Where has this week vanished? Is it lost forever? Will I ever recover anything from it? The joy of life, the unexpected victory, The realized hope, the task accomplished? WillI I ever be able to banish the memory of pain, The sting of defeat, the heaviness of boredom? On this day let me keep for a while what must drift away. On this day let me be free of the burdens that must return. On this day, Shabbat, abide. — Rabbi David Polish (1910-1995) Books have a magical way of opening to the pages we need most. Often, when I pick up our beautiful prayer book, Mishkan T'filah, I open to Kabbalat Shabbat and land on this perfect reading by Rabbi Polish. It so beautifully captures the chol — or the mundane nature — of the week in contrast to the power of Shabbat kodesh, the holiness of the Sabbath. The week is slowing [...]

Jewish tradition offers us many ways to understand God, and the Hebrew language has over one hundred names for the Divine. Each of us relates to and grapples with God in a different way and uses different names to refer to God, and one way of referring to God might be more meaningful to us at one moment of our life than another. In this week’s Torah portion, Pinchas, Moses—newly aware that his days will soon reach their end outside of the Promised Land—refers to God as Elohai haruchot l’chol basar, Source of the spirits of all flesh (Numbers 27:16). Moses calls out to the Infinite by this new name, reflecting on the challenging journey he has led his people through in the wilderness and remembering that God has been alongside them every step of the way. By using this specific name for God in this moment, Moses reminds himself that God is [...]

My dad and I share a common taste in books and movies and for many years we have shared in an informal book club of two, trading paperbacks and keeping up to date with each other’s watch lists. This shared taste is likely no accident; growing up, my parents kept our bookshelves filled with Jewish texts. Throughout my childhood I devoured books on Jewish history, on spirituality, and biographies of famous Jews. Now that I am a parent (and especially now that we are spending so much time at home!), the merits of a bookshelf stacked with Jewish texts seem boundless. Recently, my dad recommended a book called Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World. Initially, I laughed uncomfortably at the title—it sounded like an unwelcome stereotype and a stressful read! But as I explored the stories of these anxious Jewish geniuses, I realized that their anxiety was often their [...]