Adventures in Mama-Land

Why wait until kids are older to start explaining the ideas behind Jewish prayers?  I created this book to share a new approach: explaining the series of brachos (brachot = prayers) we say each morning in a way that was clear and kid-friendly, not to mention fun.  Don’t you love these little wooden dolls???  They’re doing something different on every single page of the book!  They’re a great way to get the point across in a way kids can relate to. What you’ll find inside: Full Hebrew text (with vowels!) of the 15 morning brachot (blessings) Easy-to-read new English translations Light rhyming verses to communicate core concepts Fun, lively illustrations highlighting one key idea behind each bracha Available in Print or Ebook form (Kindle, unlocked and convertible to Epub or any other form you like for reading on screen or device) Check out the back cover of the book, along with a few sample spreads from inside: Honestly, I want to share the whole thing with you – but th

Many years ago, my coworker’s mother was very, very sick.  She was in a coma.  I asked him his mother’s Hebrew name.  And here’s the thing that stopped me in my tracks. This guy wasn’t religious.  At all.  He knew very little about Judaism and I only knew because it came up in conversation once.  Still, he hesitated.   He said, “She’s really very sick.  I don’t know if it would be a good thing for her to live any longer.”  On some level, even if he didn’t know exactly how, he must have believed that our prayers actually work.  So do I.  But what are we talking about when we talk about prayers “working”?  About Hashem “answering” them?  And what are we asking for, to begin with? In that situation, I explained that we’re not just asking for the person to live longer.  But this is something a lot of people don’t understand – even those of us who are doing the davening ourselves. Sure, we all have that impulse, when we find out someone’s sick, to say something automatic like “refuah

If there’s one thing that causes hand-wringing and hair-pulling in the Torah homeschooling world, it’s choosing a siddur. It makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re passionate about educating our kids, We’re passionate about Judaism, Tefillah (prayer) is an important cornerstone of Judaism.  Therefore… The siddur we choose is critical. Hence the hair-pulling.  (or tichel-pulling, as the case may be) Complicating things is the fact that many homeschooling parents are baalei teshuvah (newly-observant) or geirim (converts), who may not know the text or its meaning and might feel insecure about sharing these things with their kids. Since my own personal favourite grown-up siddur is my Koren / Sacks siddur, I was thrilled to receive review copies of two new kids’ siddurs from Koren Publishers.  One, the Koren Children’s Siddur, is for young kids, the other, Ani Tefillah, is aimed more at middle grades and high schoolers.  The distinctive Koren fonts and layout have been incorporated into