Around this time last year, Daniel Movitz was preparing to celebrate Passover at his apartment in Clayton, using a seder kit he received from Chabad, the Jewish outreach organization. Like Jews around the world, Movitz was alone physically but held a...

The Passover holiday has always been awe-inspiring for me. To think that millions of Jews across the world gather with family and, in other years, with friends on the same night(s) around a seder plate with the same symbols to recount the same story of...

Remember when we used to congregate together in our synagogues, at the Jewish Community Center, at restaurants, in movie theaters and in other such meeting places? Remember when people wearing masks were usually about to commit a crime rather than protect...

Growing up, our family almost always hosted a Passover seder using the Maxwell House haggadah. I found it funny that a coffee company published a haggadah, but it wouldn’t have been a seder without its odd phrases woven throughout the story.I always...

This week’s parshah, Kee Teesa, contains one of the ugliest transgressions in the long history of the Jewish people: Chet HaEgel, the sin of the forging and worshipping the Golden Calf.Quite honestly, if I had my druthers, and the chutzpah to do so,...

There is a psalm for every day of the week, known as Shir Shel Yom.  Wednesday’s is Psalm 94, and it tells us, “For the law shall return to righteousness, and all those of upright heart shall follow it.” Implicit is the reality that the...

In Parashat Mishpatim, which we will read this coming Shabbat, we find ourselves situated between a mountain (Mount Sinai) and a Mishkan (the portable desert Tabernacle). The juxtaposition of the other-worldly grandeur of the Sinaitic revelation and the...

In this week’s Torah portion, Yitro, we encounter one of the most epic moments in the Torah.At the foot of Mount Sinai, accompanied by thunder and lightning, the newly freed Israelites enter into a new covenant with their Redeemer. They hear the Ten...

This Shabbat is known as Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song. It is so named because the Torah reading this week includes Shirat HaYam, the “Song of the Sea,” the earliest example of shirah in the Bible. More than just a song, shirah is a genre of...

The Torah portion for this week, Bo, is filled with plagues (three, to be exact), darkness, laws of Passover, the commandment to sanctify the new moon, borrowed items and pidyon ha-ben — redemption of the first-born son. This is a story about our liberation...

This week’s Torah reading describes the first seven of the 10 plagues that were intended to demonstrate how the power of the God of Israel surpasses that of Pharaoh and a host of lesser Egyptian gods and goddesses. At first, it appears that these...

After I graduated from college, I spent a year working for Facing History and Ourselves, an international organization whose mission is to use lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.One of Facing History’s...