Yosef asked us to close our eyes, think about our desires, let them wash over us, fix on one and ride it like a surfer to wherever it takes you. The ultimate goal of the exercise was to arrive at a prayer directed toward the fulfillment of that desire. I was at a weekend retreat with members of my chavurah, my circle of Jewish friends who are the core of my Chicago community. Even...
Late one afternoon early this month, the Mission Hill School in Boston was put to death by the Boston School Committee. The execution was live streamed, and I watched every painful minute of it. The outcome was no surprise because at the BSC’s meeting a week earlier, the members heard a report from a law firm hired by...
This is the note we sent to our daughters at the end of our rollercoaster week. Dear Ones, It’s hard to believe that it’s only a week since the first symptoms appeared (for me. For Mommy a day or two later.) Since then, everything has happened in triple time – the testing, the antivirals, the sleeping and eating apart and then back together, the isolation and the liberation from isolation. It’s...
Last week I offered some hopeful examples that called into question the myth of failing public schools. Today I wanted to slice into that myth in a different way, one that I hope will make you as angry as it does me. We’ve been suckered once again by what appears to be a powerful movement to the right yet turns out to be something else entirely. The Great Parent Uprising against wokeness focusing...
If you flip back through my early blog entries, you’ll find one about my six-year tenure as the teaching principal of the Pierce School in Bennington, NH. Although I left forty years ago, I’ve kept up with what’s happening at the school and in the surrounding Conval school district through our subscription to the local newspaper, The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript and our summer visits to the...