Blog

I keep re-reading an article that I read in the Harvard Business Review last year.  The article  by Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan is entitled "Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure."

The topic is this: "We often take a militaristic,“tough” approach to resilience and grit. We imagine a Marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round, or a football player picking himself up off the turf...Read more...

I make a mean beignet.

I may not be able to swing a baseball bat or shoot a 3-pointer or run to the endzone but when it comes to making beignets I’ve got game.

It is a craft that I’ve been carefully curating for two decades and a skill that has been shared with precious few. It is how I became the most popular person in my hall at my undergraduate institution and it is how I wooed Rebecca. A few years ago I had the...Read more...

By now, we are in the trenches of our Matzah eating week. Personally, I am longing for Wonder Bread.

Wonder Bread reminds me of sleep away camp. Aside from slathering my bread with butter and 7 packets of sugar, I would also squash the bread into a big ball and eat it like an apple. Bread puffs up, its fluffy, there is air in it.

However, with Matzah we cannot do this. It’s plain and brittle. There’s no stuff added, no...Read more...

Today I was part of something amazing, the Atlanta Initiative Against Anti-semitism (AIAAS). A gathering of over 100 organizations, coming together to say NO to hatred. From leaders of AT&T and to Chick-fil-A, to school teachers, police officers, government officials, rabbis, cantors, reverends and beyond, we all sat together. We listened to one another, and spoke our minds. And ultimately we affirmed that injustice anywhere is injustice...Read more...

At a time when too much of the news involving the Jewish world is concerning and alarming, I wanted to use this column to share some positive, heartening, and good news regarding Israel! I begin with a reminder that we have a wonderful Israeli guest – Rabbi Meir Azari – delivering the sermon on Friday evening and leading Torah study on Shabbat morning. Rabbi Azari is the senior rabbi of Beit Daniel, our partner Reform congregation in Tel...Read more...

This week, I have been thinking about what I can I do to make things better for people across our country and our world who are suffering, who are hungry, who are scared. This week in particular, I was feeling an overwhelming sense of wanting to fix it all. However, I was also feeling discouraged, knowing that this is an impossible task. I was then reminded of a story, a story that you might even know.

A...Read more...