As Erev Shabbat approaches, my little family is all getting ready for shul and even the toddler is excited. He’s running around the apartment singing “Shabbat shalom, hey!” and keeps saying how much he wants to go to shul. The moment we walk into the doors of our synagogue he starts running around the lobby. We wrangle him to remind him we are going into shul, not only into the building. He refuses to calm down.

I am a lucky girl. I have two women who I call mom. Well, one I call mommie and the other emma (Hebrew for mother), but that’s just semantics.

Last Pesach, I heard a sermon given in which my friend and rabbi used the phrase “faith is packing your timbrel” and I got super fixated on this concept and have found it running through my head in difficult times, a sort of mantra to reflect upon.