Birkat Chaverim
Part of the Global Day of Jewish Learning topic of blessing and gratitude is the topic of "Blessing the Bad." I had not intended to speak about this at all. I did watch Rav Steinzaltz's video on the topic. This is available if you sign up for the Global Day of Jewish Learning. Then I stumbled onto Mayim Bialik's Kveller piece about thanking the firefigh ...
You may or may not know that through September the Israeli electric company is having a "contest" to get people to use less electricity. The basic idea is that people will get a discount on reduced usage between 10-30%. Why the 30% cutoff? Probably to make sure people are actually still in the apartment and using electricity in a regular way. We are ...
Being part of a community means helping out when people need help. Helping out can mean offering to pick up children from school, running errands, making phone calls and preparing meals. Organized Jewish home has a nice series about chesed meals so I don't need to add much here, but I will reiterate- if you want to be helpful by making a meal do make su ...
I came up with this idea a long time ago, but I never got around to posting about it. I thought it was appropriate around Shavuot given the Matan Torah connection. The idea here was to make Mitzvah cards for my daughter based on mitzvot she already does and can recognize. I took pictures that we already had that depicted a variety of mitzvot and used t ...
In honor of Parshat Yitro here is a tutorial of how to make a great Mitzvah baby book with photos of the different pages. I did not make it- it was made by one of the girls in my class. She wanted to make something for her new nephew and we came up with this idea. We looked at lots of different childrens books. She wanted to do something for now rather than when he was older. I suggested black on white since its easier for younger children to see, and I had been saving the plastics from wipes packages to use as the crinkle inside the baby book. ...
I have been talking with my daughter about mitzvot (loosely translated as good deeds or commandments) quite a bit lately. Because of the holiday season, we have spoken about about the shofar, the symbolic foods, prayer, charity, teshuvah among other holiday related mitzvot. We have also been talking in general about the mitzvot that she has performed. ...