Tikkun Olam

It's funny. Just before the real New Year starts - the real New Year for me being Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year - we're not in the habit of going around joking with our friends, saying: 'ok, I'll talk to you next year.' We say this just to be 'cute,' as if it's going to be a whole year before we speak to them again, when we know we're going to in two days, or a week.  Just the number of the year will have changed. It's an excuse to party, to go out with friends or family and do something, anything--often something crazy, that we'll regret in the morning, as they say. On New Year's when I was a child, I'd go upstairs to my "best friend's" apartment, directly above ours (my best friend was an Episcopalian girl named Laura. We used to communicate by banging out various codes on the heater pipe in the bathroom). There we'd eat snacks and drink sodas, play games, and wait until the stroke of midnight, when we...

This is my first post in the month of December. I haven't had the energy to sit down, research stories which interest me, and write. I've also not been in the best of moods. Too much stress, personal, and global. Besides, everybody else wrote about the incredible snowstorm-of-the-century and thunderstorms in Israel, so there is nothing I could write that's new; except for how my daughter in Tel Aviv wheeled herself to the mirpa'ah over a kilometer away from her apartment in freezing pouring rain in a hailstorm, over many inaccessible sidewalks and broken 'wheelchair ramps,' covered almost head to toe (thank G-d-because without, she could not have done it) in the excellent raingear she bought at REI here in Denver when she last visited-how smart! Why was she wheeling herself in her wheelchair in dangerous weather? Because she couldn't afford a taxi. In other matters, our 'partners for peace' children play 'Behead the Enemy' games (hat tip...