Rosellen’s parents moved from Manhattan to West Palm Beach, Florida when the New York air became difficult for my mother-in-law to breathe. Their new home, Century Village, was a community of perhaps ten thousand retirees, all living in similar one- or two-bedroom apartments. It is telling that in preparing their wills, they asked each of their three children if they would like to inherit the...
I’ve read a lot of proposals in my time for new schools, new programs, new institutions. They contain many statements about the nature of the new entity that have to be seen as aspirational. In the fortunate instances when these proposals actually come to life, we can sometimes trace the way these aspirations mutate because the circumstances into which they are born are in constant flux. I want...
If the name Timothy Snyder is familiar to you, it’s likely because of the pamphlet-size book by this Yale historian called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. When it was published in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump took office, it sounded a loud alarm for those of us who feared that his time as...
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...