holidays
On Shofar Blowing and Racism
מִן-הַמֵּצַר, קָרָאתִי יָּהּ; עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ Out of the tight place I called to the LORD; God answered me ...
Why Do So Many Jews Ignore Shavuot?
Shavuot has become the Rodney Dangerfield of Jewish holidays.
Reimagining A Holocaust Classic
Music and Judaism go hand in hand. Every Shabbat service, lifecycle event, Jewish holiday or Israeli holiday has a specific song ...
From Slavery to Freedom, From Grief to Joy
In ten days we will be surrounded by these same boxes in a different house. After nine months of preparation—purging ...
Passover, Shabbat and Rat Poison – Poisoning Ourselves With the Poison Used Against Us
This year the first day of Passover fell on Shabbat. Can we find a deeper connection between Shabbat and Passover?Perhaps we ...
The Missed Kitniyot Opportunity
Passover 2016 hasn’t even begun, and I’m already frustrated with so much talk about food. Well, this year it’s not ...
Passover, Then and Now
Pesach (Passover) is my favorite holiday. I enjoy reading about the journey from slavery to freedom and the journey of ...
Passover: Festival of Binaries
Leavened versus unleavened; inside versus outside; Jew versus non-Jew; life versus death. Passover is a festival of absolute binary distinctions that we ritually link together in order to affirm our identity as the people God brought out of Egypt and to pass that identity on to our children. This is the Torah's equivalent of “Jewish Identity for Dummies.”
The Global History of Ma Nishtana
Each year, Jewish children around the world learn the Four Questions. After all the image of the small child chanting ...
Sephardic Songs Add Merriment to Purim
And what is a drinking party without drinking songs? As in other Jewish communities, drinking alcohol was part of the ...