Note: Last week I said I was not ready to deal with the situation in Israel/Palestine and Gaza and wrote instead about running. We were – and continue to be –overwhelmed with news from the region, and I’ve wrestled with whether I had anything to say that hasn’t been said already. I’ve chosen to add my own voice because silence can be misconstrued as complicity. For American Jews like me who have...
There’s a popular ice breaker that I’ve used with groups just getting to know each other. Tell us, I ask, something about yourself that most people don’t know and that might surprise us. My own ready response is this: For many years I was a regular runner. I once calculated that over the years I had run farther than the distance around the equator. With the passing years, from looking at me, that...
There were many things I liked about President Obama. However, my big disappointments with him came on my home court, education. First, there was the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. My more prescient friends were more troubled by the choice than I. I pleaded to give him a chance to prove himself. He seemed like a good guy. He played basketball with the kids in the ‘hood whom...
Although this piece starts in the garden, that’s not where it will remain for long. At the start of every growing season, we gird ourselves for another battle with the evil and tenacious weeds which threaten to engulf our vulnerable crops, so we jumped at the opportunity to attend a workshop a few weeks ago devoted to strategies for keeping the weeds at bay. The recommendation was to turn the...
On a recent morning we had a conference – Zoom, of course – with the lawyer who will be updating and revising our wills and powers of attorney. The originals were drawn up in 1997 and, as we discovered in the course of our conversation, there have been changes in the law as well as in our thinking about the contents of the will. It turns out that in the eyes of the state, dying is a complicated...