A friend recently recommended I read God is Here: Reimagining the Divine by Rabbi Toba Spitzer. It was a gift. Truly. Rabbi Spitzer provides beautiful, rich metaphors for the divine. Images that don’t chafe the way the God is a giant sky-man does. Things like God is water; God is fire; God is a whisper; God is a place; God is a cloud etc. I loved trying on the different metaphors with Rabbi Spitzer and testing how they feel with my experience of the divine. Even before thos

Somehow these reflections ended up unpublished for nearly a year. 😮 I uncovered the essay when looking for something else in my Google Drive, and decided I might as well share now. Enjoy! February 22, 2022 I can’t remember how I learned about this title, but I know I purchased it (from a brick and mortar bookstore no less) only a few days after it’s official publication date. Michael Schur’s television series, The Good Place , was one of my favorites of the past several year

I usually try to write my reflections on a book within a week of my finishing reading it. That way my recollection of the arguments and my reactions to it are fresh. Sadly, that did not happen for Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America , which I actually finished reading on the last day of 2021 (before I read How Do you Live? even). I think part of the procrastination has been that I don’t know how to do this work justice. Ambivalent Embrace is a fasc

I often begin my reflections on a given book with a brief explanation of how that title came to be on my TBR shelf. So far, I’ve only shared reflections here on non-fiction titles. With this offering, I’m going to break both conventions. Back in 2016, I was yearning for a story that portrayed a healthy mother-daughter relationship. With a four-year-old at home, the unending march of children’s stories–from Disney princesses to PJ Library picture books–painted a pretty clear p