יום ראשון, ג׳ אלול תשפ״וSunday, August 16, 2026
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By Solly Hess
How long should an engagement be? On the one hand, the longer it lasts, the more time you have to prepare for the wedding. From choosing the right venue to the caterer and the band, the more time you have, the better organized and executed your simcha will be. But then again, why wait? You […]
Many Jewish thinkers describe the Jewish calendar not as a simple cycle where we return to the same starting point each year, but as an upward spiral.
May this Elul give us the opportunity with renewed meaning and passion and we prepare our minds and souls (and voices) for the inspiring days ahead.
During this season of teshuvah (and really, throughout the entire year) we can review what we’ve written and decide what needs to be corrected, what needs to be rewritten.
This is our opportunity to strive for bigger and better things in the upcoming year.
In Tanach and today, it often has the connotation of a solitary guard or a group of guards (like an honor guard – a mishmar kavod) who stand at their post and provide protection for those within.
With the greatest irony, G-d places His desires in our hands. He longs, so to speak, to give us pure blessing, comfort, and glory. Yet, we sin and rob Him of this.
By Chaim Saiman
There are watches in heaven matching the watch periods on earth, and the night itself is genuinely dangerous – exile, dread, and demons all make their appearance. That dread is held at bay through Torah study.
Hashem was awake the whole time, waiting for us to join Him.
Tuesday afternoon the beis medrash is a ghost town. Thursday at ten, suddenly everybody's a masmid. What changed? Nothing in Shas. The cholent got here. Let's be honest about the incentive structure. The cholent is the real maggid shiur. The kugel is the second seder. Somewhere in between, two guys are actually killing a Tosfos, […]
By Hillel Fuld
It is usually a term of endearment and some people use it as a nickname for a baby and even for an adult.
I had two bubbies. Although the truth is that we spelled it Bobby.
By Keshet Starr
No matter which kind of bubby you have, the name brings up a larger question – how do we connect across generations?
Bubby isn’t a title that comes with biology. It comes down to what someone does.
I promised myself that I would be the bubby I never was blessed with if I was zoche to have grandchildren.
By David Curwin
In the ceremony of Havdalah, the relevant sense is the last one. It marks the distinction between kodesh and chol, sacred and weekday: not physical separation, but making a distinction.
By Martin Bodek
I still dip the wine into my pockets and across my brow, so that I'll be rich and smart. One day. Hasn't worked yet.
I grew up going to sleepaway camps. Every Havdalah was with the whole camp. It was an experience, not just the fast 20 second deal which many people have. Singing Havdalah was one of my favorite parts of camp. After all, my name is Shira.
What about distinguishing between good and evil, between light and darkness? Can there be anything more obvious than that? Sadly, not at all.
We can only control what we can control. We can control our words and our actions. How people choose to interpret our words and our actions is beyond our control.
We can learn an important lesson from a shvitz. Just as the body seeks to return to its regulated state after being overheated, the soul seeks to return to its natural state of connection with Hashem.
Sometimes, I shvitz in worry, wondering when and how my kids will overcome their next challenge. Or how the war in Israel is going. Or the Jewish community here in America is faring.
By Anat Coleman
As temperatures climb, the city seems to shed layers. Shorts appear. Tank tops emerge. I remain covered. And start to shvitz.
In panic we feel sweat and call it threat. In our work we feel sweat and call it mine. Both times the body is simply telling the truth, and both times we paint over it with a meaning it never asked for.
I shvitz a lot – cooking meals on Friday for Shabbat, chasing after our three young children, rushing from one work event to another – and I'm grateful for all of it. The only thing I ask? Please just blast the A/C.
Today Hatzalah is a lifesaving organization that also pioneered in the ambucycle, a motorcycle outfitted with everything necessary to start emergency medical treatment.
In my experience, the same volunteering spirit and leadership that compels people to join Hatzalah often is why they are the ones who often daven or blow shofar on the Yamim Noraim.
I think about the path that Hatzalah created for so many men to contribute and to be recognized for their contributions, and how important that was for their relationship to the Jewish community.
