allude to movies like The Wedding Planner, Made of Honor, and Sweet Home Alabama in all of which the bride ditched the groom...
In the constant struggle to build a successful life, it is all too easy to be pulled down by hardship, dark recollections, terrifying fears, and sad thoughts flitting through one’s mind. One remains confidently focused on the task by treating each day as its own opportunity to achieve success and happiness. This Thursday we celebrate...
We, as a society, have failed our children when they cannot safely go to school, concerts or about their daily lives. We have also failed them when we promote policies that increase their chances of growing up in unstable households and being illiterate, unpracticed in logical thinking, unnecessarily drugged, addicted to violent video games, in...
My wife and I love listening to your podcast. I have a question that no Rabbi has been able to answer to my satisfaction. (It could be that they have answered the question accurately but it never resonated with me.) It’s about Jacob and his children. Jacob is revered by us and his children were...
One of the most sensually satisfying things I’ve ever done was building a seventeen-foot sailing boat out of oak and spruce, plywood and glue, bronze screws and canvas. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the aromatic sawdust. After eight months of part-time, loving labor, launch day was almost an anticlimax. It floated,...
Imagine a woman in the mid 1800s crossing North America by wagon train. Now imagine her amazement if she was to travel a similar distance today by jet. Multiple blessings of gratitude would spill from her lips. I tried to keep this in mind recently when I was cramped into a small seat, grazing shoulders...
Dear Rabbi and Susan, I’m an orthodox Jewish homeschool mom of five and I love your show! Our homeschool curriculum focuses heavily on reading good literature and my kids have just reached the age where Edward Eager’s tales of magic, C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, as well as many others in the fantasy genre...
Here’s a question for politicians: Do you really want to fight poverty? I mean do you really, really want to end poverty, or do you just want to get re-elected? If you really mean it, I have some good news for you along with some bad news. The good news is that you no longer...
While preparing Gila Manolson’s book, Hands Off: This May Be Love for a second printing, I took the opportunity to look through it again. The following quote jumped out at me: “God created our bodies and souls to work together as one, with the soul defining one’s identity and the body expressing it. Our dress, …
A few times this past week while reading my daily paper I found myself checking whether I was actually following the Onion, a news satire organization. Each page had one or more articles that made me think, “This can’t be real.” Listening to the radio compounded the problem. There was the opinion piece explaining to...
