This week’s portion begins with Sarah’s passing at age 127. The Torah reports that her years were all equally righteous and that Sarah lived a perfect life. Now it became Avraham’s responsibility to bury her in an appropriate place. It…
Pet peeves. We all have them, and we can’t really explain why we have them. They are the little things that could go unnoticed by most people, but seem to be particularly outsized grievances to us. People who walk slowly…
There’s a dial somewhere, that spans the continuum from None to Enough. It describes how much people work out, and 99.9% of the populations gets dialed in somewhere in the middle. But there are select individuals who break the dial…
This week’s portion introduces us to our Forefather Avraham. Maimonides (Laws of Idol Worship 1:3) tells us of Avraham’s beginning and his greatness. ג) כיון שנגמל איתן זה התחיל לשוטט בדעתו והוא קטן והתחיל לחשוב ביום ובלילה והיה תמיה…
When I think of jellyfish, I think of the bright colorful gummy candies I used to eat as a kid. But when I think of swimming in the ocean, I think of the living jellyfish. As a matter of fact,…
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis may go down in history as the most frustrated and frustrating doctor in history, but he certainly will also be remembered as the doctor that saved millions of mothers and infants. Born to a prosperous Jewish family…
This is a repeat of an email from 12 years ago this week! I hope you enjoy the vintage Shabbos email from time to time! I introduced my wife to the pleasures of good sushi on our seventh date. In…
You can’t always get what you want. But sometimes you get exactly what you want. Today, I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted to write a Shabbos email, and was looking for inspiration, when my good friend Noach Klein…
There used to be four seasons a year; spring, summer, fall and winter. But these days we have created many more seasons for ourselves. There is constructions season from April to Nov, Pumpkin Spice Latte season, which had an early…
Dear Reader: I’m currently in Montana, learning and teaching with about 40 young Jewish men from all over the US and Canada. Therefore, I don’t have the time to write a Shabbos email from scratch, so I’ll share one from…