Thought of
the week.

I have been thinking of all of the gifts God has bestowed upon me, and about how everything that has happened to me is really for me, as I get to be there with people through their struggles, just as I have struggled. Of course, I wish that I could…

One of the Ten Commandments and the basis of all Judeo-Christian values is, “thou shall not covet.” All of the other commandments relate to actions, yet this is a feeling. How can a feeling be wrong, and for that matter, how can a feeling be controlled? A simple answer is…

How do you handle situations when you have changed your mind, when you have decided, after sometime, to institute a boundary that you haven’t before? How do you explain to someone that the behavior that you seemed to be okay with for so long, just isn’t okay? I have found…

In the Jewish tradition, we are instructed to repeat the story of the exodus from Egypt in detail every year and remember it daily. Additionally, on the annual commemoration of Passover, we are instructed to tell our children the story and its significance. We know that we are instructed to…

“Don’t worry about the state of someone else’s soul and the needs of your body. Worry about the needs of someone else’s body and the state of your own soul.” – Rabbi Levi Yitzchok I look at this statement and it tells me everything I need to know about the…

It is well known that the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” also means “opportunity”. Any civilization that can see the blessing within the curse, the fragment of light within the darkness, has within it the capacity to endure. Hebrew goes one better. The word for crisis, mashbe, also means “a child-birth…

I dare say that we all want to know the future, what will be, how it will all turn out, and what our fortune is to be. On the flip side, we all want to know what challenges we may have, etc. Many times, I have met with people who…

R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi’s Tanya said that if we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel. Cognitive behavioral therapy calls this reframing. Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor and the founder of Logotherapy describes our ability to reframe as the only true human choice. He states…

Sometimes this world is quite overwhelming and it feels as though enacting any change is impossible, so why even try? How can we motivate ourselves to start, when the job or task seems impossible and failure is more likely than success?! The proverb says, “it’s not upon me to finish…

Byachad is the Hebrew word for together. The first time the Torah mentions togetherness was when Moses gave the ten commandments at Sinai. The quote is, “As one person with one heart”, as it was only when we were a cohesive unit that we merited the Torah, God’s greatest gift.…