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Becoming Jewish Without Questioning Your Sanity

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How to Listen to a Shiur

First, what’s a shiur? It’s usually just a lecture about something that is somehow tied to Jewish thought. And it usually has a lot of Hebrew and/or Yiddish and/or Yeshivish. I used to become very frustrated when listening to shiurim (plural of shiur) because of the frequent use of words I didn’t understand. However, now […]

What Does It Mean to You? The Amidah Edition

I remember one of the very first questions I asked my first rabbi: In the amidah, what does “may my soul be to all like the dust” mean? (The amidah is also known as shemonah esrei, a long silent prayer that is the central focus of the liturgy) [Using the Koren translation because that’s my […]

Shabbat Shalom! Being a “Lech Lecha” Kind of Girl

Converts (and especially orthodox ones!) experience more change in the first few Jewish years than some people do in an entire life, and more than most Jews, I would argue. Like most Jews of any movement, I come from a family and culture of tradition. You’re born, live, and die in the same place, or […]

How Do Converts Choose a Minhag?

What is a minhag? “Custom.” Plural: minhagim. However, some minhagim have been practiced so widely and for so long that rabbis have declared them to be mandatory halacha. More generally, each large group of Judaism are considered to have a “minhag,” including Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Yemenite, Indian (from India), etc. Further, some minhagim are how […]

Orthodox Women Being Patronized by Feminists? Oh, Linguistic Irony!

I discovered a blog post today titled Frum, Fashion, and Feminism on the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Jewesses with Attitude blog. It started so well: talking about fashion becoming more open to modest designs and the orthodox women who are working towards that end (including the fabulous bloggers Chavi and Hadassah). Then I ran into the […]

Status Wars: Not Nearly as Fun as Star Wars

There is a Status War going on in the world. People who have become religious later in life (either as baalei teshuva or converts) are having a very difficult time proving that they are, in fact, Jewish. Personally, as painful as the conversion process can be, I think the baalei teshuva have it worse. Thanks […]

Adventures in Semantics: “Going to Temple”

Quite frankly, I hate this phrase. Yet people say it to me all the time and will continue to say it, so I have to learn how to live with it. So do you. Most of the time, it simply is not worth the effort to explain to someone who (a) won’t even remember and […]

A Response to a Very Good Question: Why Not Fake It ‘Til You Make It?

I saw a great question about conversions. I decided to post the question and my answer to that question here because I think that’s a struggle the overwhelming majority of orthodox converts face at some point in their process. How would you respond? THE QUESTION: Not to risk offending anybody, but I’d be curious as […]