Last Pesach, an Orthodox friend of mine, Shmuly, was at a business meeting during the middle days of the holiday. When lunchtime came, his colleagues went out to local restaurants, but Shmuly remained at the conference table and took out his matzah and hard-boiled egg. As he unwrapped it, another colleague joined him and unwrapped his lunch too. It was ham and cheese—on matzah.
The colleague looked at Shmuly with a relieved smile and said:
“Boy, I'm glad I'm not the only one. It's hard to explain Passover, isn't it?” Well, today I want to explain the name of the holiday.
On the seventh day of Passover, we are reading in the Torah about what happened on that day thirty-three hundred years ago the splitting of the Red… Read More »
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Parasha Insights
DO YOU BELIEVE OR DO YOU TRUST?
TODAY IS A GIFT
They tell this story about Winston Churchill. As Savior of the free world, he felt himself entitled to grab a little shuteye (nap) in the House of Commons. When a fellow Parliament member approached him and said, “Must you fall asleep when I am speaking?”
Churchill answered, “No, it is purely voluntary.”
The Rambam rules in his laws of Tefillah:
When Rosh Chodesh Nisan falls on Shabbat, three Torah scrolls are used. The weekly Torah portion is read from the first, the reading of Rosh Chodesh from the second, and Parshat HaChodesh from the third.
Thus, this Shabbat is one of those extremely rare occasions when we take out three Torah Scrolls, since we read three distinct portions—Tazria, Pinchas and Bo.
We… Read More »