Just seven weeks after Passover comes the bookend of the harvest holidays called Shavuot, also known as the Feast of the Weeks. Shavuot celebrates the day the Jewish people first received the Torah at Mount Sinai, and welcomed the sacred wisdom passed down from above to below. Today, Shavuot tradition includes feasting on dairy and…
It’s that time of year when the Jewish State commemorates great sorrow and great celebration. The back to back holiday of extremes approaches every year, and invites individuals as a collective to mourn the passing of terror victims and fallen soldiers, and then momentarily after, celebrate the birth of the State of Israel. The dissonance…
As our calendar once again lands on Passover and we tell the story of Exodus for the over three thousandth time, it’s quite ironic that we are trapped inside our homes. With the modern-day plague called COVID, we can recognize the universally deep shift taking place. Systems are crashing down like the blood, frogs, and…
What do Purim and International Women’s Day have in common? Besides coinciding within the same few calendar hours, alongside the full moon, the days are both marked to commemorate notable women in history, and there is no doubt that Queen Esther is a female role model extraordinaire. As we know the story, Queen Esther stepped…
I could feel the nerves running through my veins. Welcome to Egypt. It was my first time crossing the border since moving to Israel in 2010. I had heard that Israelis adored Sinai, yet the rumors quickly shifted in 2011 after an uptick of violence, spurred by terrorists whose aim was to create destruction of…
