I love the paradoxes of Sukkot: a holiday with profound universalistic theological overtones that became politically important for particularists; a holiday that uses the metaphor of the sukkah both to imagine the canopy under which[…]
The decision of which siddur a congregation should use is both a significant choice for any congregation, and a choice whose importance should not be exaggerated. Purchasing a new siddur is a significant expense for[…]
A mature adult faith demands that we take in difficult, painful facts and allow them to become part of our understandings of God, our language of faith and connection. Hanukah is not a holiday about[…]
This term, first used by medieval commentators (see Zimmerman, p. 27, note 6), is, itself, an inaccuracy: Rabbi Zera merely describes a stringent practice which Babylonian Jewish women had taken upon themselves. Thus, the correct[…]
Every Passover, we read the haggadah at the seder and we are reminded of the obligation to imagine ourselves being redeemed from Egypt. For my ancestors, this may have been possible. They were regularly oppressed[…]
The creators of the Mishnaic Haggadah structured it as a work of Greco-Roman rhetorical oratory, the most common and effective means of persuasion available in their culture, precisely in order to achieve the liturgical goal[…]
For over half a century, scholars have argued that the Seder might be understood as a modified Roman symposium. Both the Roman symposium and the Rabbis’ Passover meal, Barukh Bokser observes, include “the use of[…]
…the Israelites departed from Egypt, a country where this bread-beer was the only obtainable or national alcoholic luxury, to the land flowing with milk, honey, and wine: instead of poverty-stricken slaves, they became a free[…]
…I contend that the words in Exodus xii. 19, “that which is leavened,” which in Hebrew are rendered מַחְמֶצֶת, or machmetzeth, was a beer similar to the modern Egyptian paste or bread beer (Boosa), now[…]
…the substance now rendered as “that which is leavened” (Exodus xii. 19) was, in reality, the Hebrew beer, a substance resembling the present Arab bread-beer Boosa, a fermented and eatable paste of the consistency of[…]