Pessah 2024 The incommensurable suffering of the families and the hostages of the October 7 pogrom; the orphans, widows, parents, brothers, and sisters of the soldiers dying in the war Hamas has imposed upon Israel; the 300…
The miracles reported in the Bible were supposed to strike the reader as miraculous. Even if some natural phenomena can be found at the heart of the Ten Plagues, the theology rather than the natural history of the plagues intrigued the biblical authors and inspired them to tell the tale of the plagues as they did.
all through Jewish history, from the Exodus to the Maccabean Revolt to the rising from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust to the creation of the modern State of Israel, the end result was not the to-be-expected consequences. It was something that surprised even the most optimistic speculations about human capacity.
To paraphrase Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Jews do not keep their faith because of the miracles they experience. It is their faith that leads them to interpret their life as miraculous.
What really happened that night, on that day hundreds and hundreds of years ago, when the Book of Exodus tells us that
Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt… And he called for Moses and Aaron by night and said: ‘Rise up, get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. Take both your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone; and bless me also.’
Though Israel is still a secular country where secular Jews account for 36 percent of the population
it is estimated that by 2059, the Haredi community will constitute 35% of the Jewish population in Israel.”
A story is told about two Israelis on a trip to Switzerland. They stop a passerby, hoping he will be able to indicate to them how to get to the address they were looking for. The friendly…
“ Our country doesn’t have a problem with Jews. Our Prophet Muhammad married a Jewish woman. Not just a friend—he married her. Our neighbors were Jewish,”
The Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is possessed of a ruthless and stubborn character. He is an egocentric, unemotional human being, devoid of all compassion, incapable of feeling the pain of others, shame, or guilt.
The unpredictable, inexplicable help that we encounter With the exodus from Egypt, something radically new happened: history took an unexpected turn, and the world suddenly changed. Exodus, the book that recounts this event, tells us that…