Tag: experience

This wasn’t supposed to happen, especially not to me. I could give you all the stats: my great-grandfather learned in Radin with the Chofetz Chaim, my grandfathers learned in Slobodka and Novardik, and my father has smicha from Ner Yisroel in Baltimore. Outside of the brief fantasy (which lasted a lot longer than I care to admit) that I would be the star player who takes the Chicago Bears to the Superbowl, I always saw myself in yeshiva. It is what I had always planned to do, and I never really contemplated anything else

A popular performer who brings smiles to the faces of the elderly at Atria Kew Gardens, a senior assisted living home, has been recognized with an award. Anthony Soriano, known to everyone as Tony, has been honored with the Exceptional Service Award by Atria Senior Living.

I have a girlfriend I'll call Esti who works for a kiruv organization. During the summer semester, this organization offered an experiential history program. They taught a subject for a week, and then the next week toured the places they discussed in order to experience history firsthand. If they studied the First Temple era, for example, they would then visit the City of David.

God's Favorite Prayers, by Tzvee Zahavy, makes for fascinating reading. It is an intelligent, sometimes amusing, and always highly readable essay addressed first and foremost to those who know "everything" - those so familiar with the prayers that they don't really need a siddur to follow the service.

In my previous three columns (1-7, 1-21 & 2-04-2011) I wrote about my experience with thyroid cancer - a disease that I actually had twice, almost nine years apart. I was very lucky that this is a very curable carcinoma, and even more fortunate that I never felt any real discomfort or pain from the two surgeries and radioactive iodine treatments I underwent. Even when I was very hypothyroid - a prerequisite for the radioactive iodine to have the maximum affect on any cancer cells that were not removed by the surgery - I still felt fine.

Dear Rebbetzin Jungreis, As a regular follower of your columns, I am aware you are writing about your recent journeys that took you throughout the world on a mission to bring Torah to our people. I truly appreciate the importance of your work and have personally met many people who have become Jewishly committed after hearing you speak or reading your book. Nevertheless, may I be so presumptuous as to ask you to interrupt your series and respond to my letter, which is critically urgent?

The "Collection of Imaginative Stories" in HaMalach HaGoel and Other Bedtime Stories is a bit on the high-minded side with a few clich?s tossed in the mix. Nevertheless, the lap-sized hardcover explains to its readers how to become mature, responsible individuals of integrity. The life lessons are for children aged eight and up.

Gourmet mouth-watering food, top notch cooking classes, a wine and cheese tasting, and exclusive tours of a kosher chocolate factory and Manhattan's premier farmers' market were on the menu and, in its first tour, Kulinary Adventures served up these and more.

Gourmet mouth-watering food, top notch cooking classes, a wine and cheese tasting, and exclusive tours of a kosher chocolate factory and Manhattan's premier farmers' market were on the menu and, in its first tour, Kulinary Adventures served up these and more.

In Italo Calvino's short story "The Adventure of a Photographer," part of his collection Difficult Loves (1985), the "non-photographer" and bachelor Antonino Paraggi, finds himself increasingly alienated from his married friends who go out with their families and cameras each Sunday and "come back as happy as hunters with bulging game bags," their photographic catch of the day.

Israel is a magical country, but to experience one of its greatest wonders you have to travel out to what the world calls the West Bank and the Bible calls Judea and Samaria.

The BIG Picture: 36 Sessions to Intellectual and Spiritual Clarity deserves to sell at least as many copies as the Tanach. It's a classroom for spiritual growth.

A standing-room-only crowd of mourners paid tearful tribute Monday night to Yoseph Robinson, the beloved liquor store employee gunned down last Thursday as he tried to protect his girlfriend from a masked gunman.

A standing-room-only crowd of mourners paid tearful tribute Monday night to Yoseph Robinson, the beloved liquor store employee gunned down last Thursday as he tried to protect his girlfriend from a masked gunman.

