Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.

There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do.

You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.

We're in a hyper-connected world, and there's a crisis of connection. The first thing that God says about woman and man in the Bible is that it's not right for humans to be alone. Social media interaction cannot take the place of face-to-face interaction. If anything, it prevents us from doing that. We're staring into our screens for so long that we're forgetting to look at the people directly in front of us.

Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.

Adam and Eve - and especially Eve - are victims of the greatest character assassination the world has ever known. Eve is not secondary. Eve, if anything, is the great initiator in the story. She's the first independent woman. For me, rediscovering that Eve was the greatest bad**s women of all time was a revelation.

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.