Dear Friends:“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the…

Dear Friends: I’m often intrigued by false cognates.  Hoodoos, also called tent rocks, are common geological features around Los Alamos, the result of erosion of soft rock underneath a harder rock.  This results in a tall, frequently tapered spire with…

Dear Friends: Our hybrid Friday evening service was interrupted recently in the middle of the silent, standing prayer, the Amidah, by a voice emanating from the computer speaker querying repeatedly, “Can anyone hear me?”  Although my solitude was momentarily broken,…

Dear Friends: Recently I scanned the headlines of the online news, and in my haste, I mistook what was written as bitcoin for the Hebrew word “bitachon,” Bitachon is generally translated as “trust.”  (Somehow, I think that putting one’s trust…

Dear Friends: The fall holidays provide us with an annual opportunity to take stock of where we’ve been and where we are heading.  A different cycle also came to a close for me with the completion of a study discipline…

Dear Friends: My childhood Jewish religious education outside the home followed what I think was the conventional Conservative synagogue approach of the baby boom era.  We learned Bible stories and the aleph-bet, meeting a few hours every Sunday, from ages 5-9. …

Dear Friends:   Beverly and I continued our transition from New York to New Mexico this past quarter, swapping out New York-style pizza for green chile, as we embarked on the arduous task of unpacking hundreds of boxes, many of…

Dear Friends: I begin this bittersweet missive with a paraphrase of a passage from the first major Rabbinic text, the Mishnah, in which Rabbi Nechunya ben HaKanah composed a prayer (M. Ber. 4).  This prayer expresses my own experience with…

Dear Friends: The Talmud (BT Shab. 30a) says that “there is no marriage contract and wedding in which contentiousness does not arise,” but I find all weddings to be joyous affairs nonetheless. Beverly and I spent a week and a…

This past quarter has certainly seen Beverly and me venturing back out into the world more than any time in the previous year, driven in large part by our achieving fully vaccinated status.  (If you’re eligible for the vaccine but…