Four New Questions for Your Seder

Sparking discussion on some of Passover’s most important themes from aish.com

Jews love questions. So it’s no surprise that the Seder, commemorating the birth of our people, is structured in a question/answer format. Participants are meant to ask and to spark lively discussion and exploration.

In this spirit, let me add to the Seder’s four questions an additional four that pick up on some of the most important themes to contemplate at the Passover table.

1. A question on the main theme of the Seder

Why do we call it the Seder?

2. A question on the theme of family

If the Seder is so important, a student once asked me, how come it’s observed in the home and not in the synagogue?

3. A question on the theme of children

The Seder revolves almost entirely around the children. The reason is obvious.

4. A question on the theme of slaughtering the Paschal Lamb

The requirement for Jews being saved in the Passover story was to slaughter a lamb and to smear its blood on the doorpost so God would “pass over” that home and spare its inhabitants.

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For more information on Passover, come see Jvillage's Passover Spotlight Kit. 

Cult Kosher For Passover

The top 10 foods we love to eat during Pesach.

By Ronnie Fein for The Jewish Week

Passover’s almost here and supermarkets are starting to fill up with those kosher for Passover foods you can’t get, or wouldn’t care to eat, any other time of year. No, not matzah and potato starch: I mean the good stuff.

#10: Coca-Cola with the yellow top. The colored cap means the Coke is made with cane sugar, so it tastes the way it back in the day, before high fructose corn syrup took over the world. Corn, of course, is kitnyiot, that category of grains and legumes that are forbidden to Ashkenazi Jews during the holiday along with the more obvious foods like bread and pasta. Sarah Klinkowitz, author of the blog "Food, Words & Photos," says her family fights about which version actually tastes better. But taste aside, everyone knows that Coke made with sugar is healthier than that high fructose corn syrup kind, right? Ditto Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, also made with sugar during Passover.

#9 Hashachar H’aole Special Cocoa Spread. Folks like Sina Miz at The Kosher Spoon like to wet their matzah just slightly under cold running water and then spread it with the chocolate. According to the scuttlebutt, this is an Israeli thing, and it means the holiday is coming. “ I’m getting excited for Pesach now!” Miz said.

#8 Manischewitz Coconut Patties. If you, like me, are always on a diet, you allow yourself to eat these candies—a cross between macaroons and Mound’s candy bars—only during Passover. My brother stocks them in his freezer and I actually could have them any old time. But I don’t. I really don’t.

#7 Tam Tams. Because they’re beyond crackers. “They make me want more of everything,” reflected Liz Rueven of Kosher Like Me, who has found all sorts of interesting ways to use these savory old reliables: as soup croutons, for instance. Who knew?

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Uncovered in Jerusalem, 9 tiny unopened Dead Sea Scrolls

Researcher finds tantalizing tefillin parchments from Second Temple era, overlooked for decades and unread for 2,000 years

By Ilan Ben Zion for Mosaic Magazine

They’re not much larger than lentils, but size doesn’t minimize the potential significance of nine newfound Dead Sea Scrolls that have lain unopened for the better part of six decades

An Israeli scholar turned up the previously unexamined parchments, which had escaped the notice of academics and archaeologists as they focused on their other extraordinary finds in the 1950s. Once opened, the minuscule phylactery parchments from Qumran, while unlikely to yield any shattering historic, linguistic or religious breakthroughs, could shed new light on the religious practices of Second Temple Judaism.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has been tasked with unraveling and preserving the new discoveries — an acutely sensitive process and one which the IAA says it will conduct painstakingly, and only after conducting considerable preparatory research.

Phylacteries, known in Judaism by the Hebrew term tefillin, are pairs of leather cases containing biblical passages from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. One case is bound by leather thongs to the head and one to the arm during morning prayers, as prescribed by rabbinic interpretation of the Bible. The case worn on the head contains four scrolls in individual compartments, while the arm phylactery holds one scroll.

