Category: Life Lessons

Categories
Judaism Life Lessons

The Best Birthday Ever: Ari’s Bar Mitzvah

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Ari’s bar mitzvah. Words can’t really capture the feelings I have about it. Watching my son become an adult, surrounded by family and friends—there’s nothing like it. Yes, we had a fun party. But a bar mitzvah is more than that. It’s a spiritual life event.

This transformation—from ordinary celebration to sacred moment—is the heart of Jewish practice. As Harold Kushner says in To Life!: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

Ari’s Moment to Shine

First of all, I need to give Ari all the credit in the world. He stood in front of everyone—family, friends, our entire community—and led the service, read Torah, and delivered his d’var Torah with a voice that was loud, clear, and thoughtful. This was his moment, and he owned it.

For his d’var Torah, he worked with our friend Doron. They studied together for many sessions as Ari figured out what he wanted to say. Doron pushed him, as his study partner, to dig deep and find his own meaning. His Torah portion, Nitzavim, was almost impossibly perfect for the occasion. “You are all standing today,” it begins—and there was Ari, literally standing before us, taking responsibility for his own Jewish life. He taught us that the Torah “is not in heaven”—it’s not distant or unreachable, reserved for angels or scholars. It’s here with us, in our mouths and in our hearts, in the way we walk, think, and act.

He illustrated this lesson with his own observation. At Camp Ramah, he noticed that the song during the Torah procession was much faster than at Habonim. At first, he thought it was just a different tradition. Then he realized: at Habonim, you walk all the way around the shul, so you need a longer song. At camp, with a smaller space, the song had to be faster—like how the Jeopardy music is exactly 30 seconds because contestants have 30 seconds to answer.

He owned this whole line of thought—taking the general lesson that we need to adapt Judaism to our context and making it his own, all within the framework of Jewish tradition. He was proud of his thinking, and everyone was impressed. The Cantor even cried. This is the kind of thinking of an adult.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched Ari take responsibility for this work. He studied hard for his Torah portion, showing up week after week to prepare. He volunteered for his mitzvah project, packing care packages and writing cards for American soldiers overseas through an organization honoring Stu Wolfer, a Jewish American soldier killed in Iraq who worked with my wife. As Ari pointed out, real tzedakah costs something—it comes from the prime hours of your day, not just leftover time or money.

Ari’s best moment happened at an unlikely point. The Rabbi made a joke during the service. It was kind of an awkward joke, as he’s a new Rabbi and didn’t know the community that well. In fact, this was his first large event. He said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You became a bar mitzvah when you turned 13.” Ari, genuinely surprised, did this very physical double-take—hands to his head, “Oh my God, you’ve blown my brain!” The whole crowd cracked up. That humor, that ease in front of everyone, helping the Rabbi co-lead the congregation—it was pure Ari.

The Power of Ritual

What does it mean for a 13-year-old to become a man? He still can’t drink, vote, or drive. But rituals serve a purpose—they take ordinary events and make it holy.

I used to scoff at the idea of birthday parties: “Why celebrate? It’s just another day.” But I’ve realized that a birthday is an opportunity—it’s a vessel, an opportunity you fill with meaning. It becomes a moment for people to focus their energy on you, to make it special.

A bar mitzvah is a birthday party on steroids. It’s one of the few times in life when friends and family will fly across the country to mark an occasion.

When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—joy with purpose. It’s about sanctifying life itself. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.

The Gift of Presence

In addition to having God’s presence, we also had the presence of all the people who came to celebrate. Those who traveled from out of town, those who participated in the service, and even those who simply woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled out of bed, and came to shul.

This collective energy is what fuels a simcha. As William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Each person who shows up is making a choice about where to direct their time and attention—and that choice matters.

The pandemic taught me just how much. Suddenly it became easy to “attend” a bar mitzvah or funeral virtually. You could drop in on an event without changing out of pajama pants, maybe playing Angry Birds when things got boring. No travel required, no time lost, no real inconvenience.

But something essential was missing. These virtual gatherings felt hollow, and it wasn’t just the technology’s fault. What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time.

This is when I finally understood something I’d always dismissed as a cop-out. In the days of the Temple, we gave animal sacrifices. Today, we’re told, the sacrifice we bring is our time. I used to think this was just a convenient excuse for the absence of ritual offerings. But now it makes perfect sense.

Time is the most valuable thing we have. We each have limited time on earth, and how we spend it defines our lives. When people gather to celebrate together, that collective sacrifice creates something sacred. As William James also wrote, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.

