Monthly Archives: April 2014

I’m visiting Los Angeles, a city where I lived in the 1970s. The traffic is orders of magnitude worse than in those years and the delays are appalling. Of course, there were many exceptions and memory is often rosy about … Continue reading →

We’ve already asked four questions during Seder.  We marched out of Egypt, once again, on our way to something called חירות, cherut, freedom. We’re about to witness the most dramatic Divine intervention into the natural world, the splitting of the … Continue reading →

It’s counterintuitive, but many good solutions are. Perhaps rather than obsessing on our own personal feelings, senses of entrapment, hopes and aspirations, we should focus our attention, exclusively, on the redemption of the Jewish People, both in Israel and in exile together … Continue reading →

Our sages describe the slavery of Egypt as being so all-encompassing that even our thoughts were no longer our own. Some accounts say that God Himself had to provide us the strength even to  groan in misery–we were no longer capable to cry out and … Continue reading →

I find it extremely sad that most “modern”, “innovative”, “relevant” rewrites to the Haggadah begin with removing “the boring parts”, all the rabbinic teaching that actually makes up the bulk of the liturgy. Indeed, it is exactly these Mishnaic and … Continue reading →

“הַמְחַדֵּשׁ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּכָל יוֹם תָּמִיד, Hamchadeish b’tuvo b’chol yom tamid, Who renews with His Goodness every day, continuously/eternally”, is repeated daily in our morning prayer. קְדשִׁים תִּהְיוּ כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אֲנִי, Kedoshim ti’hyu ki kadosh ani, Be holy because I am holy, (Vayikra 19:2). We’re mandated … Continue reading →

Words are critical. Of all humanity’s many achievements, language is by far our greatest. Dismissing the obvious, trendy and anti-humanistic “observation” that “other animals also employ language”, from the dances of bees to the songs of whales, we’ve never detected … Continue reading →

The to-do list this time of year is always daunting.  Not only do we face the yearly accounting that goes with a thorough house-cleaning (what to keep/what to discard?, what of the “things” I’ve generated, looking back on them, have … Continue reading →