Barely a few weeks ago, we didn’t just remember the Exodus. We were asked to see ourselves as though we had left Egypt. Lirot et atzmo, to imagine it as part of us. This line has always called out to me. It is a reminder that: Memory isn’t passive in Judaism. It’s active, alive, arriving. Memory creates a kind of pressure in us. An ongoing request from the past on our present. Today is Yom HaShoah, and we’re asked to remember again. But not in the soft, distant sense. We light candles. We say...

By the time you read this, you might already be elbows-deep cleaning and kashering a cooking pot. Or sweeping under furniture and finding unexpected Cheerios. Or feeling the low-key internal panic about meal planning. That’s how this season goes, right? Passover has this power to take up mental, physical, and spiritual space, not just on our counters and in our cabinets, but also in our bodies and minds. It holds both the past, the present, and the future all at once. There’s memory, there’s...

Now that Tu Bishvat is officially behind us, the next holiday in the calendar is Purim! This is a topsy-turvy holiday, full of farce, Game of Thrones-esque palace intrigue, and giving cute gifts to friends. There's really no holiday quite like it. I've been starting to explain it as: April Fool’s Day meets Halloween meets a community potluck. I've been digging into this holiday with fresh eyes, as part of a class I'm teaching. Through that process, I've realized that some of the ways we've...