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"We're getting divorced. But we're doing it amicably, with mutual respect." When ex-spouses (or ex-es) describing their divorce sound like "we're withdrawing our offer on the house we looked at Thursday", you can get the idea that they never invested enough to be hurt by the loss. But listen again: you'll hear emptiness in the voice: Pain in the heart. Yes, the stigma is lost. Yes, some koffee-klatch and water-cooler conversations have an "everybody's-doing-it" attitude. No. No one who went through divorce thinks it's painless. But if pain-free divorce is a myth (in the shattering), divorce is a reality, an...

One of the early expressions of the dignity of the individual is in this week's Torah reading. The greatness of giants is a commonplace -- Adam, Noah, the Patriarchs, Moses - these are all noteworthy names. But the anonymous, the scores of thousands who were not leaders and chiefs, the masses -- they too are endowed with worth by the simple theme of this week's Torah reading, the census. Counting implies value, for worthless things are not counted, certainly not as individual units but in the mass at best. The Torah counts Israel to the last man, because each one,...

The period between Passover and Shavuot, the festivals of liberation and the giving of the Torah, is marked by the Counting of the Omer.1 In a sense the festival of Shavuot is a fulfillment, a climax, of Passover. In terms of the Jewish people, the significance is obvious -- Israel was not a nation by virtue of freedom alone but by virtue of the Torah. What does this mean to the individual? Torah gives life a purpose, a pattern that gives significance to the commonplace. The mitzvot impart spiritual importance even to the ordinaries of living; they make the Jew...

I'm very rich. That I never hear. I'm very humble. That I never hear. I'm very spiritual. Ah, at that I cringe very often. Why don't they realize spirituality is humility? Truth is, when they say "spiritual" they mean abstract: a quest for the unnoticed, unstated, the uncommon. But spirituality, in that definition, is not something inherently good, worthy or desirable. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak (known in Yiddish as the Freidike Rebbe) was unimpressed by yeshiva bochurim, the boys in yeshiva, who opened the refrigerator just to see what was inside. When I first heard that, at about fifteen, I pretty...

In a world of crises, an immediate problem is the dissolution of the family. We regret the passing of the fabled Jewish family, not out of sentimentality, but from realistic appreciation of a personal experience. The devoted family, an anchorage amid confusion, is rapidly disappearing, even among Jewish people. "What can we do?" is the distressed cry of parents seeing their children growing away from them, going elsewhere for guidance and even affection. We attempt, futilely, to recreate the old family spirit, and wonder why we don't succeed. The atmosphere of a Jewish home was not produced by spontaneous generation,...

The weekly Torah portion describes the characteristics of kosher and forbidden animals, fish, and fowl. Nachmanides in his commentary observes that the forbidden fowl are predatory. Among these prohibited birds enumerated we find the chasida, translated as "stork." The literal meaning of chasida is "kindly," an appropriate name, says Rashi, because this bird is helpful to its friends, and shares its food with them. In this case, asks the Gerrer Rebbe, since the bird is kindly and sympathetic, then according to Nachmanides it belongs among the kosher instead of the forbidden fowl. The Gerrer drew an interesting moral from this....