Family

Memorial for Walter Blum – V’Haya Achrei Chen

May 11, 2010

(יואל ×”, א, ד) This is the third in a series of posts from the memorial for my father, Walter Blum, who passed away last year. The event mixed music and humanistic interpretations of Jewish texts to try to share what my father was like and what he was passionate about. ——————————— When Yoel suggested […]

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Memorial for Walter Blum – Pitchu Li

May 5, 2010

(תהילים קי”×—, ×™”ט) This is the second in a series of posts from the memorial for my father, Walter Blum, who passed away last year. The event mixed music and humanistic interpretations of Jewish texts to try to share what my father was like and what he was passionate about. ——————————— The words for the […]

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Memorial for Walter Blum

April 27, 2010

Walter Blum, 2008 My father, Walter Blum, died a year ago on March 22 of lymphoma. At the time, I wrote on this blog about my difficulties saying the traditional Kaddish prayer and how I planned to formulate a series of alternative “events” to honor my father in a manner that I hope he would […]

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Running the Marathon – Israeli Style

March 24, 2010

My wife Jody and I ran the 10K in the Jerusalem Half Marathon last week. I’ve been running 3-4 times a week for over a decade already, but never in a competitive race. We didn’t come in first, but we were satisfied with a respectable time of an hour and six minutes. We arrived at […]

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No Place for Old Folks

March 9, 2010

During last week’s Purim celebrations, I began to feel my age. Not the Megillah reading – you can appreciate that no matter how old you are (especially if you’re hard of hearing…helps drown out the din of the groggers). No, it was the party afterward. Every year, my wife Jody and I go dancing at […]

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Rain: a Love/Hate Story

March 2, 2010

I really hate the rain. And these past few days have been tough ones for the anti-rain parade. Oh, I know it’s good for us and the country desperately needs to refill its reservoirs. I just wish we could get all our rainfall at night, when I’m sleeping. Getting caught in a daytime downpour is […]

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Meditations on Being Alone

February 16, 2010

My wife left me this week. Don’t worry – it’s nothing serious. Jody is participating in a week long meditation retreat at Kibbutz Hanaton in the Galilee. That means I’m home alone with the kids (not a problem) but also alone in the kitchen (bigger problem). I have never been much of a whiz as […]

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Prediction Tradition

January 4, 2010

Growing up, our family had an annual tradition on New Year’s Day. My father, my brother and I would gather around the family room table and put down in writing our predictions for the upcoming year. We would then open the envelope that had been sealed “upon pain of death” from the previous year. Our […]

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Back to Summer Camp

December 8, 2009

Our kids have been attending a Bnei Akiva-style summer camp for the last several years. Kayitz b’Kibbutz is based at Kibbutz Shluchot in the Jordan Valley, a few kilometers south of Beit Shean. The camp doesn’t have visiting days during its sessions, so we’ve been forced to use our imaginations to picture what our kids […]

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If You’re Going to Egypt…

February 1, 2007

Well, we made it back from Egypt and we had a fantastic, fascinating, amazingly awesome experience. We felt perfectly safe the entire time and never felt any antagonism, though that might have been in part that no one actually knew we were either Jewish or Israeli. See this post on how we traveled “Jewcognito,” entering […]

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