Great Source of Passover Information, fun, more

http://www.jr.co.il/videos/passover-videos.htm

Another Oldie but Goodie - Passover Rhapsody

Passover Cleaning

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from the Times of Israel March 29, 2015 

At Passover This Year, Difficult Conversations About The Promised Land

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from The Jewish Week March 25, 2015 by Stewart Ain

NOTE: 10 Jews, 20 opinions... 

A sharply divided community limps toward the Passover seder.

With tensions between the United States and Israel running at a fever pitch, even the benign, ritually symbolic words of the Passover seder have suddenly become charged with divisiveness and political import.

For Susie Heneson Moskowitz, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Torah in Melville, L.I., reading the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” at the end of the seder next week will take on a whole new, and unexpected, resonance.

“We pray that there will continue to be a Jerusalem that reflects Jewish and democratic values — and is safe and secure,” said Rabbi Heneson Moskowitz.

Her statement, which seems to straddle liberal and conservative positions and reflect anxiety over controversial statements made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Election Day, epitomizes the concerns of a divided American Jewish community: that Israel continues to be the homeland of the Jewish people, that it can one day move forward with a two-state solution that allows Israel to end the occupation of its Palestinian neighbors and that it remain safe within secure borders.

Rabbi Moscowitz was reflecting, in part, the concerns of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who warned on the Senate floor last week that President Obama’s treatment of Israel could endanger Israel’s safety by emboldening its “enemies to launch more rockets out of southern Lebanon and Gaza, to launch more terrorist attacks, to go to international forums and delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.”

Rubio was responding to Obama’s promise last week to “reassess” America’s relationship with Israel in light of Netanyahu’s pledge on the eve of last week’s election that a Palestinian state would not be established under his watch. (Netanyahu’s Election Day statement that Arabs were “voting in droves” met with widespread criticism in Reform and Conservative circles.)  

Although Netanyahu clarified his pledge after the election — saying he is still committed to a two-state solution but that current conditions make that impossible — Obama dismissed them in a phone call to Netanyahu. He later told the Huffington Post: “I indicated to him that given his statements prior to the election, it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible. We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region.”

Such talk from the Obama administration continued this week, with his chief of state, Denis McDonough, telling a J Street conference Monday that Netanyahu’s election eve comment was “troubling.”

“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don’t raise questions about the prime minister’s commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations,” he said.

At the State Department, deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that the U.S. is now looking to Israel for “actions and policies that demonstrate genuine commitment to a two-state solution, not more words.”

And Obama repeated Tuesday that his dispute with Netanyahu is substantive and not personal.

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Enlivening Passover, One Deck of Cards at a Time

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from TABLET by Sara Polsky March 25, 2015

Rabbi Noa Kushner opened a recent Shabbat evening service at San Francisco’s The Kitchen with a quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel: “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society,” she read. “It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”

The service that followed was anything but dull: It was high-octane, all in Hebrew, and musical. The Kitchen, which Kushner founded in 2011 after working at Hillels at Sarah Lawrence College and Stanford University and as a congregational rabbi, describes itself as a “religious startup,” one of a number of independent Jewish congregations that do not slot themselves into traditional denominations, or even into the standard format of a synagogue. “What we’re looking at,” Kushner said in a recent interview, “is creating not an institution but what we affectionately call a solar system,” in which the city offers a variety of Jewish experiences that may not connect directly to attending services.

Here are some of the planets in that solar system: For Shavuot last year, The Kitchen held a scavenger hunt in which participants acted as Ruth and received text message directions from Gabe Smedresman, a Kitchen member, acting as Naomi (including instructions to study Torah for 15 minutes in a café). The Kitchen staff (three full-timers) is currently choosing hosts for a program of in-home Shabbat dinners. And just a couple of weeks ago, in mid-March, The Kitchen released an updated version of its Passover game, Next Year in Jerusalem. The game, which debuted in a pre-holiday rush last year, involves a deck of cards split between “ritual” cards, which are used in a precise order to guide participants through rituals of the Seder, and “action” cards, to be used at any time during the evening’s proceedings, which offer prompts to “reflect,” “act,” or “discuss.”

The new edition of the game was created in response to user feedback, just as startups improve their products based on user input. That similarity is intentional, said Yoav Schlesinger, the Kitchen’s executive director, not just because the organization is based in the startup-heavy Bay Area but “because we think it’s on point. It’s all about rolling things out quickly, getting customer feedback, meeting the needs of the market, making changes based on the feedback you get. It’s a conscious effort on our part.” The “product,” as Schlesinger put it, is Torah, the same product Judaism has offered all along. But The Kitchen, like a handful of kindred communities established in the past decade, is “trying to innovate around how we deliver that to people.”

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If Men Cleaned For Passover

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from The Forward March 24, 2015 by Devorah Blachor

NOTE: THIS is why I love being Jewish. There is no "right way". But we are all in this together. 

