Good and Evil

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. […]

What is worth the ultimate sacrifice?

I, like many of you I am sure, have been unable to turn off the TV over the last few days. It is surreal to see a sovereign nation under siege, and to see it in real time, filmed by everyday people going through it. I read this morning that a Ukrainian soldier, Vitaliy Skakun […]

Lessons from Basic Training for the COVID-19 Pandemic

As I drifted off to sleep, my mind returned to a warm evening in March of 2010. Myself and a few of the guys that had become my closest friends over the past 4 years sat in a corner booth of Smokey Joe’s bar in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We were a few feet from the dance […]

Being Vulnerable

Dear Friend, Thank you for the inspiration to write this. You told me that being vulnerable wasn’t in your nature, and that you were going to try something new as a way of working through a difficult few months. Your courage gave me courage, so I wrote down some things that are not so comfortable […]

Coming back

My Army bag, by outward appearances, is a large green duffel bag. To me, it is a time capsule. Roughly a year ago, I hastily threw a collection of clothing, toiletries, uniforms, and assorted other accessories into the bag, zipped it shut, and handed it off to Eric, who graciously stored it for me in […]

פינת זיכרון

It’s just a street corner. There’s nothing particularly special that separates it from the thousands of others like it throughout Israel. But for one boy, it was different. On that corner, the boy I once was would say goodbye to the girl he once loved on Sunday mornings before he returned to base. As I […]

Never again to us, or never again because of us?

This year my mother hosted an incredible Seder, and asked us, as it’s participants, to write about what freedom meant to us. My cousin Reuben delivered a powerful message about the commandment to remember that we, too, were slaves in the land of Egypt, a commandment that is given to ensure that we don’t treat […]

Forbes Under 30 Israel Summit

Every choice we make in life; every meeting or event we choose to attend, every time we choose to go and not to stay, has ramifications that we cannot begin to imagine at the time that we make those decisions. A plane that takes off from New York en route to LA, should it adjust […]

Bearing Witness

The teenagers of today are the last generation that will be able to hear firsthand accounts of the Holocaust; they are the last generation that will look down at the forearm of a survivor and see a number tattooed into the skin that was meant to erase it’s bearer’s name and identity. Their children will […]

I Can

As a child I was diagnosed with learning disabilities. My particular difficulties surrounded the processing of shapes and characters, specifically as they related to new languages. The doctors said learning a new language would be difficult if not impossible for me. More than a decade later, my Hebrew teacher at Penn scoffed at the idea […]