Closer Than You Think

This week's parsha, Netzavim, arrives right before Rosh Hashanah, when we're asked what we want written in the Book of Life. This episode is about the freedom that question assumes: the power to choose our perceptions instead of accepting them as fixed reality. That choice matters most at home. When we decide our kid is "the difficult one" or a rough season is "just how our family is," we treat a...

This week's parsha, Ki Teitzei, commands us to build a fence around the roof of a new house, and the Chassidic masters read it as protecting the new self we commit to building each year: a fence that holds in who we are and holds out who we're not. That's also the job description of a parent. Our kids forget who they are constantly, in every meltdown and lie, and we're meant to be the ones who rem...

This week's parsha, Shoftim, bans every form of fortune-telling and then commands us to be tamim, which one commentator defines as someone whose insides match their outsides. It's a lesson about the compulsion to predict and control the future, and no one knows that compulsion better than a modern parent surrounded by expert advice, studies, and books promising the right inputs will produce the ri...

This week's parsha, Re'eh, contains the commandment to tithe, and with it a famous promise that giving leads to wealth. But the Sages define wealth in a surprising way: one who is satisfied with their lot. That definition changes what it means to give our kids a better life. Generational wealth isn't really a portfolio; it's whether our children inherit a story of "always enough" or "never enough,...

This week's parsha, Eikev, warns against believing "it is my strength and the might of my hand" that produced everything we have. That warning applies to more than wealth. As parents, we try to engineer our kids: sticker charts, reward systems, scripts, all designed to manufacture the confident, resilient child we want. But children aren't machines, and growth can't be forced, only cultivated. Whe...

This week's parsha contains the Shema, the most famous prayer in Judaism, and it makes a claim far more radical than "there is one God." It rejects the whole idea of dividing life into separate compartments, which means work-life balance was never the goal. Balance is teetering between two things; integration is being one person everywhere. That matters most at home, because our kids are watching...

Does God really care whether the mezuzah scroll sits at the bottom of the top third of the doorpost, tilted in? And how could narrowing your ideal client profile possibly grow your business? This week's episode, on Parshas Devarim, unpacks Moses' strange, limited blessing to the Jewish people: a thousandfold increase, when God had already promised Abraham the infinite. The people protested; the Re...

This week's parsha, Matos-Massei, lists all forty-two places the Jewish people camped in the desert, and at every stop, even the miserable ones, they set up the full camp. It's a strange detail with a lot to say about how we handle hard feelings, ours and our kids'. When your child melts down, you may say all the right things while secretly rushing them through it, because no one ever let you sit...

This week's parsha, Pinchas, opens on a man who acts decisively in a moment of total chaos, when everyone around him is frozen. It's a strange story to connect to parenting, but the link is the frozen moment itself. So much of parenting lives there: your kid does something, and you stall out, unsure whether to give a consequence or a hug, scanning for the right technique. The truth is that clarity...

A reader asked me a question I couldn't shake: I get why secure attachment matters, but how do I actually build it with my kids, day to day? After a year of writing about presence and connection, I had to admit the honest answer: this isn't something you learn from an essay or a podcast. It's caught, not taught, the way one candle lights another. In this year-end reflection I talk about why real c...

My almost-four-year-old hit me with "that's not fair" for the first time this week, over having to nap while his baby brother stayed up. My instinct was to litigate it, to prove the ledger actually balanced in his favor. Big mistake. A child's cry of unfairness is almost never about the pizza or the screen time or the nap; it's about whether they feel seen, loved, and securely attached to you. Thi...

We've gotten alarmingly comfortable slapping diagnoses on our kids: ADD, anxiety, defiance, you name it, often for behavior that's just a child being a child inside a system that sets them up to struggle. This week I make the case I've been building toward for a year: the words we speak over our children don't just describe them, they help create who they become. A casual label is a verdict dresse...

There's a reason your kid's whining can undo you faster than almost any other sound: it's built to. Whining is wired to bypass your reasoning and grab you before you can think, the same channel that lets a real cry reach you in an emergency. This week I look at why that sound hijacks us, why it works (because it does), and how we can stop rewarding it without ever shutting our kids out. The motto...

This week I'm ranting a little (lovingly) about our obsession with finding "the thing" that will fix everything: the supplement, the protocol, the branded parenting hack, the latest biohack. My wife's mahjong group hosted an "Analog Night" and it hit me: why do we need to brand being present? The Torah's nazir makes the same mistake: turning a temporary restriction into a virtue. The real work is...

This week I explore why commitment, not analysis, is the key to a fuller life. Research shows that people who endlessly optimize their choices are measurably less happy than those who commit and move on. The same pattern shows up in my coaching work: people rarely lack knowledge; something is blocking them from acting on what they already know. The fix isn't more information; it's learning to quie...

This week I'm exploring why so many driven, successful people struggle to feel wonder at ordinary life, and what that has to do with our inability to rest. The same part of us that can't stop working is often protecting a younger part that once found the world magical and learned it wasn't safe to be that open. I share a personal story about reclaiming something I lost as a kid, walk through a dee...

Why can't driven, purpose-oriented men stop working? This week's essay redefines "flow" through the lens of parsha Emor, Victor Wooten's The Music Lesson , and Jewish mystical teachings about the sacred role of silence and rest. The Torah's peak spiritual experience is the Amidah, standing completely still with nothing to say. I explore why workaholism is almost always driven by fear underneath th...

You already know screens are bad for you. So why hasn't that changed anything? This week I argue that avoiding the bad doesn't sustain transformation; you need a vivid sense of what you're building towards. The Torah calls it holiness: a spiritual sensitivity, a felt aliveness to your own soul and to God's presence in the ordinary. Screens deaden that sensitivity. I share what we do in my house to...

This week I'm writing about why I started graduate school in Marriage and Family Therapy, and what this week's Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora, teaches about what's really going on when family life feels chaotic. The parsha describes a mysterious affliction that can appear on the walls of a house, and I think it's a powerful metaphor for what I keep seeing in my coaching work: the presenting problem...

What if the hardest thing about Passover isn't the cleaning or the dietary restrictions, but the radical idea that you didn't earn any of it? In this week's essay, I explore how Dayenu, the song everyone sings but nobody thinks about, is actually a meditation on enoughness and the art of receiving. I walk through specific intentions for the matzah and maror at your seder this year, and why actuall...

Every dad in my groups says the same thing: I know what I should do, I just can't do it. This week I explore why, through an unexpected collision between modern parts-based psychology and what Chassidic philosophy has been teaching about the animal soul for centuries. Parshas Vayikra opens with the laws of animal offerings, and the Hebrew word korban doesn't mean sacrifice: it means bringing close...

This week's essay explores the difference between two kinds of repetition in parenting. Repeating a directive your child isn't following erodes your authority; that was last week's lesson. But this week, as the Torah repeats every detail of the Mishkan's construction, we learn that retrospective repetition, going back through what happened together with our kids, is how they process overwhelming e...

Most parents repeat themselves until they snap, and then feel guilty about it. This week: why that cycle isn't strictness, it's the absence of it, and how to hold firm boundaries while staying emotionally connected to your kids.

Purim is ultimately a story about surviving a holocaust. This week I unpack the real Purim narrative, the intergenerational trauma behind it, and why the "silly" mitzvot of Purim are actually a healing protocol for a traumatized people.

This week I explore what the Torah's blueprint for the Mishkan teaches us about generational legacy. The wealth management industry spends billions trying to preserve family wealth through governance structures and values workshops — but they're starting too late. Neuroscience shows 90% of brain development happens before age five, yet the industry's best roadmap starts there. The Torah's model: p...