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The Plot for America: Remembering Civil Rights Leader Joachim Prinz

The influential Newark rabbi was a confidante of Martin Luther King, but he’s been all but ignored by history

By Allan Nadler in Mosaic Magazine

I.

On the evening of June 26, 1937, thousands of Berlin Jews packed the city’s grand Brüdervereinshaus to bid farewell to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had been ordered by the Gestapo to leave Germany immediately or face an almost certain death sentence for political subversion. Prinz had been the most popular, outspoken, and inspirational champion of Jewish national rights and Zionism in the dark years since the Nazis’ rise to power, preaching to overflow crowds at Berlin’s most important temples about the need to leave Germany and immigrate to Palestine. By the summer of 1937 he had already been arrested a half-dozen times by the Gestapo, but he always managed to elude deportation. This time, however, he was warned by his “friend” and informant, Gestapo Obersturmbanführer Kuchman, that his days were numbered, and he reluctantly decided to emigrate to the United States, sponsored by his friend and patron Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Among the uninvited guests at Prinz’s farewell was a Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann’s presence was to have important legal ramifications more than two decades later. In the initial discovery proceedings to establish Eichmann’s identity before his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Benno Cohen, the foremost Zionist leader in pre-war Berlin, positively identified the defendant, testifying as follows:

We held a valedictory meeting to take leave of Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz who was leaving the country. He was one of the finest speakers, the best Zionist propagandist in those years. The large hall was packed full. The public thronged to this meeting. Suddenly, as chairman of the event, I was called to the door and my office clerk told me, “Mr Eichmann is here.” I saw this same man, for the first time in civilian clothing, and he shouted at me, “Who is responsible for order here? This is disorder of the first degree.” … I watched him the entire time from my place in the chair.

As a young rabbi in his late twenties, Prinz was already addressing congregations of thousands in Berlin’s largest temple, the magnificent Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, whose stunning façade has recently been restored. And less than two years after arriving in the United States after his expulsion from Germany by Eichmann’s goons, he was appointed rabbi of New Jersey’s largest Jewish house of worship, the magnificent Greek Revival Temple B’nai Abraham, which towered over Newark’s then-fashionable and heavily Jewish Clinton Hill section, where hundreds of young people swarmed to hear his Friday-night orations.

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New York Times: Soft Spot for Khalidi?

Martin Kramer in Mosaic

There’s a brouhaha at Ramaz, the private Orthodox high school on the Upper East Side, around Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor at Columbia and promoter of the Palestinian hard line. Some students invited him to speak, but the head of the school didn’t like the idea and disinvited him. Khalidi has said nothing, but he doesn’t have to. He only benefits from these episodes, and it’s not the first time. In 2005, he was dropped from a New York City teacher ed program, with the same predictable result of turning him into a free speech martyr. This tableau seems destined to be repeated over and over again.

I’m not an officer, donor, trustee, student, teacher, or parent stakeholder at Ramaz, so I don’t care how many pretzels they have to twist over Rashid Khalidi. But I do care how the New York Times reported one aspect of the story this morning: “Critics have accused the professor of having had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he has denied.” The reference here is to the activities of Khalidi when he resided in Beirut in the 1970s and up until Israel’s 1982 invasion. In those days, the PLO ran an exterritorial gangland, and was neck-deep in terrorism planned by Arafat and his mob.

Note this phrase: “Critics have accused…” Today’s article thus repeats a trope that appeared back in 2008, when the Times ran a piece on Khalidi prompted by his past association with Barack Obama:

He taught at universities in Lebanon until the mid-’80s, and some critics accuse him of having been a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. Mr. Khalidi has denied working for the group, and says he was consulted as an expert by reporters seeking to understand it.

Again, it’s the “critics” who “accuse him.”

Well, I’m a critic, but we critics didn’t just imagine Khalidi’s PLO affiliation. We were alerted to it by a parade of highly regarded journalists, including two from the New York Times. So here are the “critics” who first leveled the “accusation” (still more sourcing here):

• Joe Alex Morris Jr., reporting from Beirut for the Los Angeles Times on September 5, 1976, quoted Khalidi and described him as “a PLO spokesman.”

