Recently in Jewish Holidays Category

After Shabbat dinner this Friday, I was reading The Yankee at the Seder to our kids for the first time -- wow, this is an incredibly beautiful and moving story, gorgeously illustrated. It's simple: just after Lee has surrendered, a Jewish family in Virginia hosts a Jewish Union soldier for Seder. I don't easily get choked up and am not the teary-eyed type at all, but with this story of people putting aside resentments and grudges to celebrate Passover with a wandering Jewish lad from the enemy's side I had to stop many times and put my voice back together again because it kept cracking while my eyes clouded. I've never had this experience before with reading a book aloud. I discovered it thanks to a roundup of kids' books in the online magazine Tablet.

Because of my sore knee, it follows that there this is no God.

I was really despairing about the seaworthiness of our old sukkah for this recently inaugurated Jewish calendar year of 5770. With Sukkot approaching this Friday night, with my wife having been sick all last week with a (suspiciously pre-seasonal) flu and me juggling work and filling in as Mr. Mom (hence the earlier break from blogging), I had been worriedly aware that the sukkah frame in our backyard looked near collapse. It's a frame of steel pipes linked by joints where the screw sockets in the joints that hold the pipes together had all rusted and been stripped out so that I could neither screw nor unscrew them. If I'd been more careful in previous years about disassembling the structure promptly before the Seattle rains, this wouldn't have happened.

Among the top 10 lies about Jews and Judaism that I listed a while back, No. 3 was:

3.) Judaism has no apocalyptic vision of the End of the World, similar to that in Christianity's book of Revelation and certainly not one with a particular year as the deadline for wrapping up world history, as in the modern 2012 Mayan calendar doomsday prediction.

When I got home last night ready to start the 25-hour fast of Tisha b'Av (no food, water, or bathing from sunset till dark the next day), mourning the destruction of the two Jerusalem Temples and much else that's tragic in Jewish history, the temperature was 105 degrees. Amazing! In Seattle, where thanks to the mellow, cool weather, nobody but the rich have air-conditioning in their homes! Today's not much better -- as I write at 6 pm it's 97 degrees. Still more than three hours left to go. Both our home and our synagogue are cooled only by fans, though thank God the office where I work is nicely air conditioned. My wife is having a less easy time of it at home. Luckily, our kids, who are too young to fast, don't seem much bothered. 

This blog entry is being published automatically. I'm off Friday and Saturday for Shavuot, when Jews around the world observe the two-day festival that recalls the giving of the 10 Commandments at Mt. Sinai and the associated mass conversion of...

I'm in Southern California visiting with family and noted something fascinating in the current yearly calendar published by the Reform Jewish temple where I grew up and had my bar mitzvah. The Jewish festival of Shavuot is this coming Friday...

This coming Friday and Saturday, Jews around the world will recall and celebrate the giving of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments are the briefest possible distillation of the 613 Biblical commandments -- or alternatively, of the...

"Gee, I think the toughest thing about being Orthodox would be the kosher food," my dad has occasionally said to me. He's always enjoyed a good restaurant meal and, in truth, fine dining is not among the Orthodox community's top...

I received an email from a Jewish historian and journalist I respect very much, including this thought:I envy your finding [spiritual life] "at home" so to speak in Judaism, but alas the worship of a Jewish God who found the...

I've learned to temper both my thoughts and how I express them -- a little bit! -- since I wrote a 1998 piece for First Things about the Holocaust in light of the Hebrew Bible that was subsequently denounced in...

National Review Online thoughtfully offers a nice little roundup of a recommended Passover reading. Marshall Breger recommends:Aaron Wildavsky's Moses as a Political Leader assists one in understanding the Bible generally and the Passover story specifically in political terms. The political...

In the New York Times this morning, the day before Passover, the usually thoughtful and humane columnist David Brooks invites us to re-enslave ourselves to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Not just Jews, either, but everybody. That's the unstated message of his...

Have you seen the new Nicolas Cage movie Knowing? It's actually pretty effective as science fiction entertainment, but what fascinates me about it is the weird way it raises questions about destiny or predestination that have been bugging me all...

To my surprise tonight, I returned home from work about 8 pm to discover my two oldest children speaking Yiddish. They are Ezra and Naomi, ages 7 and 6, hereafter to be designated by their accustomed nicknames Ezzie and Noma....