Mark is smart. He’s one of my smarter friends. He is able to contort his words so as to not split an infinitive, as I just did in this very sentence. (Mark would have written, so as not to split an infinitive.) ⟡⟡⟡ Four or five years ago, Mark’s youngest child—assigned female at birth and

I’m here to help. As far as I can figure out, that’s why I’m here. To help. A saying attributed to John Wesley: Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all

I’m fuming. FUMING. F-U-M-I-N-G! I’ve just removed my key from the front door and crossed over the threshold. The setting is my first floor apartment at 7 Keren Hayesod in Jerusalem.  I lived there for a year — two buildings down and across the street from the Super Sol where King George starts. About a

I am supposed to arrive at the wedding rehearsal at 4 p.m. I planned on arriving 15–20 minutes early. Because I don’t like being late. However, I took a wrong turn. At the intersection of the I-5 South and the I-405 South, I went the wrong way. Now, I’ll have to turn around in a

To offset our discomfort about our upcoming visit to the Terezín (in German: Theresienstadt) concentration camp/ghetto, Emmett and I fall into making dark jokes. Gallows humor. “Do you think they still give free tattoos upon arrival?” “Want to wear matching pajamas for our tour?” Dark, ugly jokes.  Because reality is just too overwhelming. The feelings

Jane and the kids misplace keys. Not me. I don’t. I always return my key to the keyrack. That’s where they go. When the key isn’t on the hook, which happens from time to time, I find it on some surface in the house. Usually, the kitchen table. Then, without fanfare, I pick it up,

In the 18th century, in Hannipol, a small district of Khmelnytskyi Oblast, in present-day western Ukraine, there was a rabbi known as Reb Zusya. Zusya, a pious man, taught about humility and had a strange habit of referring to himself in the third person. Instead of saying, “I am hungry,” or “I don’t understand,” he

I rewind the etymology podcast 15 seconds because I missed the details about the origin of the word travesty. I want to listen again—more closely—so I learn it, so I can recall it later in conversation… because if I tell you how travesty—from “traverse” and “clothing”—came to mean “shockingly unfair,” you’ll think I’m smart. Lost

Most of the time, even when we don’t really need to be rushing (and sometimes without realizing we are rushing) a really large percentage of us rush anyhow. Seems we are angled forward, always striving to get ahead. I get it. It’s the soup we are in. Our society conflates productivity, hurriedness, and worth. We

“I have the honor of sitting with the Rabbi,” Martin says as I find my seat at the reception to celebrate his granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah. At times like this, I’m not just Brian. I’m Rabbi Brian. A stand-in for God, Judaism, and all religious persons they’ve met in the past. ✧ ✧ ✧ “We pass