Second Passover is May 6th, 2012. As if Passover Number One wasn’t bad enough, on 14 Iyar we are given the opportunity to do Passover all over again with Pesach Sheini, the Second Passover. According to Numbers 9:1-14 (Parshah Behaalotecha), there were certain people back in the old days that couldn’t participate in the official [...]
For three years, I have been running PunkTorah. And in this time, I have come to realize that our issues as a greater community, not as PunkTorah, but as Klal Yisrael, have nothing to do with Reform, Orthodox, Hareidi, Reconstructionist, convert, born Jew, gay, straight, black, white or anything. It has to do with a [...]
I arrived at the kollel, the house of study (literally – this was a house that had been emptied of everything, including interior walls, and re-purposed as a space for married men to come and study Talmud, Torah and other texts throughout the day) at 7:45pm, the usual time. I found one of the few [...]
I’m not sure how many of you watch those genealogy shows on TV – you know the ones I mean, the shows that follow celebrities about as they wander Europe discovering that they’re descended from royal families and villains. Well, I’d always watched those shows with a degree of fascination and envy. There have always [...]
Imagine someone you love got cancer (G-d forbid!) and dies. You know you have to observe their yahrzeit, but looking at your calendar that you get every year from the local Jewish funeral home, you remember the day you got the phone call that he/she was sick. So you decide to commemorate the day you [...]
