Cultural messages beamed into us from entertainment, media, and politics often enter our hearts. When we become ‘infected’ by absorbing the message, it becomes a spiritual schematic inside of us that then influences our beliefs and soon also our thinking. Eventually, we become capable of infecting others and so the virus spreads. For a physical...
“I had to let three of my people go last week,” she told me, “and you have no idea how miserable I have been. I wish I could get toughened up so I could do whatever is necessary without feeling such pain!” “No, you don’t,” I replied. “In these frightening financial conditions, you may have...
All sorts of schools ranging from elementary to graduate level are abolishing grades or objective entrance exams such as the SATs. It is not a coincidence that this is happening as less learning and less transmission of verifiable skills take place. Numbers have a funny way of revealing reality. Just as most speedy drivers would...
Go ahead: List the ten most important relationships in your life. Some will be family and others will be business and work relationships. There will probably be a few friends on the list too. Family relationships are fairly well-defined. The obligations and expectations of those relationships are, for the most part, known quantities. Business relationships...
Countless people will soon be observing a Passover Seder. There are many important aspects to running an effective Seder, but perhaps the most important and the least known is that the Seder, meaning order, is an arrangement of fifteen indispensable steps from start to finish. In order to explain this to you, I must first explain the...
My wife is taking inordinate pleasure upon reading that after having three children, the famous home tidy-up-er, Marie Kondo is acknowledging that tidying up is not the most important thing in life. Nonetheless, no matter what the living room or children’s bedrooms look like, unless you have been a Kondo acolyte, I know a truth...
A Purim Lesson The past few decades have seen a huge push to promote the presence of women in the workplace. California even mandated that all companies in the state must have women sitting on their boards of directors. It is a fact of modern life that men and women interact all the time in...
Are you afraid? Maybe you fear inflation eating away at your savings. Perhaps you see evil ideologies racing to entrap the families you love and the children you are raising. Rising rates of random violence in the streets might have you nervous about going out. Maybe, just maybe, there is a silver lining. Ancient Jewish...
While discussing the verses which warn judges (and all of us) against taking a bribe (Exodus 23:8 and Deuteronomy 16:19), ancient Jewish wisdom relates a tale of two men who were standing under a hot sun. One invites the other to share the shielding cover of his umbrella. As they begin to chat, the umbrella’s...
Professor Raymond Dart was a famous anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. On the first day of the school year, in the manner of teachers everywhere, he opened his Introduction to Anthropology course with a lecture. However, a bit into his talk, he braced his hands on the lectern and, tucking...
