The Myth of the Plateau

Originally published Dec 26, 2005 What do you do when you start running out of mitzvot to take on? Do you just become more machmir on everything you’re already doing? Is it wrong to stop in a comfort zone and just stay there? What happens when you lose that good feeling you get every time [...]

A College Education?

A blast from the past. Originally posted on June 13, 2006. I’ve seen many comments in response to “Sam Smith’s” “Financial Realities in the Frum World” that talk about the undesirability of sending one’s kids to public schools. Specifically, part of Alter Klein’s comment #169 stood out to me: “If we send our kids to [...]

On Being Yourself

A year ago, I was at the wedding of two of my friends. At the Shabbas Kallah the bride went around and said something nice about everyone in the room. Since it was a year ago, I can’t remember her exact words, but she said something like this: “Rachel, your passion for learning is an [...]

Can You Really Get Everything You Want at Alice’s Restaurant?

Early on in my journey in observance, I realized that Passover was not a holiday I could spend with my family. Every year the first Seder would be at my grandparents’ house and the second Seder would be at my temple. Although my temple was within walking distance of my house, my grandma’s house was [...]

Expressing the Music in my Heart

A long, long time ago I was forced to go to Sunday school and Friday night services in order to learn for my bat mitzvah, just like the majority of Reform youth. I always resented it then, and even now I wonder if anything valuable came out of those 7 years of Jewish education. I [...]

Camp Nowhere (A True FFB Litmus Test)

Imagine this scenario: You’re sitting with a bunch of your friends at a Shabbat dinner. Everything is going fine until across the table— “Hey, Yosef, remember when we did that skit at Moshava for color war?” “Yeah, and Jacob sang the theme from ‘Gilligan’s Island’” “And us girls on the red team totally had more [...]

Shidduchim, the Dating Scene at Penn, and the Baalat Teshuva

If you can’t tell by now, I go to a secular university, but one that has a quite large frum population (around 300 including both undergrads and grads). The community is very Modern Orthodox, so shidduchim don’t happen around here so much. We’re all stuck on this campus for four years, and thus if anyone [...]

Parents and Community

When I first started becoming frum, I was away at school, and I did not see my parents for the entire semester. I was nervous to tell them about my change of lifestyle, but I had to prepare them, lest I come home and they wonder who I was, and where was their daughter? I [...]

Can One be a Frum Jew with a Nose-Ring?

Growing up, I was always the nerdy kid. I was the one who did not fit in with the crowd, who did not care about being popular, who wore crazy clothing, who wrote poetry instead of paying attention in school, and who went through a rainbow of hair colors. I first became enamored with Judaism [...]

Popular Posts

• Financial Realities in the Frum World
• Looking at Intermarriage
• How Can We Avoid Alienating our Families and Breaching Our Values?
• Healing the Rift within Orthodoxy
• Using the G-word in Reference to Non-Jews
• A Case for Modern Orthodox Kiruv
• UnInspired
• Are BTs Treated as Second Class Citizens?