This Rosh Hashanah brings to a close the year in which my father died. For this reason, and many others, I am grateful that the Jewish New Year is marked not by parties, but by days and weeks preceding and following of self-evaluation, quiet contemplation and prayers for blessings in the coming year.
\”Back in my grandfather\’s time, the diamond business was almost entirely Jewish,\” Aaron Furlong said, as he graded small stones. \”Mazel was your word, and if you went against it, you were ostracized from the business.\”
From films on the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia and civil war in Sudan to mental illness and homelessness in America, the series will allow viewers to take a second look from a Jewish perspective.
Al Carmines\’ lush score provides the backdrop for \”The Song of Songs,\” now at the Fountain, in which five dancers pair off while singers chant biblical text. Its creators hope to convey the essence of the ancient poetry, which describes God\’s love for the Israelites as the passion between a man and a woman.
Every day before Dina Goldstein (not her real name) leaves the house to take her two young children to day care and herself to work, she grabs two bagels and two boxes of orange juice. After buckling the kids into the car, she gives them the bagels and the juice, and they eat breakfast in the car on the way to school.
\”I just don\’t have time to get them ready, myself ready and feed everyone before I leave the house,\” said Goldstein, who works as a religious day school teacher.
Like Goldstein, many women find maintaining a family and a job overwhelming.
Without realizing his ideas would culminate in a book, Ed Feinstein began writing down his thoughts more than six years ago. He collected the most common questions children asked him — most having to do with why bad things happen to good people.
The only thing Jerusalem\’s Jewish and Arab shopping malls had in common when news broke last Friday of the Wye II deal was that no one was dancing in the streets. There was relief that something at last was about to move on the Israeli-Palestinian front, but it takes more than Madeleine Albright playing what she fetchingly called an American \”handmaiden\” to disperse the suspicions of half a century.
There is a difference between love of tradition and an obsessive habit of looking backward.
We live in what writer Michael Ventura describes as \”the age of interruption.\” There is a mismatch between \”inner time\” — our personal sense of the rhythms of time — and \”outer time\” — the regimented time society imposes upon us.
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