Grief is a universal experience. But mourning, which is the religious and cultural expression of that grief, reflects the specific community's values and world

As has often happened in the past, I am writing this article on an El Al plane en route to New York. At least once a year, we have a Hineni tour to Eretz Yisrael. They are always amazing and life transforming. Every day is unique and has its own flavor; every day is miraculous and spiritually elevating -this year's tour was no exception. My granddaughter, Shaindy Wolff Eisenberg, who is in charge of our Hineni activities in Israel, suggested we make this tour a "Navi event, that we trace the paths of our patriarchs and prophets.

At the height of his musical success and while indulging in all the material abundance Hollywood had to offer, Yoseph chanced upon a Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch edition of the Chumash. Yoseph's life was transformed. He decided to reject the emptiness and egotism of the Hollywood lifestyle and embrace Yiddishkeit. Yoseph converted to Judaism and now lives in Brooklyn as an Orthodox Jew.

As any psychologist can tell you - no two people who see an event come away with the very same experience. Criminologists and detectives who question people who may have witnessed a crime experience the fact that several different people will report various versions of the event.

"There is a thin line between love and hate," the saying goes. Two opposite emotions, yet one can so easily transmute into the other.

If you look at an ad or a commercial, more often than not the hype will be about the "new and improved" version of a product. The emphasis is on the fact that it's "newer" and thus better than the "earlier" version.

An easy-to-hold hardcover with colorful illustrations, We Can Do Mitzvos from Aleph to Tav explains basic mitzvot in rhyme and alphabetical order. Easy on the eyes and a pleasant text for introducing toddlers to the world of shmirat halacha, the book teaches the aleph bet with charm.

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Mordechai, a house painter in Jerusalem ("Mordechai's" name and profession have been changed to protect his identity), was self-employed for over 20 years. For the most part, business had been good. Lately, however, he was finding it difficult to make an adequate living.

A slim hardcover with illustrations that tell the story as well as the words around them, The Perfect Present poses an interesting premise. An elderly aunt surprises a young girl with an heirloom, but the child's candid "I have no use for this" response results in a painful quandary for both people.

Due to Israel's small size, almost every soldier in the IDF returns home on a weekly or biweekly basis, enjoying the comfort and company of family. Approximately 5,000 soldiers, however, do not enjoy this benefit. These soldiers - labeled "lone soldiers" by the army - either come from dysfunctional homes (20 percent) or are volunteers from abroad (80 percent). In a recently published book, Lone Soldiers: Israel's Defenders from Around the World, veteran Jerusalem Post reporter Herb Keinon profiles 14 of these lone soldiers, who come from such diverse countries as Morocco, Australia, and India. He recently spoke with The Jewish Press.

As far as Jewish lifecycle events go, there is no doubt that childbirth is the ultimate simcha that a woman and her family can ever experience. For some women, however, the days, weeks and months following childbirth can be a personally painful and daunting time, as they fall victim to unyielding hormonal upheavals that result in "the baby blues," postpartum depression and in some rare cases postpartum psychosis.

As we have been discussing, it is essential for parents to take an active role in teaching their children Torah ideas in regards to sexuality and modesty.

Well spouses have often discovered that their friends and relatives, despite their closeness to the situation, often don't realize the tremendous emotional impact living with chronic illness has on the family. With the best intentions, suggestions, ideas and criticism are offered, based on the non-experience of those with healthy families. Even when the good intentioned get a taste of the difficulties, it is sometimes not enough for them to then identify and understand what the family of the chronically ill must face on a constant basis.

I couldn't wait to board the speedy Acela train to Washington, DC two weeks ago to hear an old friend of mine, constitutional legal wiz Floyd Abrams, argue before the Supreme Court. I had watched him twice before and was riveted each time. This case, involving the McCain-Feingold Campaign finance reform act, promised to be a landmark in First Amendment law. To watch top-notch lawyers spar swords with some of the best legal minds in the country is quite an experience and I couldn't wait to feel that intellectual thrill once again.

In the past several articles we have discussed the importance of parents taking an active role in teaching their children Torah ideas about sexuality and modesty. This is because it is essential that the first images to that fill their developing minds on these concepts must be appropriate ones. There is so much invasive exposure they experience from secular culture, and much to be concerned about in regards to the existence of sexual predators in our midst. If children do not possess clear knowledge and an age-appropriate understanding of the parts of their body and how they can be used or misused it is hard for them to protect themselves.