By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz My anti-religious friend was giving me a hard time again. “You keep saying that you are on a spiritual journey towards God,” he said. “But all I see are roadblocks. Don’t do this. Don’t say that. Don’t eat this....
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz People are complicated but God has us figured out, as the prophet Jeremiah said: Most devious is the heart; It is perverse—who can fathom it? I Hashem probe the heart, Search the mind— To repay every man...
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz The beginning of the Book of Exodus is the first time that we encounter antisemitism. Pharaoh was the first to use the antisemitic tropes that have, unfortunately, become all too familiar: "There are too many of...
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz "Fear of God is the beginning of knowledge and understanding." There are several sources for this piece of wisdom. King Solomon, the wisest of the wise, said it in Proverb (1:7). Solomon clearly learned this...
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz Everyone is familiar with the phrase, “Behind every great man is an even greater woman.” In the case of Moses, it took far more than one woman to help him achieve greatness. Moses did, in fact, require six...
A young man sought spiritual perfection so he set out to find a guru. After traveling to Tibet, he spent weeks climbing a lonely mountain, finally arriving at the peak where a wizened old man sat on the rough stone, his legs crossed, his...
Leviticus (chapter 24) relates the story of a fight between an Israelite man and a half-Israelite man. The half-Israelite man was the son of Shelomith, daughter of Dibri, from the tribe of Dan, and his father was an Egyptian. In the...
The Passover Seder is a generational affirmation, a transmission of the story of God’s miraculous redemption of the Jewish people from Egypt. In this context, the Seder plate, as the centerpiece of the Seder table, is a visual aid,...
Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is a Jewish holiday commemorating the Jewish liberation by God from slavery in Egypt. In the Book of Exodus, the Hebrew Bible describes the Israelites freedom under the leadership of Moses. The holiday...
The Shabbat that precedes Pesach (Passover) is called ‘Shabbat HaGadol’ (the big/great Sabbath). There are several reasons for this. According to Jewish tradition, the first Shabbat HaGadol was the last Shabbat that the Jews were in...