I went into Ari’s bar mitzvah expecting to feel proud, but I experienced so much more. When my friends and family give their time—the most precious thing they have—to sanctify a moment in Ari’s life, something shifts. I’m not just throwing a party. I’m participating in something ancient and sacred, bringing God into the world one shared moment at a time. No wonder words felt inadequate.

Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

The Imperfectionist

I have a secret: I’m not perfect. I’ve stopped trying to be. Why am I telling you this? Isn’t a blog post supposed to help you become a little more perfect? Not this one. This is about giving up the constant struggle for perfection, and in doing so, leading a better life.

The Imperfectionist is the title of Oliver Burkeman’s blog. These essays are compiled into his book Meditations for Mortals, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The title sounds simple, but it has a very British double meaning. I originally thought the word “mortals” was referring to ordinary people, but it also refers to the finitude of life.

I’d been searching for a book of daily meditations—something that could set my day off on the right note. This one has truths I’d always sensed but couldn’t name. I’ve read the whole thing back to front 3 or 4 times this year, for 10 minutes each day while my tea steeps and the house is still silent.

Before this, he wrote columns for The Guardian about productivity, convinced that if he just found the right system, he’d finally get everything done. But each trick only bred more tasks—the emptier his inbox, the faster it refilled. Doing more didn’t bring calm; it just changed the game of whack-a-mole. Eventually he saw that the goal wasn’t to finish his infinite list but to change the way he thought about it. His solution: treat your to-do list like a river, not a bucket—something that flows endlessly past you, from which you can dip a few meaningful things, and let the rest drift on by.

The book draws on wisdom from across centuries—Stoics, Buddhists, existentialists, and even comedians—and packages it all in clear, modern language. It answers many of the key questions of life like:

  • What should I do with my life? Carl Jung says: discover your life task—the thing your deeper self is already moving toward. You don’t choose it; you uncover it. The work isn’t to decide what to become, but to listen closely enough to become what you already are.
  • How do I keep from feeling overwhelmed? Create a done list. Instead of staring at what’s unfinished, notice what you’ve already done. It’s as simple as not deleting the items on your to-do list once they’re completed.
  • What if my life could’ve turned out better? Maybe it could have—but then it wouldn’t have been yours. Simone de Beauvoir marveled that out of hundreds of millions of chances, one sperm met one egg and became her. Change even a tiny detail, and you disappear.1
  • What should I do when I feel completely lost? As comedian Mitch Hedberg put it: “If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house.”

Burkeman even has BBC radio shows exploring these ideas further. I particularly enjoyed An Inconvenient Truth,2 where he argues that convenience culture is a bit of a fraud. Companies try to convince us we need their products to remove life’s inconveniences. He uses the example of a hypothetical baby care app that raises your child without any hassle. Would anyone actually want that? Of course not—because inconvenience is where life is lived.

Each morning, as my tea steeps, I still listen to one meditation and let it settle. I still make mistakes—I get frustrated, I leave tasks undone, I make mistakes. But now I see those things differently. They’re not failures. They’re just life as a mortal.

Note: Much of Burkeman’s work is available for free on Spotify and/or the BBC.

Footnotes

  1. This one is from Burkeman’s book 4000 weeks. ↩︎
  2. Note that you have to listen to these from the bottom up because the most recent episodes are on top. ↩︎
Categories
Human Behavior Life Lessons

Happy All the Time?

One of my wife’s favorite books from growing up was Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. It stands proudly on our bookshelf like a little totem to childhood optimism—a promise that somewhere out there, happiness could be a permanent state if you just figured out how to arrange your life correctly.

For a very long time, I believed that too. I even had a section on my website called “Happiness and Inspiration.” I thought that if I read enough, optimized enough, meditated enough—whatever the adult equivalent of eating my vegetables was—I could eventually arrive at happiness.

But this year, I realized I was chasing the wrong goal.

Continue reading “Happy All the Time?”
Categories
Books / Audiobooks Life Lessons

A September 11th Memorial: Firehouse

Every September 11th, the memories return: the falling towers, the smoke, the senseless loss. This year, I discovered it just a block from my apartment, in the pages of David Halberstam’s Firehouse—written by a neighbor I’d never met.

Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, lived nearby and was searching for meaning after September 11th, just as I am now. He spent two and a half months with our local firehouse to write a memorial not just to the firefighters who died that day, but to the firehouse itself and to all the firefighters in New York.

