Inspiration 1711 articles

Okay, I cheated. “Teiva” in this week’s Torah portion may not mean “box.” “Teivah,” which does mean box in Hebrew, is also the name for the vessel in which Noah, his...

Moving into a new apartment is never easy. Therefore, when, over twenty two years ago, we moved into our home just a few days after Sukkot, I was, to put it...

The Launching of Makom Balev Tzafona 700 faces of kids, bustling with excitement, chanting and singing, waving Israeli flags as well as flags representing the reason for this congregation—Makom Balev. The...

Today I kashered my kitchen. Well, actually – a lovely Tunisian friend named Riadh and his catering team did the work. I just designated things milk, meat and parve and called...

SHIVIM PANIM LATORAH, said our Sages. There are seventy faces to the Torah, seventy ways to explain and understand; seventy paths to plumb the depths of G-d’s Divine Wisdom. And no...

Something reminded me this morning of a teenager from my hometown, but I couldn’t recall her name. About forty years ago, she killed her mother by mistake. She was one of...

Sometime during my son’s first year, I wrote in my journal that the worst thing about being a mother was that there were no pay raises, no performance reviews. I had no...

It is several days before Sukkot in the town of Rechasim. Tobi and Aryeh Miller are packing for their weeklong stay in Yerushalayim, where they are going to spend yom tov...

During daily, Shabbat and Holiday morning synagogue services in Israel (and on the mornings of Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur in the Diaspora), the Kohanim (the direct patrilineal...

There were so many things that we just did not talk about in my family. I knew almost nothing about my mother’s family, and even less about my father’s. If I...