Midrash as Filter
Apr 18, 2011 By Abigail Treu | Commentary | Text Study | Pesah
From sensual poetry to rules and penalties: how did that happen?
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Prophetess, Leader, Musician
Apr 29, 2016 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Pesah
Joy is the theme of the hour as God’s praises are sung during the completion of Hallel. The image that bursts forth in our mind’s eye is that of Miriam the Prophetess and the women celebrating their newly found freedom on the banks of the Reed Sea. While the moment is solemn, it is also one of intense elation.
Shevi’i Shel Pesah: Living at the Frontier
Apr 29, 2016 By Lauren Henderson | Commentary | Pesah
On the seventh day of Passover (Shevi’i shel Pesah), we reached the frontier of our existence: Yam Suf, the Sea of Reeds. We had known slavery intimately, becoming deeply comfortable in Egypt even as we clamored to leave. And after all the plagues and darkness and death, we arrived, trembling, at the water’s edge, about to surface and breathe the unfamiliar air of freedom for the first time.
A Noble Freedom
Apr 22, 2016 By Tim Daniel Bernard | Commentary | Pesah
Many Virginians of middle and upper ranks aspired to behave like gentlemen. In the early seventeenth century an English gentleman was defined as one who could “live idly and without manual labor.” The words “gentleman” and “independent” were used synonymously, and “independence” in this context meant freedom from the necessity of labor.
Read More—David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, 366
Remembering Pesah 1946
Apr 22, 2016 By Avinoam Patt | Commentary | Pesah
Every Passover as we read the Haggadah, we recite:
In each and every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as though he actually left Egypt. As it says: “You shall tell your son on that day, ‘It is because of this that God took me out of Egypt.’” (Exodus 13:8)
Seventy years ago, in April 1946, the first Passover in postwar Germany followed the liberation of the concentration camps. The survivors who gathered to form the She’erit Hapletah, the surviving remnant, felt this transition from slavery in a more immediate sense than any generation of the children of Israel in the 2,000 years that preceded them.
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