This past Sukkos, our family had a rare opportunity to spend Sukkos together in Yerushalayim. Our sons Akiva and Meir are learning there in beis medrash, and our son Dovid and his wife Arielle, in their shana rishona, are part of the Toras Moshe kollel. I looked around and found inexpensive tickets on Aeroflot for ourselves and our two girls, Tamar and Shalva. We would be staying in Yerushalayim, where one of the many wonderful women I have met over my years with the Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project, now called Momentum, invited us to use her beautiful home in Yemin Moshe.

These past few months, I have been writing a series of articles about substance abuse as a part of Chayeinu organization’s efforts to provide education and guidance to our community regarding substance use disorder. While we might wish it were otherwise, substance abuse is not a stranger to our community. The unfortunate fact is that there is a strong probability that our children will drink or use drugs before graduating high school. The numbers in the United States are persuasive and alarming. Before completing high school, 60 percent of teenagers report drinking alcohol, 40 percent report vaping nicotine, 40 percent report smoking marijuana, and 20 percent report smoking traditional cigarettes. About 15 percent report using illicit drugs other than marijuana. And these are only the kids who choose to talk about their substance use!

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I turned into the Seven Mile Market parking lot, how a semi-retired Hopkins nephrologist morphed into an environmental ecologist. Dr. Devorah Rivka Gelfand is not only passionate about her newest life calling; she has inspired others to jump on the bandwagon. The goal of “Cherish the Earth-Bal Tashchis” (www.cherishtheearth-baltashchis), the non-profit organization she founded, is education about and promotion of Torah-based environmental conservation to the Baltimore Jewish community.

When I arrived at the “Cherish the Earth” Environmental Expo booth outside Seven Mile Market on November 3, I was greeted by Jonathan Libber and Dr. Gelfand’s husband Shlomo. It was one of three such booths around town. The others were in front of Market Maven and Shoppers.

“Let’s go to Grandma’s house!” Although it sounds like a quote from “Little Red Riding Hood,” it’s a call voiced by kids everywhere yearning for the tenderness of a doting bubby who is always ready to stuff you with her homemade goodies. Oh, how my mouth still waters for some of Grandma’s marvelous apple pie with just the right amount of jelly oozing out at the edge of the crust. And what a treat it was to be there when her yummy honey cookies came out of the oven. Who didn’t have a grandmother who made the best gefilte fish, not to mention challah every Friday. My late mother followed Grandma’s challah recipe, and said, each time, “It’s not like Grandma’s.”

But her loving kindness and palatable delights were only a few of the reasons I loved visiting my grandmother Eva Friedman, a”h.

The desire for friends is universal. From babies through adults, we thrive on our connection to others. Anyone who observes an infant wriggling with delight upon seeing her mother – or watches a depressed elderly person suddenly become animated when receiving a visitor – understands this reality. But sometimes a child does not seem to develop relationships. This is the child who complains (or, even worse, does not complain) that he is always chosen last on the team. This is the child who does not get any play dates and is teased and bullied by others.

When you look in the mirror what do you see? You see someone who has figured out that you need eight hours of sleep to function, someone who knows to avoid Great Aunt Gertrude at family simchas so as not to be irritable for a week, someone who has learned to refuse a coworker’s request even though you might want to scream. In short, you are a person who knows how to manage anger, frustration, and hurt better than you used to.

Now look at a child. Children also feel anger, frustration, and boredom, but they haven’t yet had the chance to learn the tools to deal with these big emotions. To top it off, they are surrounded by people who think that they should already know them.

After a super-long summer, winter hit with a bang. (Arctic winds are no joke.) What to do about dinner, when all you want to do is curl up under a blanket after coming in from the cold? (Okay, okay, so we don’t feel like cooking in the summer, either.) Plan easy meals, that’s what! The obvious answer is to shlep out the crock pot during the week. It’s good for more than cholent. Just throw some frozen cutlets into it in the morning – don’t forget to plug it in! – and come home to the aroma of a delicious chicken dinner when you and the kids walk through the door in the afternoon! Plus, there’s another quick-and-easy dinner technique that I just learned about, called sheet pan cooking. Read on!

