How can museums continue to engage audiences while their physical buildings have shuttered in the interests of public health?
The Orthodox Union made the match between a food pantry and a caterer which provides Israeli airline El Al with in-flight, kosher-for-Passover meals.
The plagues were about power. The middle act of our great old epic of bondage, infanticide, torture, exile, punishment, fever dreams, and dominance.
As plagues that shut down society go, this one turns out to have its upsides.
Dueling plagues will surely make everyone’s seder feel more relevant. But it’ll also be instructive about human nature.
I remember summer of 2006, when the entire enclave was plunged into blinding darkness after a massive explosion sent shockwaves through the city.
Whatever their material effects on the body, a bug — or viral — infestation is a devastatingly effective plague. It drives the human mind wild.
The Israelites had it easy. Nobody had to kasher a thing. Nobody was running around like a madman with a feather.
God forcing us to look into a mirror so we can finally take a good hard look at who we really are rather than what we’ve long pretended.
As a child, my most favorite moment of Passover, the endless family dinner which featured a fish dish and overcooked meat dish, was the plagues.
Our tradition is predicated on the notion that no Jew should live alone on a desert island.
It is easier to indict oneself than to admit that the world is chaotic and the suffering that pervades it often senseless.
You might say, without exaggeration, that COVID is the world. Or that the world, for this brutal interval, is COVID’s. We live in plague times.
This Passover, we can ask ourselves what we would do to mitigate the suffering of our neighbor.
At my family’s seder table, we would continue around the table, with everyone contributing a modern plague to the conversation.
Passover is actually the original Zionist story — a story of freedom and liberation like none other.
Plagues today still feel quasi-magical in their malevolence: invisible and ubiquitous, we resort to ritual like washing, sanitizing and cleaning.
Jewish tradition tells us that profound lack of control is deeply significant, even generative.
