The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless.

Most of the times that I think about my relationship to Judaism, I not only accuse myself of a shallowness, but I feel certain that there's a shallowness there. That's not a bad thing, really.

The way that I feel about my Jewish identity has been really radically changed by events in life. Like, becoming a writer is one. Having children is another. And getting older and watching, you know, my parents and grandparents get older has been another, the seasons of - being witness to the seasons of life and wanting to have some kind of infrastructure to deal with it, to cope with them. Ritual has become more important to me as I've gotten older. It's not always religious ritual, but it often borrows from Judaism.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

If it weren't my life, I wouldn't have believed it.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?