I was 7 years old when I decided I wanted to be Jewish. That’s right. This rabbi began her life as a Catholic. The epiphany happened...

Sometimes you receive revelation at the foot of Mount Sinai and other times it comes to you in a stadium in Miami. At least that was how it felt to me a couple of weeks ago when I was with 61,000 other devoted Swifties singing along to our favorite songs, feeling an overwhelming sense of camaraderie and exhilaration during Taylor Swift’s epic Eras tour performance. That night, Taylor didn’t just bring her impressive catalog of music to life. She brought me back to life too. T

As a child, I was never afraid of the dark. The Things-That-Go-Bump-In-The-Night didn’t scare me. I was too in love with the magic and the mystery of the darkness. Something utterly impossible in the light of day - like seeing the stars sparkle or experiencing a fantastical dream - was miraculously possible under the cover of darkness.  But now, as an adult, I’ve come to fear the darkness. Not a literal lack-of-light darkness. But the inescapable darkness I feel unrelentingly

You can’t help but think about love on a day like today. And I’m not just referring to the overabundance of red hearts and Valentine’s Day candies in the supermarkets. Every Friday as we draw closer to Shabbat, we are given an opportunity to think about love. Romantic, passionate, giddy love. The kind of love that gives you butterflies. The kind of love that consumes your every waking moment. The kind of love that forces you to doodle in the margins of your notebook dreaming

About 700 years ago, the Kabbalists (Jewish mystics) instituted a practice of inviting ushpizin  (celestial guests) to join us in the...

We shouldn’t be here. We should have disappeared long ago like the Hittites and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and all the other...

In Smashing Pumpkins’ iconic song Zero, Billy Corgan sings, “I’m in love with my sadness.” When I first heard that lyric, all I could...

You could have easily mistaken the line winding to the end of the block for a Phish show rather than a panel discussion. But this wasn’t your ordinary panel discussion. We were there to hear experts reflect on the millennia-long relationship the Chosen People have had with the Righteous Bush. The Devil’s Lettuce. Weed. This tie-dye-clad group of people were attending the opening of the Am Yisrael High: Jews and Cannabis exhibit at the YIVO Institute and we were not disappoint

Even though the Jewish people are known as the “People of the Book,” sometimes our sacred stories can seem virtually inaccessible to us. We might read them in ritual settings such as Shabbat or holiday services. We might parody them in Purim-spiels and ask questions about them at our Passover seders. But connecting to these collective stories on a deeper, more personal level can be a challenge. As a rabbi, overcoming this challenge is the focus of my professional life. I ha