I just reread a journal from around Pesach time, and I found something I had written after going to Kever Shmuel HaNavi. As I sat at the kever reading Parshas Chana, two images stood out to me, something like bookends to the story of Chana and her son. The first was the image of Chana at the beginning of the …
Tonight I did a free writing class for Chanukah from Yocheved Rottenberg of Write Your Way Home. (I’m sure if you contact her through the site, she’d send it to you). The following is what I wrote for one of the exercises, a Captured Moment from a Chanukah gone by. I walk across the expansive dining room to the …
Rav Dessler writes in Michtav Me’Eliyahu that it’s natural for someone to start a Y”T on a high and then slowly lose enthusiasm over the course of the chag. (Think about the difference in the atmosphere on the first night as opposed to the last afternoon of a Y”T, if you can relate). Not so for a Jew who is …
Continuing on in Parshas Lech Lecha, the past week when we were learning, I got excited over a few things we read in Rashi. I just felt that they were things I had learned more than once before but never understood deeply and related to my own life. Hashem promises Avraham Avinu that he will have children, “[a]nd He took …
This summer, my Partner in Torah and I started learning Chumash with Rashi. We began with Bereishis and are now in middle of Lech Lecha. This is virtually my first time re-approaching Chumash-Rashi since seminary, with the exception of a few aliyos here and there, and it’s going very differently than anticipated. Before we started learning, I had assumed that this …
I took a workshop with Sara Yoheved Rigler and learned about the importance of charting progress when you’re working on changing a behavior. She taught a two-fold method: 1) chart what you’re doing in black and white, not just in your head 2) reward the body with something the body likes. She said, we come down here as a …
Before Succos, I bought Emunah with Love and Chicken Soup, the biography of Rebbetzin Henny Machlis a”h, by Sara Yoheved Rigler. I had flipped through it a few times at other people’s houses and was always inspired by whatever I read, so this 500+ page book was my reading material for Y”T. And full disclosure: I haven’t read the whole thing …
Sometimes if it feels as if you’re davening and davening and nothing’s changing. There was a period this year when I was so sure my yeshua had to be just around the corner, I had been davening with a lot of intensity, and feeling like maybe there was a breakthrough. But nothing changed, as far as I could see from …
I heard the following from Mrs. Dina Schoonmaker. How do we achieve menuchas hanefesh? We learn it from menuchas Shabbos. No matter what’s going on, we stop doing our work when Shabbos comes and it’s “as if it has already been done” (Rashi). Well, what if it’s not? Say you’re in Israel and you have a business partner in America. …
I feel like Purim has just crept up on me. I guess that’s a good thing, because it means spring will be here before we know it. A thought for Purim, something I heard a little while ago from Mrs. Dina Schoonmaker. The megillah is relatively short, and even as we listen, we know there’s nothing to be afraid …
