General Topics

Curses

The famous or infamous Israeli secular left wing politician, Yossi Sarid, wrote an article in the Israeli paper Haaretz (3/22/09) in response to a report that a prominent Israeli Sephardi rabbi had cursed him. In the words of his article, the important rabbi said, “After the reading of the Megilla on Purim, the names of the wicked and the righteous…

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HaTikva Again

I have written before about the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva. I wrote about how difficult the words made it for an Israeli Arab, however positively committed and supportive of the State of Israel he might be, to sing a song about a Jewish people yearning to be free. This time I am coming at it from a very different position.…

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Memorial Days

It is the season of memorial days! All the major ultra-Orthodox rabbis of the 1950’s refused to accept the Israeli Holocaust Day, Yom HaShoah. Instead they wanted to include the tragedy of the Holocaust within an existing fast day, Tisha B’Av, The Ninth of Av, when we mourn the destruction of two Temples. They argued that the tragedy of the…

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General Topics

Memorial Days

It is the season of memorial days! All the major ultra-Orthodox rabbis of the 1950’s refused to accept the Israeli Holocaust Day, Yom HaShoah. Instead they wanted to include the tragedy of the Holocaust within an existing fast day, Tisha B’Av, The Ninth of Av, when we mourn the destruction of two Temples. They argued that the tragedy of the…

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Women on Pesach

I have always suspected that Pesach, Passover, is a cunning plot to so overburden Jewish women with exhausting preparation and mind-numbing confusion over the most improbable and irrational rituals that they end up so worn out and confused that there could be no chance whatsoever of their even thinking of challenging male authority. After all, if the demands of religion…

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Pesach 2009

Nothing typifies the ambivalence of Jewish life today more than the famous Midrash that is repeated in the Talmud: Rebbi Shmuel Bar Nachman in the name of Rebbi Yonatan said, “[At the Red sea] the angels wanted to sing a song before the Holy One Blessed is He, but He rebuked them saying, ‘My handiwork is drowning in the sea…

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