Tikkun Olam

My niece is getting married this March, and I am so happy for her--she has found someone whom everyone says is a great guy (including my daughter, Toodles, who now lives in New York who has met him and has gone out with the two of them several times).  We actually are planning on attending: I only have one sister and one niece, and I want to celebrate her big day with them. So (le-havdil) I came across this lovely wedding story on the news , and couldn't resist posting it.  What are gifts? Food? Cake? Flowers? What's important is, you and the love of your life have a story to tell to your children and grandchildren for years to come: (photo by Nicholas Augustus  /  The Canadian Press via AP) There are wedding disasters, and then there are wedding disasters. In the first (and more typical) category, a bride or groom might botch the wedding vows or flub a dance move. But in the DEFCON 1 category, the entire wedd...

There seems to be a serious problem in the U.S. and Israel with the Haredim (translated as"ultra-Orthodox" by some) being forced--by their own standards--to pay for extravagant weddings for their children which they can't afford. Some fathers of marriageable daughters have considered selling an organ in order to pay for their daughter's wedding! In addition, their children are also not encouraged to learn a trade and earn a living, but rather study Torah--exclusively--and they end up living in poverty. When their children are at marriageable age, the cycle repeats again. The fact is that not everyone is cut-out for full-time Torah learning. In Eastern Europe, most boys learned a trade, and continued learning Torah, if they were so inclined. Learning was and still is greatly respected; only the geniuses and those who exhibited great promise were supported by people in the community in order to learn. Not everyone is a Torah genius, an ilui . Most people are aver...

Help! I was inexorably drawn into the NaBl0PoMo whirlpool, and now I'm whirling around and having second thoughts. You see, there is something you don't know about me, something terrible-awful which I am about to reveal to my millions of readers (no problem there, eh?). That something is just this: I am afraid of commitments and responsibilities. Yes. It's true. I am reluctant to return RSVPs to weddings, dinners, or melaveh malkahs. Even though I teach privately twice a week, a couple of hours before my classes a great wave of fear goes through me, and I have to fight off the urge to... cancel all my classes! Sometimes, when a Monday or a Wednesday comes around (the evenings I teach), and class was already cancelled for another reason (such as last week's classes because of our Chanukah party), but I've forgotten for a moment, I panic--and as I begin to remember the cancellation, it feels as if a great weight has been lifted off me and I'm free --and the...

After a very (unusually) busy summer, with our traveling out of state to visit and care for our grandchildren, and then having one grandson visit here with his aunt (my middlest, Toodles) , and then for a few days all three of our daughters being here together--the " three sisters ' --first time in years --the importance of family relationships and missing them is starting to set in, again... Our youngest daughter, here for a 30-day leave from the army (which she had to divide among 3 states because that is where her family and friends are), left in the beginning of August, for several days in New York and then back to Israel. This had been her first trip back here in four years, because of the commitments of school and then the army. We had seen her previously one-and-a-half years ago at her oldest brother's wedding in March, 2008. Our middlest just graduated from college in Israel, and is back in the States for a year-no, not at 'home' (where is home, these da...