Here's how to dish out the real soul food.
I'd spent the better part of a year traveling to L.A., writing my novel about a teenage Orthodox girl who got her own television show. It was half wish fulfillment, half daring myself to achieve that nightmare.
When you use the power of self-involvement to focus on inner change, you can change the world. Literally.
The changes happening in American politics are just the beginning of a transformation that's happening in every part of our society... including the Jewish world. It's time we prepare ourselves.
The world has a big problem with sexuality, and it is manifesting as child sexual abuse, even in religious communities.
I had slammed a door on the purest part of my soul. And for what? Like a baby crying out for its mother, I had denied its outstretched arms, turned the key, and plugged my ears to the cries.
Hitbodedut (hisboididus, if you live in Brooklyn) is the practice of talking to G-d in your own words, also known as "personal prayer". The word means literally "self seclusion," but if you are like me (you don't have time or patience to sit in a room and talk to G-d) you can do it on the street.
The Jewish world is quite simply being bored to death. But there is an antidote, it's called Purim.
Maybe we can bow our heads to the truth that Gd gave us a pill-shaped lifeboat for when this exiled life gets too heavy.
The group I imagined was splendid. But since when is something that seems wondrous actually wondrous and not, you know, a cult, or whatever?