A friend of mine recently suggested that if men nursed babies, there would be no more endless debate among parents about breast versus bottle. Everyone would do what was best for them and their families without guilt, criticism and second guessing.

  This made me think about other possibilities. What if men were in charge of Passover cleaning, for example?  

In the Long Island Orthodox home where I was raised, Passover cleaning started a month before the holiday. We removed all the books from the shelves and shook them in case a crumb had clung to the pages. Clothing, rugs, windows, desktops, mirrors, cars, garages, bathrooms, the dust that gathered above the closets – all of this got a good scrubbing.  

If you’re not weary yet, wait for it because we haven’t gotten to the epicenter. The kitchen is where the party really started. We emptied kitchen cabinets, cleaned them and covered them with new lining. In the days leading up to the seder, we removed plates and silverware from the kitchen and replaced them with Passover sets, along with pots, pans, dish towels, tablecloths, can openers, peelers, whisks and garlic presses that were waiting in a basement closet all year. We cleaned sinks and ovens with boiling water and cleanser. We emptied the refrigerator – everything had to go because if its proximity to chametz – and then lined the shelves to ready it for newly-purchased food, condiments and drinks.

When I say “we” of course I am referring to my mother. My father and my siblings helped her but about 90 percent of the cleaning fell on her shoulders. Other observant homes in our community were similarly beset by the Passover season, its women engulfed by Clorax. Betty Friedan may have left her mark on some of the homes for the other eleven months of the year, but once Springtime came around, the women returned to their domestic domains. If you happened to be a toddler who enjoyed walking around the house with a cookie, you were definitely out of luck.  

By the time my mother reached the seder table, she was exhausted. A Jewish professor at Barnard once remarked to our class that Passover was “not really a holiday for the women.” A prodigious understatement.  

I was still religiously observant after I emigrated to Israel. A friend of mine set me up on a date with a Rabbi to whom I revealed how much I was dreading Passover.  

“The cleaning doesn’t have to be that bad,” he told me. He wasn’t speaking as a Halachic subversive. He was merely interpreting the law in a clinical way – one that didn’t view chametz as ebola.

  “Once you wipe a surface with antiseptic cleanser, it’s clean for Pesach,” he said. “Everything else is…unnecessary.”  

Everything else, in other words, was neurosis.

  I know my mother and her friends weren’t alone in the scope of their Passover preparations. In Jerusalem where I live, once the hamantaschen are gone from the supermarkets, the cleansers come out. On shelves where there were once pita bread and pretzels, there are now bottles of bleach, jars of scouring powder, packages of disinfecting wipes and stacks of Toilet Ducks.  

So how did Pesach cleaning become such a colossal and excessive undertaking?

  Chametz – wheat and other grains that have been leavened – is associated with impurity. Eating chametz on Passover carries the steep punishment of Karet, or excommunication from the community. Owning chametz is just as bad and punishable which is why Jews sell their chametz to non-Jews before the holiday. Selling chametz, which can be done today online, is insurance against the crumb that might be clinging to the pages of your copy of “The Chosen.” Or “50 Shades.”

  Selling chametz also covers the crackers and cereal hiding in orthodox basements and garages. Many observant families don’t actually expel all their chametz from their homes before Passover. Instead, they put it away, considered it “sold” and then take the food out again after the holiday is over and the chametz has reverted to the original owner.

  I’m not suggesting this is a hypocritical practice – halachic loopholes and leniencies are a cornerstone of our faith. But the hidden chametz does belie all that excessive cleaning. If you can have a package of Oreos in your home and not violate halacha, then you also don’t need to empty your closets and shake out all your clothing. And yet, rather than lean on the halachic convenience of having sold their chametz, many families go the Passover cleaning distance.  

So would men be expected to turn their homes upside down (not to mention be patronized and given chocolate rewards by Israeli ultra-orthodox politicians)? Would it be thus if men had been doing the Passover cleaning these last 2000 years? As we’re Jews, two of us will presumably have three different opinions. I know what mine is.

  I haven’t been observant for over a decade but walking into an Israeli supermarket in the weeks leading up to Passover still makes me nervous.  

And nostalgic. Passover brings back memories of the stress placed on my mother, but it also makes me recall those covered countertops and aluminum foil-covered refrigerator shelves with love. Leaving orthodoxy is weird like that.

  This Passover we’ll be travelling, just as we’ve done for the last three years. We’ll be in Cyprus, where my three-year-old is looking forward to walking around the hotel with a cookie.  

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/217339/if-men-cleaned-for-passover/#ixzz3VKxLjBiK



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WATCH! 7 Secrets to a Splendid Seder – Jew and the Carrot

WATCH! 7 Secrets to a Splendid Seder – Jew and the Carrot