Passover’s coming.
On my phone, in my Notes app, I have a note labeled “Worry List.”
Said Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah: “Once a child got the better of me.”
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, was a brilliant philosopher and a scholar of sweeping proportions, including Torah and other wisdoms. He was also a stunning orator and a deeply compassionate man. I like to think of him as my adoptive ideological grandfather.
I’ve seen many emails and social media posts reviewing 2020, capturing the highlights of the year. But the task feels insurmountable to me. There are some things that happen in my life that are so big, so overwhelming and overbearing, that I don’t even know how to make sense of them. Maybe this will finally break me, I think. Maybe I should finally see a psychologist who can make this right before it creates too much subconscious gunk. (Thanks, Freud, for freaking me out.)
A few months ago, I got a phone call from my friend Elissa. She told me that her life coach, Chris, was writing a children’s book about life after death, and that he was including different religious perspectives in his book. He’d asked her about the Jewish view, and she deferred to me, saying that she wasn’t the expert on the topic, but that I’d know what should be included. Would it be OK, she asked, to give Chris my number?
Every time I feel like crying, a voice in my head pipes up. This is what it says: