Author name: Kochava Yocheved

Gather round, friends. I want to talk to you about something near and dear to my heart: you do not need to “speak Yeshivish” to be frum. If you want to, that’s fine. But I don’t want you spending time beating yourself up over the idea that you “don’t talk like everyone else talks.” Elul […]

I’m surprised how often this question comes up. After all, what do you think is the alternative? Making them go hungry or having to hire someone else to feed them? We can get so afraid of unusual situations that sometimes we don’t stop to think through them logically first. Fear is common whenever you face

People tend to fall into two camps: those who don’t advocate for themselves and people who are always advocating for themselves.  As a society, we tend to deride that second group of people. But why? Is their behavior really that annoying or are we jealous? I can’t answer that categorically, but in at least some

With Pesach fast approaching, I did some research into what chametz means to you and me as an aspect of our personality and character. How can we search for chametz within ourselves? What does chametz come to teach us? Wanna see what I learned and share your own experiences and opinions? You’re in luck! Let’s

And that somebody would be me! I never could have seen this a year ago, when I was still waiting to convert and had been waiting for several years. But I was finally in New York and had a great beit din! And things went smoothly, and I converted in January. I met my chosson

The Olympics is supposed to be a time of international unity and brotherhood. Unfortunately, the reality falls very short of this ideal. Here are some of the “fundamental principles” of the Olympics, from their Charter [emphasis mine]: The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with

I apologize if you received multiple copies of yesterday’s post. Since I’ve been gone, Blogger has completely re-done their site, and I couldn’t make it work right. Sorry 🙁 Shabbat shalom! (And no, I currently have no idea if I’m back regularly. Maybe.)

Quite frankly, I’m tired of people bad mouthing conversion candidates who are married to a Jew or dating a Jew. When I was converting, it would often come up that I was single for most of the years of my conversion process and wasn’t dating once I formally entered the orthodox conversion process. Once the