On that day, the New York Fire Department lost 343 men. Our firehouse lost two entire companies—the 12 men of Ladder 35 and Engine 40—one of the worst losses in the city.

Halberstam takes us inside the firehouse, into a culture normally kept private. It’s an insular brotherhood of men who eat together, live together, play sports together, and help repair each other’s houses. While we see the public face of firefighters—the men running into the Twin Towers when everyone else ran out—we rarely see what lies beneath. As Ray Pfeifer, a veteran of the firehouse, says, “People think they know what we do, but they don’t really know what we do.” They don’t understand the real danger of being in a burning building when there’s a collapse and the exits seem blocked.

The swagger of a firefighter isn’t arrogance—it’s earned. Take the captain’s code: first in, last out of every fire. It’s a point of pride that sets them apart, especially from police officers. While cops climb the ladder toward desk jobs and safer assignments, firefighters advance toward greater danger—lieutenants get closer to the flames than probies, captains closer than lieutenants. It’s a confidence born from their unique relationship with risk, which explains the firehouse joke: “If firefighting were easy, the cops would do it.”

“I have always admired acts of uncommon courage on the part of ordinary people,” Halberstam writes comparing them the heroes of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War that he covered decades earlier. They live in a world of good and evil, where the good guys fight against a purely destructive force. As Angie Callahan, the wife of fallen Captain Frank Callahan, said, “Where else can you be brave in a time of peace, and where else can you do things that few other men do—deeds that save lives?”

To give you a taste of the book, here’s how Halberstam describes Captain Frank Callahan and the two traits that define great firefighters: staying calm and doing the right thing.

Wherever the fire was, though, he was very good at it. Very professional, and very calm. Calm was important; it was one of the most important words in the vocabulary of firemen, and a word they did not use lightly. That and the phrase “do the right thing,” as in, “He was the kind of fireman who always did the right thing.” Staying calm for a fireman was crucial—for unlike most other peacetime jobs, firemen were in the regular business of the suppression of fear. Every call might be a ticket to a burning inferno where there was no light, where falling walls and ceilings cut off exit routes, where a floor could give out, and where a fireman could become disoriented and begin to feel his source of oxygen failing as he grew weaker and as the heat grew more fierce second by second. Therefore keeping calm was a critical part of the job. Every serious fire could trigger powerful impulses of fear, and if an officer shows that fear on the job, if he is not calm and not disciplined himself, then the fear will spread quickly through the men. Calm is the most basic of the positive words that firemen use to describe one another.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

It’s a mindset most of us can’t imagine—being paid to suppress fear while everyone else is allowed to feel it.

Doing the right thing was equally important. When the men speak of a colleague who does the right thing, they mean he will stay at his post under terrible conditions and not panic. Doing the right thing was going in and risking your life for a trapped civilian or fellow fireman. Firemen define each other by their codes of honor, which, because of the nature of the job, are mandatory and must be instinctive.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

But Halberstam reveals that heroism in a firehouse isn’t just about the dramatic moments. It starts with something as simple as washing dishes:

The men have to be able to count not just on their officers, but on their buddies. Doing the right thing also involves small, seemingly unimportant things in the firehouse. It begins when you are a probie, and it means following certain customs, such as being the first one to the sink to wash the pots and pans after meals. The firehouse, like the military, is based on doing little things right, because if someone does not do the little things correctly, then he probably won’t do the big things correctly. Moreover, in a firehouse, if you do not do your share of the routine work, someone else has to do it for you, in which case you pull down the house, and you are a hairbag. You do not wait for someone to tell you to do it, you just do it. There is an additional reason: Between moments of fearsome danger, there is often a lot of slack time at a firehouse, and if you do not have codes like this, then it would be very easy for people to become lazy and get in a rut, and for the entire house to lose its sense of cohesion and its purpose.

David Halberstam, Firehouse

This September 11th, I’m thinking less about the towers that fell and more about the men who ran toward them. Halberstam’s Firehouse reminds us that heroism isn’t reserved for history’s darkest moments—it’s practiced daily by ordinary people who’ve chosen extraordinary lives. They’re still out there, still running toward danger, still doing the right thing.

The inside covers of Firehouse feature black and white photographs of the chalkboard frozen in time—exactly as it appeared on September 11th.
Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

What I Wish I Learned in College

Colleges teach you how to think. What they should teach is how to live a life that matters.

