Ted Riter

Hi Reader, I'm back from Burning Man. Out there, they call everywhere else “the default world,” with the assumption being that for one week a year, a small spot in the Nevada desert is the real thing, and the rest of life is just... default. I get it. And...I'm not ready to accept this binary. My life outside the gates is full of real meaning too. My marriage, my community, the men, women and couples I get to sit with. I didn't leave something more alive for something less. What I did find...

Hi Reader, Tonight's a full moon. If your social media feed is anything like mine, it's probably full of teachings about the Sturgeon moon, the lunar eclipse and a deeper meaning of these celestial happenings. All of that is well above my paygrade. However, I can tell you that tonight's full moon coincides with the end of the week, a time of rest. And, in my tradition, a time to be re-ensouled. Tonight's full moon is also the halfway point through the Hebrew month of Elul, which is sometimes...

Reader, I have something to confess. In 2016, I was on a dating app, and my profile didn’t say I was a rabbi. Not because it was a secret. Because I didn’t think anyone would want to date a rabbi. Too many preconceptions, too weird, too much. I figured I’d let someone meet me in person and then offer the big reveal. Leslie and I met on that app. And, on our first date she found out. She married me anyway, rabbi and all. I’m telling you this because I spent a long time managing which parts of...

Hi Reader, click image to register Every year, building up to Labor Day, tens of thousands of people build a temporary city in the Nevada desert, then take the whole thing apart and leave nothing behind. Not a scrap. There's even a term for anything left on the ground that shouldn't be there: MOOP, Matter Out Of Place. Leslie (my wife) and I are teaching a session out there this year called Your Partner Is Not MOOP. It's a playful offering for those navigating the dust, but the practice...

Reader, Tuesday night is a full moon. If you’re outside this week, look up. You’re looking at the same moon that’s marked a quiet Jewish holiday for thousands of years, one built around a single idea: LOVE. It’s called Tu b’Av, and it’s one of the least taught festivals in the Jewish calendar with no special meal, no liturgy, barely a ritual to its name. Its old name is Chag HaAhava - "The day of love". I love that it’s quiet. Tradition didn’t build elaborate machinery around it, the way it...

Reader, There is a pattern I have watched in couples navigating impossible seasons… and one I lived through myself. During the years of infertility in my first marriage, we quietly drifted apart… and inside that drift, I disappeared. Not all at once, not dramatically. I can’t speak for her. But my fear, my grief, my loneliness went underground because I had no language for them and nowhere to put them. The focus was entirely on my wife’s experience… and in many ways, it made sense that it...

Sometimes life doesn’t “change,” Reader, it shakes. Butterfly emerging from earthquake; AI created Bruce Feiler, in his book Life is in the Transitions, calls these moments lifequakes: those seasons when the ground shifts under the life we’ve built, and we realize what used to fit doesn’t anymore. Though I first read this book when it came out in 2020 (appropriately, during COVID), it’s a framework I refer to again and again. Chip Conley, also a great teacher in this space and founder of the...

Reader - I’m sickened, and yet not surprised, by the reporting coming out about online communities that teach and normalize sexual abuse…spaces where men trade tactics for drugging and violating women, and getting away with it. Let me say this plainly: this isn’t “edgy.” This isn’t “kink.” This is violence. And the most important thing I want to say, as a human being (not simply because I’m a husband or father of a daughter), and as a man who trains men, is this: Men need to handle men. Not...

On a scale of 1-10…Reader...how exhausted are you in your relationship? Or have you been in a past relationship? If you’ve ever felt quietly exhausted by what it takes to keep connection alive… this one might hit. What We’re Talking About There’s a term for this: Mankeeping. And yes, this pattern can show up in any couple. I’m naming the most common version I see. Mankeeping is the often-invisible emotional, relational, and logistical labor that one partner does to maintain the other...