Pesah

Shabbat Hol HaMo’ed Pesah
By Margaret Klein

We’ve cleaned, cooked, celebrated. We’ve had seders that lasted until midnight. Now it is time to celebrate again. Shabbat in the middle of Passover. A double celebration. We don’t want to sound like the Israelites wandering around in the desert but we’re tired, so tired. Why did we do all this? Is this really what God requires or are we serving some other master? It is intriguing that the root for slave Ayin-Bet-Dalet is the same root for work, for the Temple service, for worship and for servant. Did the Israelites merely substitute one slavery for another’serving God? I don’t think so.

Then this week’s Torah portion comes. Moses has just found the Israelites dancing around the Golden Calf. He smashes the tablets. He is angry and tired. He wonders what all of this is for. God demands that Moses return up the mountain again. Moses protests and Read More >

To Love Another Person Is to See the Face of God
By Laurie Levy

“To love another person is to see the face of God”
(Jean Valjean in Les Miserables)

I recently saw the show Spring Awakening on Broadway. It is the story of a group of adolescents dealing with the mystifying and consuming discovery of their sexual awakening – all the more dramatic because it is set against the backdrop of late 19th century Germany where information and education about sex was nonexistent. The show is no less relevant for today, when more than we would ever want our children to know about sex is but a website away. Even our Sages understood the need to embrace the awakening of one’s longings and desires in the springtime and so on the Shabbat that falls during Passover, we read Shir haShirim, The Song of Songs, a poem filled with images of spring and nature and about Read More >

Appreciating Freedom
By Neal L. Spevack

How can one fully appreciate freedom?

The abstention from eating hametz (leavened bread products) is a symbolic activity designed to help us appreciate our freedom. And the absence and presence of hametz in the house can be thought of as a symbol of the morally right and wrong choices acted upon in our life. In the Passover holiday we imagine ourselves as slaves. `Avadim hayinu, “we were slaves,” is the first response in the Haggadah to the Four Questions that the youngest family member recites at the Seder table.

In the home the seder observance of Passover is filled with symbols such as the four cups of wine, the four questions, the four sons, karpas (vegetables), the shank bone, the roasted egg, salt water, matzah, maror (bitter herbs) and so on. One symbol, the salt water, reminds us of the tears of our ancestors as they experienced Read More >

You! Open Up for Them!
By Rabbi David Greenstein

One of the famous sections of the traditional Haggadah’the Passover discussion of the Exodus that takes place at the seder’is the description of the questions of the Four Children and the suggested responses to them. Roughly translated, the four children are: the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one and the one who does not know how to ask.

This section has had much attention devoted to it in the
voluminous literature that has developed around the themes of the Haggadah. Especially today, with our concerns for Jewish continuity and the multiplicity of ways that people have adopted as their own expressions of Jewish identity, there has been a lot of discussion around ways of understanding these ‘types.’ One problem has been to fruitfully use these constructs without falling into the trap of stereotyping people.

But even more particularly problematic is the image of the Read More >