Last year this time I sat on the brink of something incredible. Sitting in shul at the beginning of a new year, I was facing marriage, college graduation and the start of a new job. Nothing in life is certain, but the upcoming year still held considerable promise, more so than any other in my…
After 25 hours of abstinence from food and water on Yom Kippur, your family and guests will treasure each dish on your table — even if it’s just peanut butter and jelly. So why go crazy in the kitchen? There are times when simple is best: save your efforts for Passover, and go with an…
When Eileen T. was just 16, she was going out with a boy who spent most of his time talking about another girl, Betty. “I didn’t know Betty, but I started to resent her,” Eileen recalled. The more he talked about Betty, the more Eileen — who’d prefer not to give her last name —…
Sometime around noon on Saturday, September 14, Jewish life around the world will experience something of a climactic moment — a peak instance of unity that will also be, paradoxically, a moment of unmatched division. Unity, because Yom Kippur is the one point on the calendar, research shows, when most of the world’s Jews come…
Thousands of Orthodox Jews are preparing to swing live chickens over their heads before Yom Kippur, symbolically transferring their sins to the chicken. The chicken is then slaughtered and donated to the poor for consumption. This practice is called ‘Kapparot,’ which literally means “atonement.” Using fish, money or chickens are acceptable methods of performing this…
Kotvenu b’sefer he-ḥayyim, “Inscribe us in the Book of Life,” Jews pray in the days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. “May you be written down and inscribed for a good year,” they say to each other. No concept or phrase is more associated with the High Holy Days than that of a divine “book”…
Each year when I sit in synagogue during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I’m struck by the complex stories we read about biblical women and by the wisdom these stories offer about ensuring the dignity of women and girls today. The past year was one of paradoxes. At a time when Sheryl Sandberg, Malala Yousafzai,…
Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, David Lau, called for better treatment of the chickens used in the pre-Yom Kippur kapparot ritual. Lau in a letter addressed to ritual organizers and participants wrote that causing the chickens to suffer before and during kapparot would be a “mitzvah through a transgression,” which he said “was not the intention…
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