Philosophy

We're currently in family therapy, all nine of us and two parents. Even with sessions being 90 minutes long, that gives each of us 8 minutes a week to talk about what is most important to us, assuming the therapist doesn't talk at all. (spoiler: she does) The best possible...

From the back cover: Are you worried that someone from the secular world will ask you a question about Judaism that you don’t have an answer for? Are you heading out to a campus to inspire others about Judaism with only a tenuous amount of knowledge of it yourself? Are you concerned...

Some questions I had about Judaism, I got answers that worked, to a point. There were explanations that fit within a larger framework. And as long as that framework was intact, the answers worked. "Why does the Torah tell us to do this or that?""Because God said so." Fair enough. I can struggle...

“There are no atheists in a foxhole,” Noah Weinberg used to love to say, swiftly eradicating all actual atheists who undoubtedly have existed in foxholes. That statement further disregards all the individuals who became atheists in foxholes, like the blaspheming Rabbi in Elie Wiesel’s Night. From the moment I...

Around two years ago, one of my siblings was struck in a hit and run accident. They spent a day in the hospital before any of us family members even found out about it. When we did, there were a few panicked hours as we tried to figure out...

It’s hard to be compassionate when you’re afraid. And charedim are afraid of everything. Of God, of change, of novelty. Growing up, a healthy dose of compassion would have gone a long way, but there was none to be found. Yiras Shomayim, fear of God, is what it was...

I was 11 or 12 years old when my school took us to the neighborhood holocaust museum (what, yours doesn’t have one?) The rabbis warned us that the museum curators might not have the same sensibilities that we enlightened religious people did, and therefore we might encounter some pictures of...

Overall Judaism doesn't concern itself as much with attitude. It's mostly about endless laws that you either did or didn't do. Usually the laws pertain to actions, sometimes to intention, like the obligation to concentrate fully during the first blessing of the Amida prayers. More rarely, it gets involved...

Everybody should —in their lifetime consider death, To wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. the contemplation of death, and the acceptance of death, is very highly generative of creative life. - Alan Watts In my hypnotherapy practice, I tend to attract a certain...

At this point, I have left both the religion and the nationalist views I was raised with. What follows is a short contemplation on  the similarities and differences between these two processes. My journey of leaving both was primarily an emotional one. The values and beliefs of Orthodox Judaism and...