• James M. Markham, reporting from Beirut in the New York Times on February 19, 1978, quoted Khalidi and described him as “an American-educated Palestinian who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut and also works for the P.L.O.”

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You say women 'don't need' tefillin? Here's why I do

In open letter, high school student says equal-opportunity education must be followed by equal-opportunity mitzvot.

By Avigayil Halpern for Haaretz

Dear Ms. Chizhik,

I - a high-school student - write to you from a community in which your proposals for "real empowerment" have already been implemented.

In the Modern Orthodox day schools I have attended all my life, I have been “educated for the sake of education and not simply vocation.” I have been “taught to hold [myself] with dignity and confidence, encouraged to speak and build and succeed, entrusted with the best of secular knowledge, history, literature, sciences, politics.” I am a religious woman who “speaks proper English and Hebrew, and identifie[s] as [a] citizen of a greater society.” I have, because of my education, become “tolerant and unafraid of the outside,” and I “turn to the world with an unwavering confidence in [my] own faith and strength.”

I also lay tefillin.

The “deeper and more critical” questions you raise are indeed vital to the future of the halakhically observant Jewish community. However, the issue of women’s education and involvement in the wider world is not contradictory or antithetical to the discussion of women’s increased ritual observance. I would argue that the issues are part of the same discourse and process.

You critique the way “hordes of bloggers” have skewed the women-and-tefillin (phylacteries) story out of proportion. I think that this issue has gained such prominence because it is an indicator of the direction in which Modern Orthodoxy is moving. I began laying tefillin because of the excellent education I received, an education which you would no doubt endorse: I have been fortunate enough to have access to the skills with which to engage both Jewish ideas and the secular world. The more I learned - in classes with male and female peers – the more I saw a disconnect between the access I was given to religious texts in the classroom and the rituals I was permitted to engage in at synagogue.

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How Jews Gave Real Estate a Good Name

Fights Against Anti-Semites Helped Shape Urban Landscape

By Jenna Weissman Joselit for The Jewish Daily Forward

In the two cities I call home, New York and D.C., real estate is the stuff of enduring conversation. Discussing who lives where and in what kind of habitat — condo, co-op, private home or rental apartment — never seems to grow stale. Nearly as compelling a topic, or so it seems to me, is the number of American Jews who are, or whose families have been, in the real estate business.

From coast to coast, the roster of extremely well-heeled American Jews is abundantly stocked with those who owe their good fortune to property ownership: There are the Smiths in D.C., the Swigs in San Francisco, and the Chanins, Levitts and Roths in New York — among many, many others.

What makes this phenomenon more interesting still is that you don’t have to be a g’vir, a big shot, to earn a decent living from the real estate business. Many American Jews at the grass roots, including a hefty quotient of Hasidic Jews, variously own, manage and develop property. The recent and untimely demise of the Brooklyn real estate developer Menachem Stark laid bare any number of things about the Hasidic world that he inhabited. But the most salient, and relevant, finding revealed the large number of Hasidim who figure in this economic arena.

Much like the diamond industry, which is fueled by interpersonal relationships, family ties and a code of behavior that places a premium on trust, Hasidim have been similarly drawn to real estate. A prime example of the ethnic economy at work, it is also a study in what my colleague, Barry Chiswick, chair of the economics department at the George Washington University, calls “complementarity between business life and personal life.”
The workaday demands of the real estate business do not conflict with or subvert the community’s internal religious rhythms; they are comfortably accommodated instead.

But then, history, too — American history, that is — has a lot to do with the configuration of this particular facet of the ethnic economy. Years ago, many immigrant Jews and their children took to real estate speculation or, as the American Hebrew more lyrically put it in 1927, the “romance of realty.” Some real estate men developed New York’s garment center. Other real estate-niks, or “masters of the metropolis,” as another article described them, put up the grand apartment house buildings that grace the Upper West Side of Manhattan while still others transformed Brooklyn and the Bronx.

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