The Holiness Hidden Within The World

Rabbi Rachel Timoner On Rediscovering Judaism

Our God is the God of the widow and the orphan and the stranger, a God who says, “If you harm them, their cries will reach me.”

Tea Time

At 3 AM my eyes snap open. It’s been about fifteen hours since my last fix, and I’m already edging into withdrawal. With a sigh I get out of bed and head down to the basement to make a cup of tea from my store of opium poppies.

What Little She Had

It is one thing to be bad with money when you have it, and quite another to be bad with it when you don’t. My mother gave away what little she had, mostly because she had been taught that every poor person she met was the Lord in disguise, testing her love.

That Year

That year, all our fathers had died or were getting ready to, and they were not taking it well, that is for sure.

The Natural Order Of Hebrew School

A low-grade, persistent terror plagued me throughout the summer before sixth grade, because in June I’d found out I was to spend the next year in Rabbi Friedberg’s class at my Orthodox Jewish Hebrew school.

Displaced Persons

After World War II Congress voted to allow thousands of European war refugees into the U.S. Whenever a ship carrying these “displaced persons,” as they were called, came into New York City, Kalischer would go to the harbor to take pictures of the new arrivals. He had come here as a refugee himself not long before, at the age of twenty-one, and he recognized the fear and expectation in the faces of the men, women, and children.

What Are The Odds

That this trip isn’t the stupidest thing he’ll ever do / That they won’t drive one mile before she asks, Where are we going? three times / That she’ll ask why can’t she drive anymore

Selected Poems

— from “Falling From The Sky” | When we found out our daughter had gone deaf, / I did not question God’s fairness

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