One of my favorite parts of Lamb, affectionately known as "that Jesus book", is when Biff (Jesus's best friend) decides that he wants to be a professional mourner. "How hard can it be," he wonders. "Tear at your hair, sing a dirge or two, take the rest of the week off." And I have to tell you, his funeral songs are some of the best I've ever ( Read more... )

I have to love how my rabbi talks about Judaism. "Well," he tells us, teenagers who of course have totally made up our minds about religion and would never be influenced by our teachers and leaders in any way, "you don't actually have to believe in God to be a Jew. And you don't need to follow the Torah either. Really, the Bible is just a ( Read more... )

It's fall, and religion's in the air ( Read more... )

Tonight and tomorrow are the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. It’s one of the most major holidays in Jewish tradition because it’s the day you try to sincerely repent for all your sins. You try to get forgiveness from those you’ve wronged, and finally from G-d. You pray and you fast and you hate the holiday so much that you start writing about ( Read more... )

I've got it. My new years resolution, I mean. I've figured it out. I've decided that this year, I'm going to stop complaining so much ( Read more... )

I'm ever so proud of myself for being able (unlike a few years ago) to take news articles with a grain of salt, or a pound of salt if need be. Unfortunately, I think it's the latter in the case of a magazine called "Reform Judaism" that was sitting on our coffee table this morning. I was reading an article on an increased amount of anti-Semitism ( Read more... )

People, I think, need to remember that Israel is not the big bad bully picking on the poor innocent Arabs. Yes, they have large and effective armed forces. This is necessity: Israel is a tiny country, about the size of our fair state of New Jersey, surrounded by large, hostile (or guardedly nuetral, to be fair) Arab nations, many of whom refuse ( Read more... )

Came back. Stuff happened. But I'm too lazy to detail it all here ( Read more... )

So I've collapsed under pressure. Thousands of well-wishing adults have been asking, "So what college are you going to?" mere seconds after I meet them. It seems to be some compulsion, with those adults. They all seem to have a burning desire to know where I'm going off to, and to influence that choice. ("You know, I went to Tufts. It's a great ( Read more... )