RSS
Pesach is Personal
An image from “Family at the Seder,” from the 1935 Haggadah by artist Arthur Szyk (b. 1894, Lodz, Poland—d. 1951, New Canaan, CT). Photo: Courtesy of Irvin Ungar
JNS.org – Passover is less than two weeks away, and it’s always interesting to see the many holiday customs that are observed by different communities. They are as different as we are. While the basic observances are pretty much universal, everybody seems to have their own unique way of celebrating. Each family has distinct traditions and customs handed down from generation to generation—not only Ashkenazi and Sephardi, Chassidic or Lithuanian, but every individual family. Whether it’s how to find the afikomen or our favorite seder songs, we all seem to have definite views on how things ought to be done.
Sometimes, our personal Passover practices can be rather outlandish. Take the woman who does not actually keep kosher year-round but during Pesach, she “changes over.” This isn’t logical, but who am I to be dismissive of a Jew’s desire to connect to God and keep a mitzvah? I can only hope that she will “change over” permanently and keep kosher for the rest of the year as well.
Historically, most families were stricter on Pesach than the rest of the year. The most religiously observant people underwent stringencies they never observed at other times. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., we never ate out during the eight days of the holiday. Not even at the homes of our most religious friends or people we ate with on Shabbat or Yom Tov. Why not? I suppose it was because every family has its own restrictions on Pesach. This one does this and the other does that. This fellow won’t eat this product and the other doesn’t touch that vegetable. We all respected each other’s right to be extreme or meshuggah frum on Pesach.
But why?
There are two reasons behind this special scrupulousness on Pesach. One is practical; the other is halachic and somewhat technical.
Practically speaking, we need to be stricter and take additional precautions on Passover because foods that are perfectly kosher during the rest of the year are for this one week strictly forbidden. Bread and biscuits, chocolate cake and challah, pizza and pasta, wafers and whisky may be 100% kosher and deliciously edible every week of the year, but during this one week, they become absolutely treif. We could easily make an innocent mistake and take a bite of any of these foods if available and within easy reach. So, we make sure that the house is thoroughly cleaned and that all chametz is locked away. Thus, no innocent mistakes can be made.
Then there is the halachic reason. You may have heard of the concept of bittul or “nullification.” This is a principle of kashrut that holds there are times when, for example, a small amount of milk becomes mixed into a larger amount of meat. The milk will be overwhelmed and “nullified” by the meat, and usually, the forbidden mixture may still be kosher. I hasten to add that these issues must be addressed by a qualified rabbi only.
Say you are preparing your Shabbat meal, and your domestic chef slips on a banana peel and accidentally spills her milk tea into your pot of chicken soup. Do not throw out the soup! Call your rabbi. Depending on the circumstances, he may be able to help save your Friday-night dinner from disaster.
You know the story of Tevye der Milchiger? He was the milkman in the shtetl. Well, one day, the unthinkable happened. The caterer was preparing a wedding feast, and one of his workers slipped on the proverbial banana peel and his milk tea went flying into a vat of meat. Can you imagine the calamity if there were no dinner for the hundreds of hungry wedding guests? The rabbi of the shtetl was called in to deal with this most serious halachic question—a very grave shaaloh indeed.
The wise old rabbi called Tevye into his private study. He closed the door tightly and whispered into the milkman’s ear: “Tevye, tell me the truth, how much water do you pour into your milk?”
“Rebbe, you would accuse me of cheating my customers?!”
“Tevye, it’s just me and you here behind closed doors. Please, it’s very important that I know. How much water?”
“Rebbe, efsher ah bissel, ‘maybe only a little bit.’”
“Tevye, I beg of you, your secret is safe with me. Please tell me the truth. How much water do you normally add to your milk?”
What can I tell you? By the time the rabbi extracted the whole truth from Tevye, he was satisfied that the meat for the wedding was not only strictly kosher but that Tevye’s milk was probably pareve!
Still, during Passover, the kashrut concept of bittul does not apply. Chametz is such a strict prohibition that it can never be overwhelmed, no matter how big the pot may be. Even an infinitesimal amount of chametz will render the biggest pot of Passover food absolutely forbidden.
Thus, we must be as stringent as possible to keep even the smallest piece of chametz far and away from us and our families. Hence, our extreme strictness on Pesach.
Some people ask why we need so many kosher-for-Passover products today when in the good old days, we never had all those options, and it was just fine. Others insist on every convenience over Pesach to make it more enjoyable. Still others will go to a beautiful hotel—in Israel or some exotic destination—where every luxury is laid on and it is truly their “Festival of Freedom.”
To each our own. Whether it is our unique childhood memories of fathers or zaydes conducting a traditional seder, or the seder songs of our youth that still play on our soul strings, the dedication to Passover is alive in Jewish hearts. Thus it should be for the festival that celebrates the very birth of our nation.
While it may be our national birthday and the very beginning of Jewish peoplehood, Pesach is also a very personal Yom Tov. We each celebrate it in our own ways and styles, with our own special memories and even our own curious idiosyncrasies as well.
I wish all my readers a chag kasher v’sameach!
The post Pesach is Personal first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login