Right now, the Jewish community is finishing up its annual marking of days, as each night we count the Omer, the 49 days between the second night of Passover and the beginning of Shavuot. The time between liberation and revelation is one of spiritual preparation to receive God's word, moving...

The Jewish blessing for thanksgiving, the shehechiyanu, thanks God for granting us life, sustaining us and bringing us to the particular moment in our lives that we are grateful for. In a rushed world, we slow down to savor the present, and to reflect on steps brought us to this...

"Either companionship or death!" --Babylonian Talmud Ta'anit 23a

This Talmudic cry points to the necessity of companionship for human life. Honi HaMa'agel, a Rip Van Winkle-like character, wakes from a long sleep to learn that his friends and family are long since gone. Life without companionship, he decides, is just...

What's in a slogan? Is it merely a carefully designed marketing hook or is it a statement of core values, distilled down to its essence?

This week, on Shabbat, the Jewish community begins its annual recitation of the book of Deuteronomy in synagogues. Reading parts of Deuteronomy can often...

This year, I keep getting questions about chocolate.

Passover seems to be the annual peak of Jewish chocolate consumption (perhaps because it makes an easy dessert when many of us find baking without flour difficult), and for the ethical, kosher-keeping consumer, a tension emerges. There...

I grew up in Toronto in the mid-late 1980s and early 1990s, part of a Jewish community that included a percentage of Holocaust survivors and their descendents. Our community was a generation "newer" than the American Jewish community, and it wasn't unusual to have grandparents or great-grandparents who were born...

Sometimes I feel like corporations think we can consume our way to a better world. If we only buy the right (green/local/organic/fair trade) products, we will make things better. Or we buy something and it makes a donation to a cause. What a bargain! I got to take something home...

What is our highest value? In Jewish tradition, two rabbis debate the question of what constitutes the Torah's most central commandment. Rabbi Akiva insists on "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) while Ben Azzai holds that the assertion in Genesis that every human being is created in God's image,...

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the UDHR), which was proclaimed 63 years ago this Saturday, Dec. 10, 1948. She used to offer a nightly prayer that ended by asking God to "Save us from ourselves and show us a...

It's not every day that I get kicked out of a supermarket, but it's also a bit unusual to see a group of rabbis singing in Hebrew in the tomatoes section of a Publix in Naples, Fla.

Fifteen rabbis and I had travelled to Immokalee, Fla., to meet with...

This week, former Vice President Dick Cheney has come to New York to hobnob with members of the financial elite at the Rodman and Renshaw Annual Global Investors Conference and chat with the hosts of "The View." As he promotes his new memoir, "In My Time," and relishes the role...

Stories change with every retelling -- sometimes the details and sometimes the meaning. The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will be here soon, and then the stories will begin again.

I was in New York on 9/11. From a bus entering the Lincoln Tunnel, I saw the...

In the weeks before the death of Osama bin Laden thrust the debate over the efficacy and morality of torture back into the headlines, a disturbing report was released by the American Red Cross. After speaking with hundreds of American teenagers, it became clear that the generation that...

What do a minister, a rabbi and a nun have in common? In the case of myself, Reverend David Schilling of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and Sister Estrella Castalone of Talitha Kum, it is the fierce desire to see an end to modern slavery....

Since the death of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday, the architects of the torture program have rushed to resurrect their claim that enhanced interrogation techniques protected our nation in the aftermath of 9/11. Disregarding the absence of clear facts and overeager to justify an illegal operation, Jonathan Yoo, Jose Rodriquez,...

I was checking my email late Sunday night when I noticed a headline on the New York Times website: "President Obama to address the nation." "They've caught Bin Laden," I said to my husband. "There is nothing else urgent enough for an instant press conference on a Sunday night." As...