Building a Jewish Life

It is beyond time to update my links and blogroll pages. Can you help? What are your favorite online Jewish resources, Hebrew resources, conversion blogs, and anything else you think would be useful to a conversion candidate? Just drop them in the comments below! The internet is a very big place, as I’m sure you’ve […]

Welcome back to the real world, post-chag! Do your co-workers and classmates still remember you? I bet you have so much free time in those hours you’ve previously been spending prepping for yom tov each week. Sure, you could spend that time catching up on real life or learning Torah… or you could brush up […]

Ah…the fall chagim. When everyone (including you) eventually starts to get tired of hearing, “it’s a holiday again.” This is especially problematic in the school and workplace.  When you become an orthodox Jew, you suddenly have a lot of holidays. Holidays that involve you not working, not driving, not answering your phone or emails, not […]

Hefker is a “term of art” in the Talmud, as we say in the legal world. That means it’s a word with a very precise meaning that may not line up exactly with how it’s used colloquially; not a word to throw around lightly. You mean exactly what it says. For instance, trespassing has a […]

Ah, summer. When perfect strangers start getting very “concerned” about your clothes if you dress in a tznua way (“tznius” is the most common way to say that, but that’s technically the wrong grammatical form – it’s about time I used it correctly on this blog). This happens to both men and women, though it’s […]

An interesting controversy has hit the media this week that might be confusing to you, if you’re new to the orthodox community. The Israeli wine maker Barkan was outed as moving their Ethiopian-Jewish workers out of the parts of the wine process where they might touch the wine. It turned out this was a requirement […]

In the interest of safety, I advise all of you to avoid any contact with Rabbi Ephraim Bryks as part of your conversion. There are reports that he may be trying to work with conversion candidates through his privately-created beit din and even runs a mikvah out of his home.  Conversion candidates are at an extreme […]

Shabbat is over. It’s Saturday night, Motzei Shabbat! You’ve probably eaten 4 meals in the last 25 hours (dinner, maybe breakfast, maybe kiddush at synagogue, lunch, dinner again – we say three meals are halachically required, but your body also counts breakfast and kiddush and any snacks in between.) You look famished. You should eat […]