Parenting

Memorial for Walter Blum – Pachamama

May 20, 2010

This is the fourth 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. Unlike the previous videos, this one is in […]

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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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Life as a Board Game

April 8, 2010

Our life has become like a board game. Specifically, one that I created 38 years ago. When I was in sixth grade in 1972, my friend David Saunders and I decided to create a Monopoly-like game with a dice, play money, and various cards which players would pick from a pile and then act on. […]

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Vacation Tips for the Passover Holiday

March 31, 2010

It’s vacation time in Israel – the week of hol ha mod Pesach (the days in-between the Seder and the the seventh day of the chag) is a time when schools and many businesses close down and half the country seemingly takes to the parks and general great outdoors. Our family traditionally heads north to […]

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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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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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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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Between A Rock and a Hard Case

November 30, 2006

Shabbat afternoon in the park with my friend Eliot from out of town, eight-year-old Aviv and Eliot’s two little boys, Liav and Avidan, both of them under the age of 10, playing happily, riding scooters around a mostly empty basketball court while their parents chatted about whatever it is adults chat about. The weather was […]

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