Sefira Lightstone

The elevator reached the fourth floor. The doors slid open, but I was tempted to hit “lobby” and push this off for a week. I was returning home from vacation.

Terah (also spelled Terach ) was the father of Abraham, the first Patriarch of the Jewish nation. Although Terah was a prodigious idolator, his son Abraham recognized the truth of one G‑d. Read on for 11 facts about this unsavory ancestor of ours and his end-of-life turnaround as unpacked in Midrashic sources.

Jonah is the protagonist in the famous biblical story in which he is thrown off a storm-tossed ship and swallowed by a fish. His narrative is read in the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Read further for 15 facts about this remarkable prophet and his intriguing story.

Abraham was a zealot. He was so intolerant of false notions that he smashed his father’s idols. That nearly cost him his life, but in the end, his new concept of one invisible, omniscient and omnipotent Creator caught on so well that today followers of Abrahamic religions comprise more than half of the world’s 8 billion people.

And it came to pass after these things, that G‑d tested Abraham, and He said to him, "... Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go away to the land of Moriah, and bring him up there as an offering on one of the mountains, of which I will tell you...."

Walking the paths of an Auschwitz sterilized by the time that has passed since the horrors perpetrated here, I begin to doubt humanity and its Creator. I stare at the lush green of a tree reflected in a puddle, battling the obvious fact that trees cannot be green here, and neither can water reflect. This is hell that came to earth. Yet, while conscious of this, I feel no blinding pain for the senseless murder of millions of my brethren. Just a void emptiness, the nothingness of a head that's not thinking. I feel suspended in a world I cannot comprehend.

With the proliferation of augmented reality (AR) headsets, which overlay digital information, like images or text, onto real-time footage from the real world in front of you, we begin to question what constitutes vision.

Gematria is a system of assigning numeric values to letters or words in the Hebrew language. It is based on the belief that words or phrases with the same numeric value may have related or interconnected meanings.

Keeping kosher in the workplace can present a variety of challenges, from getting and prepping your kosher food to making sure that you can store it separately from the non-kosher stuff your coworkers may bring.

When I was 11 years old, my family left the former Soviet Union and moved to the United States. Although our family was not religious, that first summer I went to Chabad ’s Camp F.R.E.E. (Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe). My mom sent me there because it was, quite literally, free. It was my first exposure to Jewish practice like putting on tzitzit or saying a blessing.