Passover 5771 may be past, but its lessons return in last week’s parashah (B’ha’alot’kha). Of all our holidays, Passover ranks supreme in that we were delivered from Egypt specifically with Passover in mind. Whatever else we do as Jews follows from this singular event in our past. In Temple days, therefore, the Passover sacrifice was …
Parashat Tzav Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman We can chart the last half century by the kinds of seder we have had. Fifty years ago, we celebrated an old-country model brought here by grandparents who davened it through in Hebrew from the Maxwell House Haggadah. Some of us remember it nostalgically, but in fact, we rarely …
Continue reading “A Passover Question That Keeps Us Up All Night”
by Jill Menkes Kushner From Reform Judaism, Winter 1995 Reprinted With Permission Temple has become a place to ask questions about God; to think; to wonder; to explore feelings that seem out of place in the everyday world. My rediscovery of Judaism has been and continues to be much like an archeological expedition, a slow …
by Sherry Israel From The Reconstructionist, Spring 1995 Reprinted with permission. In any discussion of community and contemporary American Jewry, it is essential that we pay attention to the wide context in which we live. Too often, we seem to forget that the complex realities of Jewish life today did not arise in a vacuum, …
Continue reading “Ethnicity, Geography and Jewish Community”
From “The Jewish Journal,” September 26, 1997 Reprinted with permission. You would think that in a city with 519,000 Jews and at least 175 synagogues of all different strains, Judith — she requested her last name not be used — would be able to pick a place of worship to spend the High Holidays. But …
Lawrence Bush From Tikkun, September/October 1995 Vol. 10, No. 5 Reprinted with Permission If Noah had been able to pray before the flood-rains fell, the world might not have been destroyed. The Zohar implies this when it portrays Noah emerging from the ark, breaking into tears at the sight of the drowned, decimated landscape, and …