I’m also drawn toward the somewhat humorous Hatzalah culture that has become a bit of a meme, most recently in the comedy of Dovie Neuberger.
The Gemara teaches that Jews are responsible for one another. Few institutions translate that principle into action as literally as Hatzalah.
Perhaps freedom is not political or economic. Maybe real liberty is internal – something no government, culture, or oppressor can ultimately control.
A free country does not stay free by accident. Liberty must be taught, cherished – and occasionally sung slightly off-key.
The freedom to worship is one of our most fundamental liberties and we should hold on to it for dear life.
Liberty demands an ever-watchful stewardship. It means having the courage to speak up when it is hard rather than carrying the day over in silence, which is easier.
By Nachum Segal
Rules and guidelines and values should be appreciated for all they add to our lives while, at the same time, a live and let live approach can exist at their side.
A chok is a Torah law that transcends human logic. It asks us to trust even when we do not fully understand.
Does Hashem have a reason for everything, and that is why we follow the Torah? Or does Hashem decide some things arbitrarily, but we follow them anyway because Hashem said so?
The less trust exists in a relationship, the more explanation becomes necessary. But the deeper the trust, the less understanding needs to come first.
We keep the Torah simply because G-d said so. If we can begin to scratch the surface of the thought-process behind it – great. But that is just additional flavoring, a cherry on top.
To err is human, but to purify and rectify requires the divine touch of the Torah and its guidance.
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A nudnik is someone who, when you ask how he's doing, tells you. Even when a nudnik agrees with you, it feels like an argument.
As a parent, I’m nudnicking the other way to my kids – did you say a bracha? Did you wash your hands? Did you bring a water bottle?
By Eli Lebowicz
Every writer needs an editor to do some gentle bothering, jabbing, pestering, bugging, prodding into making sure their assignment is in by a deadline. And if I didn’t have one, this never would’ve gotten finished in time. Thanks for being a nudnik.
By Sara Blau
The most effective thing I've found to counter an intrusive thought or a temptation is simply to notice it: There's that nudnik again – and keep walking.
On television, Jews are often portrayed in stereotypical ways – nudniks, nebbish sons, overbearing mothers, JAPY daughters, or going unorthodox. Up until a couple years ago, there was no concrete research to show just how pervasive this problem was.
By Avi Ganz
At the same time, the Jews of Cape Town or Teaneck, Boro Park or Antwerp are just as Jewish as the Jews of Bnei Brak, Tiberias, and Jerusalem. All of them have a divinely-gifted share in the Land of Israel.
Starting from the aliyah that marks the bar mitzvah, life is marked by aliyot. And as soon as we reach one height, we begin scaling the next.
Aliyah isn’t just the uplifting of a soul. In a quite different meaning of the same word, aliyah refers to the men, women and children who have uprooted themselves and have returned home to the land of Israel.
It is the vertical that reminds us about our creator and that gives us a sense of proportion between our powers and His.
Strip away the punditry and the word still means what it always meant: a Yid going up. The mountain hasn't moved. The Beis HaMikdash is still missing. The longing in the word is still older than any flag.
Intellectually I know that tznius is a middah, an outlook, a shield that guards our inner selves from becoming diluted, but invariably, one of the first images that pops into my mind when I hear the word tznius is that young teenage girl on her first day of school.
It is certainly harder in the heat of summer, but it makes it even more meaningful to make a kiddush Hashem when people know how dedicated you are to Judaism.
With such acceptance, one can attain wisdom, since one who acknowledges the limits of his or her knowledge is more receptive to new ideas.
Tznius is not about limitation; it is about elevation. It is about recognizing that dignity creates strength and that there is beauty in refinement and self-control.
By Ariela Davis
I try to enforce tznius dress code for my students at school and it upsets me if any of my own daughters try to push the limits but… to be honest, tznius does take center stage in our education system far more than halacha affords it in Shulchan Aruch.
Dying with a weapon in defense of Jewish life in Israel is not the same as dying helplessly in exile. Perhaps both belong to the same Jewish story, but they tell different chapters.
By Maayan Zik
Tzom unlocks teshuvah because fasting is an act of self-denial that asserts that you are more than your appetites, which is the very foundation of repentance.
