At a Thanksgiving gathering my uncle once asked my favorite day of the week. Without thinking, fifth-grade me excitedly blurted out “Thursday!” He was surely dazed by my response, expecting the average elementary school student, or any student for that matter, to say Friday for its end-of-the-week esteem and acclaim for welcoming the weekend. After processing his confusion, he continued “And why is that?” To support my answer, I blithely retorted, “Well, because it’s the day before Shabbat.” I went on to explain to him all of the excitement that was a Friday Shabbat...
Did you know that there are roughly one million suicide attempts a year in the United States, with one suicide every 13 minutes? Or that in Wisconsin, one person dies by suicide every 11 hours? Or, that over four times as many people in our state die annually by suicide than by homicide? Chances […]
One particularly cold December day in 2014 as I tried to warm up my hands after chanting outside a local McDonald’s restaurant with workers striking for $15 an hour and the right to join a union, I wondered what effect this bone-chilling activity would really have. How would protesting with a few dozen people […]
On July 24, we began the time in our Jewish calendar known as the Three Weeks. This is a sad time when we remember the many disasters that befell the Jewish people in the past. Last year, the controversial ruling by the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage happened during the Three Weeks. Some of […]
After a beautiful communal Tisha B’Av celebration, I opened Facebook to see that Milwaukee was burning. An hour earlier we were lamenting the burning of Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago, not knowing that our own city was burning right then! And not just with physical fire. A rage burning deep inside from a desire […]
Anti-Semitism existed in Milwaukee in the 1950s and my generation lived through it, some of us experienced more and some experienced less, but it was always there
The Talmud reminds us that “my fathers and mothers planted for me before I was born,” says Betsy Green, in her speech on the importance of creating a Jewish legacy. In this photo, a tree twists upward in Israel.
With my wife’s periodic recommendation, when I finally agreed to go to weekly Torah study at Congregation Shalom some years back, I was surprised to find how sophisticated it was psychologically. That same finding holds true for our annual Jewish holidays. Forgiveness The High Holy Days begin with Rosh Hashanah, when a Jew is […]
“Susan” is a 45-year-old woman who leaves her house bright and early every day for her job at an advertising agency. Her mom, age 75, is in cancer treatment and unable to drive. Because Susan had to take time off from work yesterday to take her mom to the doctor, she’s going in extra […]
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