Click the player and hear Rabbi Wise’s Additional Comments About This Week’s Message [mp3_embed playlst=”https://www.etzhayimhhb.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/HHJC-web-gems-8th-Day-of-Pesah-5772.mp3″] Where are you from, originally? It’s a question we ask people as we are getting to know them. Sometimes their accent or dialect of English gives them away, and sometimes they grew up not far from where they now live, Continue Reading »
I don’t like cleaning. I don’t know anyone who does. So when Pesah draws near, we begin to wonder what we did to deserve this new form of slavery. It’s pretty sad that the joke greeting around this time is “Hag kasher o-sameah–have a happy or a kosher Passover,” as if the effort that goes into making Continue Reading »
It’s weird from the word “go,” and it leads me to ask many questions. “Why is our table set differently than on every other Shabbat? Why do we sing the Table of Contents of the book at our places? Now we’re making kiddush–ok, now I feel a bit better, but you tell me to recline Continue Reading »
We were horrified by the news from Toulouse this week, the brutal slaying of seven innocent victims of hate. Four Jews, three of them young children, and three French paratroopers were murdered in cold blood. And to learn that one of the victims, 3-year-old Gabriel Sandler, was named for Rabbi Continue Reading »
“Why do we dip the hallah in salt when we make Hamotzi?” This is one of those questions that comes up frequently. The traditional answer is that the table upon which we eat is a mizbeah, an altar, in miniature; just as the korbanot, the ancient sacrificial offerings, were salted, so, too, is our hallah. But that begs another question: why Continue Reading »
I never had the privilege to study with Nehama Leibowitz (1905-1997), the diminutive giant who taught Torah to generations of students. But she left a legacy for which all teachers strive. She was most famous for her questions; she would mail “gilyonim–pages” of these questions to students, receive their answers, and return them with comments. Continue Reading »
After the travesty of the Golden Calf, Moshe manages to save the Israelites from God’s anger. But he wants more. He wants God’s immediate presence in the Israelite camp. He wants to know how God plans to interact with Israel from this day forward; and, for that matter, how God will interact with him. God Continue Reading »
Among our Hebrew High School students (and their parents), I’m notorious for introducing passages from the Torah that they never would have been given the chance to learn when they were children. We call the class “Tantalizing Tales of the Torah,” though the parents of the older students who learned with me four years ago Continue Reading »
A Hasidic tale: On Shabbat Terumah, when we read of God’s demand for an offering, Rabbi Yitzhak of Vorki happened to be visiting Rabbi Mendel, the Kotzker Rebbe, who had recently begun to live in great seclusion, receiving only close friends such as Rabbi Yitzhak. “Why,” asked Rabbi Yitzhak, have you gone to such extremes Continue Reading »
The expression “caught red-handed” seems to suggest the worst possible result of being a thief. After all, if someone else’s property is found in someone else’s possession without evidence of a legal transaction, the “someone else” has some explaining to do. The Torah, however, tells us that it can indeed be worse. The penalties Continue Reading »