Anxiety seems to be much more prevalent in modern times than it was in previous generations. Some argue that one of the factors causing this is the number of choices we have on a daily basis. Living in a shtetl with few people, few stores, and few outlets can feel comfortable. It means our lives are simpler and require less decision making. There is less to worry about. In addition, we basically knew ahead of time how our lives would play out, at least regarding those aspects over which we had control. We knew where we would live, what occupation we would follow, how we would eat, where we would go to shul, and where our children would go to school. Today, our choices about all these aspects of life are much broader. Unfortunately, when a person is inundated with options and, thus, decisions, it can trigger anxiety. This can be true even regarding small decisions.

Last year, on the first night of Chol Hamoed Sukkos, an intense storm cast five bolts of lightning into the field behind my house. One of them traveled underground, under my neighbor’s house, and slammed through the solid metal cover of my fuse box, starting a fire in my basement. It sounded like a bomb had hit the house. People down the block told me later that they had felt their houses shake from the impact. I was home with my younger four children, while my husband was at shul with my older boys.

We all froze.

Recovering, I told my kids that it sounded like a transformer blew really close by. I didn’t realize at the time that a force of immense power and hotter than the surface of the sun had just penetrated my home.

Jewish comedy can be traced back much further than the Catskills’ Borsht Belt, where many prominent comedians began their careers between the 1920s to the 1970s. In fact, comedy is actually mentioned in the Torah. The Gemara [Ta’anis 22a] refers to two professional jesters who were – they earned the World to Come through comedy. When they saw people who were depressed, they cheered them up, and when they saw two people quarrelling, they tried to make peace between them. Yet rarely do we come across people, especially in our greater Orthodox community, who have made comedy their profession. Luckily for me, however, I happen to know a few of them.

When I was teaching Chumash, I noticed a disturbing trend. Some students were skilled learners and enjoyed learning anything related to Torah. Others were unsuccessful and also had a negative attitude toward their Torah learning. The gap in skills and attitudes between successful and unsuccessful students grew greater and greater each year of school. I once heard an alarming phrase: If a student dislikes math class, they will hate math. If they dislike their Torah classes, they will hate Yiddishkeit. The responsibility to make sure all students are successful is huge.

My students would look at a pasuk (verse) and quit. I needed to reach them before they got to that frustration point. Literacy research states that if a student recognizes fewer than 85 percent of words and comprehends less than 50 percent of a text, he or she will get frustrated unless motivated or supported. Frustration leads to giving up. The question became how I could help students stay above their frustration level when learning Torah.

When I was growing up, my mom used to get up crazy-early on Thanksgiving morning and start cooking the turkey. While the turkey was in the oven, she made the corn, broccoli, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and more on the stove top. My aunts and uncles would come over, and we children would do an arts and crafts project at the table. Then we’d all sit around the table and say what we were thankful for before eating a crazy amount of food. My father (may his neshama be blessed) used to mix his food together so that the mashed potatoes, corn, and cranberries, topped off with the turkey, formed a huge pile, an amalgamation of the different flavors and textures. To this day, that’s one of my favorite things to do, too. Thanksgiving with family and friends close by, laughing and eating, is my kind of holiday.

There are many areas in which the concept of rotation, exchange, or substitution has been shown to have positive benefits. For example, we learn about crop rotation in social studies, where the goal is to help maintain the balance of nutrients for healthy soil. One of the rules is “to rotate plant families from one season to the next so that related crops are not planted in the same spot more often than every three years or so.” Combine this with the concept that “it takes a village to raise a child,” and the text books could read, “One of the rules is to rotate members of families from one season to the next, so related children are not planted in the same spot more often than every three years or so.” You see what we have here? A survival technique for parents across the globe!

