My Confusion and I

Channel 4 has for 2 weeks now showed  a tv-program called Jewish mum of the year. This tv-program is suppose to be a competition between jewish mothers competing in being the best mum by planning a Bar Mitzva party or match making and so on. For non-jewish people this might seem like a good program to get an insight of the jewish world and how the typical jewish mum behaves. It is an opportunity to see if they behave differently than non-jewish mums and what makes them so special. However, for a jew, this program is a cringe-fest. Most of us have a jewish mum that definitely would qualify to be the typical "yiddishe mame" but at least my mum is very different from all of the mothers competing to be the best one. Watching it for 2 weeks now has made me realise how stereotypical the women are on the show and no wonder some people find jews strange. We are portrayed as naive, spoiled, stupid and, in lack of a better word, annoying. I know some of my friends might agree with thi...

Last week it was the Jewish New Year. The difference between the Jewish New Year and the normal is that the Jewish holiday is the beginning of a week of repentence and asking for forgiveness whilst the normal new year is about celebration and fireworks. We do celebrate but there are many things leading up to Yom Kippur, the day of judgement. We will get judged by G-d and therefore need to repent our sins we've done this year. For many people this might seem like a strange idea, how can we repent our sins for a whole year and not only that, we repent for everyones sins and not just our own. To be honest I didn't really understand the whole point when I was younger but the last couple of years it has brought another meaning to me. We all make mistakes in our lives and no one is perfect. As much as we want to believe we've never hurt anyone or even ourselves we do it all the time. Just the way you might look and someone can hurt that person and we might not even be aware of ...