Fasting is an expression of closeness – achieved or desired. And when we think about it, isn't that really the point of all of our own fasts as well?
By Jordana Baruchov Grreenfield
Jewish wisdom teaches that every person is made up of two parts: the physical self and the spiritual self, the body and the soul. They are meant to work together in harmony.
By Ruchi Koval
The first thing that pops into my head is “tzom kal,” because no one in America calls it a “tzom” – they call it a “fast day.”
So much of what we accept as true about ourselves, about others, about the world, is based on appearance. It looks like what we know, so we assume it is what we know.
By Keshet Starr
Beyond the lack of post-meal dietary limitations, what is the deeper meaning behind dairy, especially on Shavuot? After all, this holiday is not only about the deliciousness of the cheesecake and that Insta-worthy cheese-pull on your lasagna.
How can something that is produced in a pure meat entity bring forth its opposite?
The pro of being milchig is that you don’t have to wait any time at all to eat fleishig. You just wash your mouth out with water and then have fleishig. Some actually wait thirty minutes.
By Hillel Fuld
The word milchig refers to dairy food as it pertains to mixing meat and milk, a prohibition we learn from the Torah commandment not to cook a calf in its mother’s milk.
I recently outsourced my wisdom, only to discover that the person who I outsourced it to wasn’t on the mark.
By Adina Broder
While intelligence can be innate and knowledge can be acquired relatively quickly, wisdom tends to develop over time.
Perhaps not everyone will succeed in becoming a chacham, but certainly we can each be a talmid chacham – a student of wisdom.
After reading all those sad pages in all those sad books that sit on that very sad shelf, the most profound, deepest wisdom I’ve learned is: we just don’t know.
A wise person doesn’t have to know everything, but they should constantly be learning from everyone, not just from those who they feel are on their own level of learning.
By Chaim Saiman
My day job is teaching contract law, while I am learning Bava Batra at night. Often, the substance of these two periods of study can be remarkably similar. Yet the experience of engaging with them is fundamentally different. It's the difference between "learning" and "shteiging."
Not every bochur is built to be a talmid chacham in the classic sense, and that’s not a problem to be fixed. The pressure to fit one mold has real costs, making some question who they are and what they’re for.
By Rabbanit Dr. Adena Berkowitz
It is a Yiddish word derived from the German meaning to ascend or rise.
Ideally, it should be something we do in every aspect of our spiritual lives. Nevertheless, its most common use is to refer to the growth one experiences in intense Torah study.
There is a fundamental difference between the Torah we learn and the other disciplines that we study. In mathematics, my effort is immaterial. Either I know the equations or I do not.
Between British pubs, American delis, and supermarket branding departments, “nosh” has become one of those rare words that somehow means both comfort food and moral superiority at the same time – depending entirely on who’s selling it.
By Anat Coleman
To an outsider, it might seem excessive. After all, snacks can be bought almost anywhere. Isn’t part of being on vacation about letting go, being spontaneous, and indulging in what’s around you?
By Eli Lebowicz
Nosh as the noun also feels like it’s the comfort food you go to when coping with something tough that’s happened.
I know most people think of sweets when it comes to nosh, but I prefer a more salty, savory treat like pretzels or potato chips.
A nosh wasn’t a full meal. It was just a little something – standing in the kitchen, grabbing a bite of this and a taste of that. No rules, no plates, just enjoying food in the moment.
By Martin Bodek
Mayim – like “horse” and “sheep” – is both singular and plural, with a singular literal meaning, and a plural of figurative meanings.
By dvora
There is one additional component, without which none of earth’s bounty could thrive. It is simple yet complicated; it is a formless, shapeless, colorless liquid which has sustained human life, plant life, animal life. And that is water – mayim.
By Avi Ganz
Our default setting, as natural as water in a seabed, is "Knowledge of the L-rd." Without the distractions and challenges of our lives, we would be so powerfully aware of Hashem's presence.
Water adapts, taking the shape of whatever holds it, while also maintaining a quiet strength that allows it to carve through stone over time.
August 14, 2026 