David Rosen’s family room seemed typical. Actually, I discovered, it is a treasure trove containing 47 years of research into Torah sources, research from which he gleans amazing anecdotes and extraordinarily obscure historical facts. As interesting as David’s ongoing endeavor is, it is even more astonishing considering that he has suffered from severe chronic pain, 24/7, for the last 25 years.

David Rosen’s passion for Jewish history began when he was a 16-year-old tenth grader in 1972. It bothered him that he did not know anything about Jewish history – including the churban (destruction) of the first and second Temples, the Rishonim and Achronim, the Geonim, the miracles of Chanukah and Purim, and the kingdoms of Beis Yehuda and Beis Yisrael.

The national focus on the opioid crisis unfortunately obscures the fact that the use of cigarettes is the leading preventable cause of mortality, accounting for about 480,000 deaths annually, and about 30 percent of all cancer deaths. Despite an over-50-year-long government campaign against cigarettes, smoking continues to hold many people in its addictive grip as well as draw new victims. Indeed, It is particularly worrisome to watch adolescents smoke either traditional (combustible) cigarettes or JUULs, knowing that smoking early in life is not only a strong predictor of smoking as an adult, but also greatly increases the likelihood of using other drugs. Adults who continue to smoke cigarettes will likely face a host of medical complications and increase the risk of transmitting the smoking habit to their children.

We often hear the term mesiras nefesh. It means, of course, to invest one’s entire soul in something. Most of the time, we use it much too lightly. True mesiras nefesh, as we will see below, is above normal human capability and can accomplish what seems impossible.

My goal in this article is not to give a summary of the life of the great Rav, Rabbi Avrohom Kalmanowitz, zt”l. Rather, I will recount one episode that shows us what can be accomplished when great people are willing to be moser nefesh. My information is taken from a recently published ArtScroll biography, A Blazing Light in the Darkness by Avrohom Birnbaum.

When I was a very young child on Loyola Southway in Lower Park Heights, every night, my father held me in his arms and slowly danced around our living room singing “La La Lee.” One day, he went to visit his parents in Atlantic City, where they owned a boarding house. That night, I wouldn’t go to sleep. “I want ‘La La Lee,’” I cried over and over again. The next morning, my mother packed our bags, and we boarded a bus to join my father. Eventually, I outgrew “La La Lee,” grew up, married, and moved to Atlanta, Georgia. But I still feel the warmth of my father’s arms as he danced and sang to me.

Both my beloved parents died in Cheshvan, four years apart: my mother in 1986 and my father in 1990. Since my mother was nifteres first, I observed her yahrtzeit by hosting a group of women in my home to speak of her virtues. Sometimes, I sponsored a class in her memory as part of Bena, the women’s division of the Atlanta Scholars Kollel (ASK). But what to do for my father?

I was ready – or so I thought. I cruised into my second driving test, confident (or trying to convince myself that I was) that I wouldn’t repeat the misI take of my last test: scraping the barrier in front of the spot I was supposed to be backing into. Now, one month later, I was a much more experienced driver, a much smoother driver, and a much safer driver. I would without a doubt pass this test with flying colors.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I was still nervous.

As the stern-faced instructor barreled into the car, I offered her a tremulous smile, intent on transforming her dry list of monotonous instructions into something a tad more cheerful. Surprise! No such luck.

Before my recent trip to Israel, my niece asked me if I could bring coats for her son and daughter, both size 2T. I remembered that Ilana Smith has a collection of baby and children’s clothing that she stores in her basement and gives away for free. I went there to look for coats, but Ilana directed me to Sara Lea Wetstein.

At the Wetsteins’ house, I was amazed to see a room wholly set aside for coats. She has men’s, ladies’ and children’s coats, hats, boots, gloves, and snow pants. In less than five minutes, I found both a boy’s and girl’s jacket in great condition and perfect for my niece’s children. I also found a jacket and a protective car seat cover for my granddaughter here in Baltimore!