The Ansche Chesed blog is a place where you can find enriching material to read about God, Torah and the Jewish People.
The people closest to me have asked over the years how I maintain my optimism – my calm certainty that in the end, all will be ok – even during my hardest moments. The truth is, I’m not sure how this happened, but I’ve thought about it a lot. Is it just something I was… Read more »
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is, “Are there really Jews on Rikers Island?” This question says nothing about the asker, but everything about how we have positioned incarceration and the incarcerated as out of sight, out of mind. It’s a “bad” place for “bad” people. Or, as more than one of… Read more »
For me, and I suspect for many people, the most moving moment in the Jewish circumcision ritual, the Brit Milah (or more commonly in the Yiddish pronunciation, the Bris) is the moment when the rabbi or the mohel after the circumcision itself says the phrase ze ha-katon, gadol yihiyeh— “may this little one become big.”… Read more »
This summer I have experienced the circle of life. In July, my daughter Ariel and her husband welcomed a little girl, Yael Hodaya, into their family. She is healthy and much loved by her sisters, and all who meet her. In August, my mom, Harriet Fishman, passed away. She was 87 and not in great… Read more »
When I’m hosting an event or leading a service, it’s often hard to drop my guard for long-enough to enjoy the experience myself. As the convener, it’s my job to make sure that everyone else is engaged, and my needs are superfluous. So as a rabbi during the “high season” of Elul and Tishrei, my… Read more »
