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It is officially watermelon season.

Soferet Jen Taylor Friedman has started a tefillin gemach for women, based in NYC. She explains, A gemach is a charity which lends things to people in need. Sometimes it's basic stuff like plates, sometimes it's wedding dresses, sometimes it's furniture, and sometimes...

Award-winning playwright, performer and author S. Bear Bergman has got a new and extremely worthwhile project going on. Bear writes, Last month, someone told me I was her hero. I had gone to her small college and performed, and afterwards her classmates had begun to...

I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any...

Yesterday was mostly about errands. I took a sweater into the dry cleaner--the guys I wave hi to every time I pass by, which is often--and, for not the first time, the owner wrote down my first name on a piece of paper, pinned it to the article of clothing, and told...

Over the last few days, a tremendous number of people have gotten to this blog by googling, "How to protect yourself from demons." I'd like to guess that since we're in Nisan now and that chunk of Talmud I quoted on the topic a couple of years back is, in fact, from...

Is it... snowing out? I think it is! It keeps alternating with rain, so it's hard to tell, but that sure looks like big fluffy flakes of snow. Weird. ETA: It is SO snowing out!!! It looks like Christmas out here. Crrazzy.

This would be a good time to draw folks' attention to the Open Source Haggadah project. It's not as robust a database as it could be, but it's a nice idea. You click on all the different aspects of the seder (kadesh, urchatz, etc etc) and can then, from each component...

Here's your first kavvanah, led by HaRav Mavis Staples. (hat tip to Bear.) ETA: It occurs to me how profound a song this is for the inner yitziyat Mitzrayim* that we each have to do. We want those we love to come with us, but even if they're not willing or able, we...