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Recently in Jewish Holidays Category

Monday December 21, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

A Fantastic Find of a Kids' Book

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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.

Wednesday December 9, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

With Chanukah Approaching, My Knee Hurts

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

You think I'm kidding but this line of reasoning is commonly heard from devotees of evangelizing atheism like Richard Dawkins. It's the argument from seemingly poor, botched, or suboptimal design. Yet the Hebrew Bible alerts us early on that creation is afflicted with a "lack" or "deficiency" (chesron), as Jewish philosophy terms it. The Maharal, whom we talked about recently, discussed this theme in his book on Chanukah, Ner Mitzvah, which is why I mention it now. Chanukah arrives this coming Friday night.

The human knee appears to be ill-suited to its task, hence the prevalence of knee pain, similar to that of back pain, and so on. I've had trouble from this recurrent minor soreness, brought on by running. So here's a website devoted to cataloguing instances of apparently faulty designs like my knee that, so goes the argument, a creator would not allow in his creatures.

That is a theological argument, not a scientific one, based on the premise that Dawkins & Co. know what a God would or wouldn't do if that God existed which he does not. As Dawkins writes in The Greatest Show on Earth, regarding the extravagantly lengthy and circuitous recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, "Any intelligent designer would have hived off the laryngeal nerve on its way down, replacing a journey of many meters by one of a few centimeters." Atheists think they've discovered a devastating "Ah hah! Gotcha!" sort of a response to religious believers who, it's assumed, never realized that nature has a certain painful lack of perfection built into it.

Thursday October 1, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

The Sukkot Miracle of 5770

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.

The whole frame, on which you drape a heavy canvas wall and a bamboo roof, was listing terribly to one side from kids swinging on it. Yes, we've had that same frame in the same place for the two years past. I know that's not the respectful way to treat a holy item like a sukkah. At least the canvas and bamboo had been safely stored in the garage since last Sukkot.

Anyway I assumed that I couldn't tighten or loosen any of the joints. Under the weight of the canvas walls, something was bound to give. The whole structure would collapse and we'd be left without a sukkah to eat our festival meals in. It's my favorite Jewish holiday so that would have really saddened me, along with my family.

But then the miracle happened!

Wednesday September 30, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

Sukkot: Judaism's Holiday of the Apocalypse

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.

So here comes the festival of Sukkot, starting this Friday night, to correct the misunderstanding. My essay for Beliefnet on this too little appreciated feature of the Jewish calendar is here. Excerpt:

Thursday July 30, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

Synchronicity and Tisha b'Av Amid Record-Breaking Heat for Seattle

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. 

I believe in synchronicity, the idea that juxtapositions of time and events not only may seem meaningful but do in fact convey real meaning. See Jung on that. If a tough fast comes on a day of record-breaking heat, I assume there's meaning in it for me, and I don't see it as a congratulatory "Job well done!" sort of pat on the back from the Holy One Blessed Be He. 

You can't read the book of Lamentations, whose chanting represents the centerpiece of Tisha b'Av, without seeing suffering as a message. The book recounts the suffering that accompanied the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Much of it had to do with physical deprivation. When you fast, you neither feel nor look your best. So this verse from Lamentations caught my attention, referring to the Nazirites who previously had been specimens of health; now, "Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick" (4:8). That's about how I think I must appear right now.

Friday May 29, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

On Shavuot, Thinking of Converso Jews

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...

Tuesday May 26, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

Erasing Shavuot

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...

Sunday May 24, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

What Is Torah?

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...

Thursday May 21, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

The Toughest Thing about Judaism

"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...

Monday April 20, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

Remembering Adam & Eve's Son Abel -- on Yom HaShoah?

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...

Monday April 20, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

The Holocaust & the Hebrew Bible

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...

Wednesday April 8, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

The Politics of Passover

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...

Tuesday April 7, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

Back to Slavery! With David Brooks and the New York Times

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...

Sunday April 5, 2009

Knowing, Nicolas Cage, & Passover

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...

Thursday April 2, 2009

Categories: Jewish Holidays

Ongeleynterheit: A Message of Passover

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....

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About Kingdom of Priests

David Klinghoffer is an author and senior fellow in the Religion, Liberty & Public Life program at the Discovery Institute. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Jewish Forward. A California native, he currently lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and five children.

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