On the train up to Yale for an event, I told my friend Cherie, “Whenever I go back, I get this feeling of anxiety. It’s not about other people judging me—it’s about me judging myself. Am I doing enough? Am I worthy of having gone here?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah. I have that too. It’s called Yale-ing.”

That was it exactly—the quiet, constant self-surveillance that comes from trying to measure up to an imaginary, idealized version of yourself. Yale searches for the most driven, unconventional, obsessive people it can find and gives them space to run. What looks like drive from the outside is often anxiety on the inside—a constant need to prove themselves again and again. They’re insecure overachievers.

Continue reading “What I Wish I Learned in College”
Categories
Life Lessons Meditation

In Praise of Idleness

For most of history, people worked so they could have leisure. We’ve somehow flipped it: now we have leisure so we can work better.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that being busy was the same thing as being valuable. If your calendar is full, you must be important. If your inbox is overflowing, you must be needed. If you never stop moving, you must be living a good life.

It’s a strange inversion of history. The ancient Greeks even had a word for this: scholē. It meant “leisure,” and it’s the root of our word school. Leisure wasn’t a reward for hard work; it was the highest state of being. Work was a means to secure leisure, and leisure was where life actually happened — in thinking, creating, learning, conversing.

The early idea of the “liberal arts” came from the same place. They weren’t job training. They were the “arts befitting a free person” — skills in language, reasoning, mathematics, and music. They were for people who had the time and freedom to explore ideas without having to justify every minute in terms of productivity.

Nearly a century ago, philosopher Bertrand Russell made a sharp case for idleness in his essay In Praise of Idleness. He argued that civilization would gain far more from shorter work hours and longer stretches of leisure than from endless production. For Russell, leisure wasn’t a pause from life — it was where life happened. It was the true incubator of culture, thought, and creativity.

Continue reading “In Praise of Idleness”
Categories
Judaism Life Lessons

What $1 Can Buy

This is a story about an experiment in giving.

I’m used to walking down the street and seeing someone sitting on the sidewalk with a sign:

“Homeless. Please Help.”

And I feel it—that tension. That deep, emotional tug to help.

But then the mental calculus starts. There are so many great causes I could be supporting with that dollar. I could give to a food pantry. Or support addiction recovery. Or donate to a shelter with wraparound services. Or contribute to an organization that tackles root causes like housing policy or mental health care.

Continue reading “What href=”https://schlaff.com/wp/what-1-can-buy/#more-11165″ class=”more-link” Can Buy”
Categories
Life Lessons

Ivy League Trading Cards: The Heroes of Early Women’s Education

When I wrote the blog post last year, Yale Needs Women, I found myself cringing at how President Kingman Brewster handled coeducation. He didn’t so much throw open the gates as grudgingly unhook the latch—mostly because Princeton had just started to admit women, and Yale’s admit rates were taking a hit. Brewster famously insisted on still admitting 1,000 men each year to ensure Yale’s mission of “producing male leaders” wasn’t disrupted. The women? They could come—so long as they didn’t get in the way.

Yale, in short, was pretty awful. But many Ivies were pretty bad. Dartmouth women arrived in 1972 to frat chants, hate mail, and banners reading “Better Dead Than Coed.”

But there were some heroes in the fight for coeducation. I thought I’d use ChatGPT to create some trading cards of the Heroes of Ivy League Coeducation. Here’s my first attempt. At the bottom, I’ll show you how you can help me out!

Continue reading “Ivy League Trading Cards: The Heroes of Early Women’s Education”
Categories
Life Lessons

Grant Me the Wisdom to Do More Than Cope

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer

I first heard these words in my twenties and thought they were the pinnacle of self-help wisdom. It’s known as the Serenity Prayer—famous in Alcoholics Anonymous. Here was a path to peace, proven in the crucible of real suffering.

Continue reading “Grant Me the Wisdom to Do More Than Cope”
Categories
Kids Life Lessons

Why E-Sports Are Sports—And Why it Matters

My son Ari is playing on his middle school’s E-Sports Team. Each week, he and his classmates log on to play Super Smash Brothers against kids from other schools. Their uniforms are school-branded hoodies with their names printed on the back.

At first, it felt weird. A school E-Sports team? I’d always thought about sports as a physical thing where the coach would run him so ragged outside that he’d come home tired enough to fall asleep in his soup. Sports were supposed to leave him sore and grass-stained, not sitting in a classroom tapping buttons a controller.

Continue reading “Why E-Sports Are Sports—And Why it Matters”