Adventures in Mama-Land

(to download a print-friendly PDF version of this dvar Torah, which was adapted from a shiur by Dr. Tova Sacher, click here ) There’s a very well-known midrash that in his old age, Avraham requested… well… to age. It seems like an odd request. He lived not long after the generation of people like Methuselah, who lived 969 years. Certainly, people aged before Avraham. Or… did they? In fact, this midrash suggests, lots of people before Avraham were old – sometimes, very old – but nobody actually got old at all. This whole midrash arises due to a problem with the passuk: וְאַבְרָהָם זָקֵן בָּא בַּיָּמִים And Abraham was old, advanced in days. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said Hashem never makes the same day twice. “Every day is an entirely new creation.” Even if you wake up and today seems exactly the same as yesterday – it’s not. So, too, whenever there’s a redundancy in the Torah, it should catch our eye. Because there are no redundancies in the Torah. If something looks...

I just caught a glimpse of myself in a reflection, in a car window, on my way to the train station. “Wow,” I thought.  “That sure does look like the real deal.” What do I mean by the real deal ? Well, you know .  Okay, I’ll come out and say it.  A 40-something frum woman, hair covered, a little dumpy, a little boring, pretty content with her quiet life off somewhere in Nowhereville, Israel, following the ways of Hashem.  You’d never know I was only faking it. Becoming a baalas teshuvah in my early 20s, fitting in was super-important, because if you think about it, I was kind of in freefall.  I’d given up a whole lot – friends, beliefs, even, to some extent, family.  So being accepted was kind of a matter of survival – if I wasn’t accepted, I’d be all alone. So when did I stop caring? I don’t know if I ever did, but