11 December 2020 | Dvar Torah
“You’ve got a friend in me You’ve got a friend in me You got troubles, I’ve got ’em too There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you We stick together and see it through ‘Cause you’ve got a friend in me You’ve got a...
4 December 2020 | Dvar Torah
The scene is too easy to picture for any parent. The boys are fighting in the living room- again. Mom steps in, separates them and gives them the now famous “time out”, to think about what they have done. Then, after sufficient time has passed, mom tells the boys to...
27 November 2020 | Dvar Torah
There are moments in our lives we see clearly in our mind’s eye as though they just happened. One such moment was the time my husband and I, newly married, offered to take our friends’ children, all four of them, downtown for a movie. After the show, we gave each...
21 November 2020 | Dvar Torah
A quick Google search of the expression “Covid fatigue” yields over 392 million results. Incredible, considering that less than a year ago, none of us really knew what Covid even was. Fatigue, boredom or “ennui” are states of being that we are all too familiar with; a...
13 November 2020 | Dvar Torah
Our days are filled with a myriad of choices: some big, some small, some seemingly inconsequential and some potentially life changing. In fact, it is estimated that the average adult makes roughly 35 000 decisions each and every day (UNC Science, 2018). But it is in...
12 November 2020 | Dvar Torah
One of the hardest things of being in a Red Zone is the isolation. Our Yom Tov and Shabbat tables where once we hosted family and friends with boisterous conversation and song, are now quieter and more sedate. Many of the more vulnerable in our community, the elderly,...
12 November 2020 | Dvar Torah
Over the past eight months, we have all been zooming, be it for work or school or even simchas, of late. Inadvertently, this has given everyone a glimpse into our homes. There is one thing that struck me sitting in on meetings with many different communities in...
23 October 2020 | Dvar Torah
The rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon that has inspired art, literature and song and has become a universal symbol of hope and unity. From a young age, children learn to draw the rainbow with the proper ROYGBIV colors. They learn, in science class, that the...
16 October 2020 | Dvar Torah
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who read the instructions before assembling their latest purchase and those who toss the instructions aside because they “don’t need anyone to tell them how to do it”. It has been my experience (names withheld to...
9 October 2020 | Dvar Torah
As any self-respecting Ashkenazi Jew, I have a bank of key Yiddish words and expressions that I pull out on occasions where no other word will do. One such word, learned from my mother-in-law – who, incidentally, also does not speak Yiddish – is the word:...
