Lexi Lampner

Your 18Forty Parsha Guide is a weekly newsletter exploring five major takeaways from the weekly parsha. Receive this newsletter every week in your inbox by subscribing here. Questions or feedback? Email Rivka Bennun Kay at Shabbosreads@18forty.org. We live in an era of hyper-visibility. Your social media presence announces your existence. Your LinkedIn profile catalogs your achievements. To be unseen feels like a form of death.

Jewish law is often asked to do something deceptively difficult: to decide what a non-Jewish holiday really is. It does so not only by examining its origins but by looking carefully at what it means now. This becomes particularly challenging in the realm of secular or quasi-secular American holidays—some of which began as explicitly Christian, pagan, or otherwise foreign but, through cultural evolution, have shed much of their religious meaning.

November is National Adoption Month and we had the pleasure of speaking with Chavie Bruk, who courageously shares her story with grace, wisdom, and levity. Married in her early twenties in 2006, Chavie Bruk moved to Montana with her husband on shlichus (emissaries of Jewish outreach) to establish a Jewish presence in the vast, picturesque state. Her husband “really connected with the people and there was space for a permanent [Jewish] center,” so the newlyweds created one.