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…uld not afford a chicken, they ate a shtekele fish. But today chicken is cheap, meat is mundane. Unless you really like chicken, to fulfill the mitzva of making a Shabbat meal special in our day, you might have to eat Kosher Chinese. To take a historical, but only slightly less trivial, example, we note that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Conservative rabbinate was condemned for the radical innovation of presenting sermons in Eng…
…g to do is to praise a righteous person, because the language of praise is cheap and formulaic. Suffice it to say that if the best way to teach is by example, Ruthie is the greatest teacher I know of emuna, of hesed, and of avoda — of faith, of steadfast love, of the holy work of worship. Without any irony, I can say that she is truly a giant. Which brings us back to the place we started, the theme of sacrifice. When our ancestors gave the first f…
…erent. Everybody does something behind closed doors, whether it be write a cheap romance novel or go to some forbidden site on the Web. The thing I do behind closed doors is write poetry. Long and involved, they usually represent some flaw in humanity or in myself or just some tragic love poem. Words spurt out of my mouth and I have to write them down or else I lose them, the ideas slipping through my fingers like grains of sand in an hourglass. I…