A common critique of religion is that it exists only to blunt our fear of death through the deployment of comforting fairytales, replacing life’s great and unsettling unknowns with visions of an afterlife which are — if not less unsettling — at least less unknown.

Such a mindset, however, is foreign to the Torah, which accepts with equanimity that death is a part of life.

Los Angeles is a place where you can very easily feel like you’re always trying to keep up with the Joneses. People here have nice cars and nicer homes. They wear designer clothes and Rolexes and belong to Equinox. They go on beautiful vacations, which they display in perfect family portraits on Instagram. With all this pressure to be equal to our wealthy peers, coupled with the high costs of housing, gas and food, it may feel like you can never get ahead.

Every March, my mother laid out an incredible Nowruz (“New Day,” also known as Persian New Year) arrangement, called a Sofreh Haft-Sin, on the dining room table, with specific items symbolizing spring and rebirth. And every Shabbat in March, my father complained that he had no room for wine, bread, Shabbat dinner and his newspaper.

…there is one notebook I’ve kept up regularly for a decade: my commonplace book. The slim red book is filled with quotes, lines from books and songs and poems and conversations that stuck with me. Nothing is my original thought, but all of it struck me as meaningful when I wrote it down.

Astronomers have found rocky exoplanets about the size of Earth, and some of them reside in the habitable zones of their stars, where conditions are just right for liquid water. But no one has yet discovered evidence of life in another planet’s atmosphere, nor detected radio transmissions wafting from the direction of a distant world.

Sometimes the attention cast toward American culture comes at the expense of foreigners knowing about their own countries. Canadians, a 2008 study found, tend to know more about American history than about their own national history.

Gershon Schusterman: Death is not in and of itself tragic. The circumstances surrounding it determine the appropriate response. The end of a holy life well lived, can be a call for celebration.

…we don’t see our imperfections until we’ve completed our first drafts. This isn’t a problem. It’s a beautiful and essential part of human nature. We don’t and we can’t achieve perfection. We can only try and try again where we fall short.

Our parsha, Shemini, lists the restrictions for what animals we are permitted to eat, and the more complex the life form, the more constraints are put in place. So, the simplest life forms — fruits and vegetables — have no stipulations. Fish have only one restriction — that they have fins and scales. By contrast, the most complex level of life — cattle, sheep, etc. — have the most rules.

This week on Unorthodox, we’re all connected.

Our Jewish guest is Julie Platt, the new chair of the Jewish Federations of North America, and the mother of some very talented Jewish children. She tells us about the work JFNA is doing to help Jews in Ukraine, and shares her theories on why so many Camp Ramah alums end up on Broadway, her sons included.

In discussing the way that the international community had embraced the cause of Ukrainian nationalism, Tobin pointed out that the same respect ought to be accorded to Zionism and the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty over their homeland.

The United States of America is the most powerful nation in the world. But it is facing tests of its credibility in multiple theaters of conflict. What do America’s adversaries believe about the capacity and will of the United States to respond with force? Has America’s deterrent power diminished? If so, can it be built up again?