Ben Shiv’im L’Seivah, says Pirkei Avot (5:21) – “The age of seventy brings fullness of years.” What an historic privilege it has been to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of a free and...
I have noted previously in this column that God’s name appears nowhere in the Book of Esther. Countless Seder celebrants cite the parallel exclusion of Moses from the Passover Haggadah. Moses’ conspicuous absence may be...
He was a character straight out of the novels of Charles Dickens. Scholars have long found Dickens’ attitude toward Jews problematic. The character Fagin in the novel Oliver...
In my youth, I was privileged to attend a truly outstanding congregational Hebrew School, under the leadership of Rabbi Asher Bar-Zev. I remember vividly sitting among particularly unruly and inattentive Hebrew high school students, when...
BARCELONA — This Passover I am in Spain, land of Jewish ghosts. Spain was once a place where Jewish piety and poetry flourished. Now it is full of neglected sites and abandoned synagogues. Fewer than 50,000 Jews remain.
The title of this weekly column, “Say Little, Do Much,” is (while partially in reference to its brevity) taken from Pirkei Avot 1:15, where it is listed as a favorite teaching of Shammai. Shammai was...
By time we say “Kol Dichfin Yeitei v’Yeichol, Kol Ditzrich Yeitei v’Yifsach” at our Seders (“Let all who are hungry come and eat, all who are in need come and observe the Passover”), we have...
