This year, Passover will be like no Passover before. Self-quarantined
in our homes to avoid doing harm to ourselves, our loved ones, and
society, Passover will be smaller than ever before.
But it will also be powerful. We…
This year, Passover will be like no Passover before. Self-quarantined
in our homes to avoid doing harm to ourselves, our loved ones, and
society, Passover will be smaller than ever before.
But it will also be powerful. We…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article I used to love the plagues. Not anymore. I used to love the plagues until I lived through them. As a child, my most favorite moment of Passover, the otherwise endless family dinner which featured a gelatinous fish dish and an overcooked meat dish, was the plagues. After…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article For Jews who practice even a modicum of tradition, social distancing is an unnatural act. Our tradition is predicated on the notion that no Jew should live alone on a desert island. Consider the institution of a “minyan,” a quorum of ten adult Jews. One needs a minyan…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article The situation is devastating. An entire country, the most powerful one of its time, brought to its knees, its vast military and economic might no match for the plague that envelops it. It must have been utterly crushing to be an Egyptian back then. And yet, horrible as…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article In her book, “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag bans us from using metaphor to describe disease. We need to toughen up, she thinks, and forgo the flight away from the thing itself, the marauding crimes wreaked on the body by maladies too many to count. As Sontag writes,…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article I remember a conversation with my son, who is 12 and studying for a Bar Mitzvah that is now in a holding pattern. Last year, at Passover, he told me he didn’t think it was fair that in order to free the slaves regular Egyptians had to suffer…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article Every year at Passover seders around the world, as families gather to recount the story of the Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt, we recount the ten plagues that befell the Egyptians: Blood, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, the killing of the firstborn. As they…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article Of all the Jewish holidays that could coincide with a once-every-century global pandemic, there is clear divine instruction in its eclipse falling on Passover. It’s been said many times that Pharaoh was the original anti-Semite and that the plagues descended upon the people of Egypt because of his…
BG IMG LINK Previous Article Next Article In the book of Job, after Job has suffered great losses, his friends come to comfort him. Finding Job sitting on the ground covered in boils, they throw dust up in the air and onto their heads (Job 2:12). A modern Israeli scholar, Meir Weiss, suggests this may…
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