Mia Mercado, in The New Yorker in 2018, said that the scariest part about being a human in the world today is unfortunately every part. And that was before COVID. She did offer some suggestions for dealing with the scariest things. For dealing with ghosts, render them defenseless by taking them to a Trader Joe’s where they will be distracted…
We are taught that there is powerful light that cannot be physically seen. We must all discover and shine that light around us.
My dad was born in 1922, my mom in 24, both first generation Americans. They met at Camp Kindervelt when they were 16 and 14. Dad fought in the war with the 101st mechanized cavalry which was the advanced troops, the scouts. So he was there when some of the camps were liberated, and saw most of his fellow soldiers…
You might say I came to premarital counseling backwards. I spent 19 years as a divorce lawyer, and worked with approximately a thousand litigants. Then in 1995 I became a divorce mediator, and worked with over a thousand couples. That’s a lot of trauma. In mediation, I worked with couples who had a failed marital relationship, yet wanted to have…
I read an article a while ago in which Lisa Kudrow told the story of her son’s bar mitzvah. Her son, 16, went to the mall to buy a game. He met some men who asked if he was Jewish. He told them half, from his mother.“That’s good,”they said and asked if he had had a bar mitzvah. He hadn’t.…
It is perhaps not strange how much I thought of my parents during the last months before I was ordained. My father died just before I entered the program, my mom while I was in it. I know my Mom was proud, and I think my Dad would have been too. I once came home from college and asked if…
It was quite an event. My grandfather was a great man. Abraham Jacob Viniar. Known as Yakov. He fled the czar, was educated for a while in Belgium, and ended up in NYC speaking Russian, Yiddish, Flemish, with a smattering of English. He went to Cooper Union, doing his work every night with a dictionary until he graduated. He served…
I was tending the flock of my father-in-law. I drove the flock into the wilderness, and I came to a beautiful mountain. Whoa, it looked like there was something in a blazing fire out of a bush. I looked, I gazed, and there was that bush all aflame, but the bush was not being consumed. I said to myself, “I…
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!