My favorite dessert stood before me, the smell of fresh pastry along with the creamy scent of its cheese. I wanted to have some, but decided not for religious reasons I felt more ardently to observe but for religious reasons I politely declined, and calmly and confidently sat down at the table with my family, watching them enjoying it. I remember automatically thinking something negative, but that moment melted away into something else. 

I wrote in my book, Better Than You Wished For, “According to the Talmud of the Land of Israel (Sotah 8:3), the world, including the Torah, was made by God with black fire on white fire. The black are the words we read and white is the parchment they are written on, but we can understand the white fire more as the ‘words’ in between the written words. When we look carefully at the actual Torah scroll, we see that there is more white than black. When the Torah scroll is raised for all to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)