Days of our Lives

Engulfed in aches, submerged in inertia, I've forgotten who I was. I see myself as a huge lump on a couch. Incapable of much else, I begin to think...

She falls backwards, landing hard. She struggles to regain her composure. A soft sob escapes her mouth. She looks up at me. Waiting for me

I know that I am her mother and know far better than she what's good and what's bad for her. But whether or not her limited view of reality is a valid one, is irrelevant: to her, her pain is real

As I mouth the words, my leg moves back and forth, rocking my newborn's carriage. One forefinger is pointing in my daughter's siddur, while my other arm worms its way through my young son's snack bag. You call this praying?

I've noticed recently that my husband is taking a few minutes longer with his morning blessings. Have the words taken on a deeper significance to him as he recites, "Thank You, G-d, for not making me a woman"?

They were coming. Tens of thousands of them, all ages and nationalities, a spectacular ocean of humanity flowing through the gates of the Old City...

"Jay," my friend wrote in his e-mail, "I don’t think you should go to shul and ask G-d for forgiveness. This Yom Kippur you should stay home, and G-d should beg you to forgive Him for what He's done to you"

Suddenly, I felt a violent blow strike my head. An eighteen foot wooden beam, plunging from the scaffold atop the five story-structure, hit me and sailed into the street as if thrown by a catapult

She was so beautiful as she lay there on her back, perfectly still. I cradled her head in my arms as we washed her face. Her skin was smooth and her limbs remarkably flexible

Consistently, the process repeated itself, until I resigned myself to the fact that my huge southern-facing window would remain empty of growing things. Then my mother gave me the cactus...

It’s stronger than you, buddy. You have to know that. It’s stronger and when it can’t burst out of your chest or squeeze through the spaces of your rib cage or rip your heart into little pieces, it finds another route...

There was an undercurrent of raw emotion in the large room. Entranced, I watched the circle of dancers and the smiling onlookers who clapped along

It seems to me that in such times we glimpse what it means to do more than simply live, and to truly never die

This past Monday morning I awoke, like every day, except that on this morning I was uninspired...

I wanted to create something beautiful, something perfect, and now it was ruined. But I neglected to consider one important question: Whose party is this, anyway?

Occasionally, we open the unused drawers in the back of my youngest son's closet to look at these relics from a distant past...

I tried to maintain a stoic expression as I left my doctor's office. Only later that night, in the darkness of my children's bedroom, did I allow myself to consider the darkest, harshest possibilities

What does light give? The details. The color and texture. The fullness and the goodness. It balances the shadows and fills in the outlines, so that the remaining darkness only adds contrast, complexity, beauty and interest to my world

The other night after tucking him in at bedtime, my youngest child called to me from his darkened bedroom. He was frightened

During those terrible first days of the war, I felt in danger of losing everything. But did I have anything to lose? Is it enough merely to survive?