“Kama Ma’alot Tovot Hamakom Aleinu!” This is usually translated as, “The Ominipresent has bestowed so may favors upon us!” However, a more accurate translation would be, “How many Higher Levels of Goodness does the Omnipresent possess over us?” I’ll readily admit that the usual translation,...
The broken Matzah reminds us that a poor person may not even possess a complete Matzah. He must live with very little. He has nothing. The Matzah itself is a symbol of poverty; it has only the very basics of flour and water. It is fair to...
I first hand out the portions of Matzah to everyone at the table and only then do I begin eating my own portion. We are all leaning to the left, crunching away at our Matzah. Inevitably someone at the table begins to giggle at all...
I find it interesting that we name the part of the Seder when we eat the found Afikoman, Tzafun,” or “Hidden,” rather than “Found.” One of my favorite parts of the Seder is when my children, now older so it’s OK, have failed to find...
Albert Einstein spoke about how our egocentrism alienates us from other forms of life. “A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from...
In his autobiography, Vladimir Nabokov describes the gratitude he feels in the presence of a rare butterfly. “This is ecsatsy, and behind ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A...
The sense of wonder that is our sixth sense. And it is the natural religious sense. D.H. Lawrence “Tell me father, why do we dip the Karpas?” “We do it so that you will ask that question.” I never liked that answer. We dip the Karpas just to make our children...
“This primary intuition of the strangeness of it all, of our single selves as unspeakably fragile and brilliant observers of a grandeur for which we have tried through all our generations to find words, this is the experience that seems to me to underlie religion....
Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants the possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been...
Some of my father’s favorite stories were about the years he spent as a Maggid. I had asked him where he found so many of the rare books in his library and he told me that his Rebbi, Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner zt”l, had sent him...
One of the very few things I liked about the first President Bush was that he openly hated broccolli, or brussel sprouts. It was not politically astute for him to admit to this one normal healthy attribute as it caused all sorts of problems for...
V’heirim es ha’deshen asher tochal ha’aish es ha’olah al ha’mizbeach … v’hotzee es ha’deshen el mi’chutz l’machaneh (6:3-4) Our parsha begins with the mitzvah of removing
For the average reader, this week's parsha must seem pretty remote: most of it consists of detailed laws about animal offerings, and the remainder is a long description of how Aharon