The 3 Most Important Ideas to Discuss at the Seder
פסח, מצה ומרור
There are 3 key concepts that should be mentioned in the Seder:
1.Pesah, 2.Matsa and 3.Maror.
Pesah, represents what HaShem did for us.
Matsa, is what we, the people of Israel, did to deserve our freedom.
Maror, is what the Egyptians did to us.
PESAH
According to Rabbi Menashe Ben Israel, the word Pesah in the Tora does not mean that HaShem “passed over” the houses of the Yehudim but “protected” them (as the Targum Onqelos hayis translates. This is why I prefer not using the term “Pesah”). When HaShem sent the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn, (משחית, a mortal plague, see Shemot 12:13 and 12:23), which in theory should have affected all the firstborn of Egypt, Gentiles or Jews, indiscriminately, HaShem “protected” (pasah) the houses of the Jews, and prevented this plague from affecting the Jewish firstborn. Pesah, then, is the festival in which we celebrate the constant, direct and supernatural protection that HaShem grants the people of Israel. This selective protection (hashgaha peratit) to the Jewish people that we celebrate on the night of the 15th of Nisan (in Hebrew known as ליל שימורים) since then watches over Am Israel to this day. HaShem protects the people of Israel in a supernatural way. The existence of Israel defies statistics or the most logical predictions. The Jewish people, is the most persecuted and harassed human group in the history of mankind. “Logically”, we should have disappeared a long time ago ח”ו, but “thanks to HaShem”, literally, we are still here!. The people and the state of Israel exist miraculously, despite all those who raise their voices and their weapons to destroy us, because just as it happened on that night of the 15th of Nisan, HaShem continues to protect us. This is what we celebrate in Pesah.
MATSA
The Matsa represents what the Jewish people did to deserve our freedom. On the 14th of Nisan, HaShem ordered the Yehudim to leave Egypt and head towards the desert.
This seems a non-brainer. Who would not want to stop being a slave? But we must take into account an element that occupies a very important place in Pesah, but for some reason, not much is said about it.
Egypt was the most modern, most prosperous, most stable and safest country in the world at that time.
In Egypt, even though we were slaves, we had water and food, which was not common in other parts of the world, where many times even ordinary people died of hunger or thirst, for example, in times of drought. Egypt was almost not affected by droughts. Egypt has the blessing of the Nile, the longest river in the world, a natural and stable resource, which provided water, irrigation for plants and fish in great abundance.
There is another factor that is also not usually mentioned. I am reading a very interesting book called “1177 BCE”, which describes the invasion of the “peoples of the sea”, savage tribes from the European coasts and islands, into the coasts of the Mediterranean. These devastating invasions, the sort of which were not uncommon in those times, destroyed virtually all civilizations of that time. Egypt survived these invasions (the people of Israel too, but this is a matter for another day …) thanks to its powerful army, which was able repel the attack of these fearsome invaders. Egypt was, at that time, a very strong country militarily.
We have to understand something that sounds a bit ironic: it was not easy for the Yehudim to abandon the prosperity, stability and security of Egypt – despite the slavery – and go to the desert, to a dry land, without water, without food, without plants or fruits, with poisonous snakes, scorpions, enemies, desert bandits, etc.
When the order to depart was given, the Yehudim could have doubted, debated, delayed the departure (להתמהמה), since we were heading towards a very dangerous place.
Our great merit is that we did not delay our departure but we rather rushed to leave, with great enthusiasm and loyalty to HaShem, trusting only in the promise of His protection. The last hours before leaving, we quickly prepared as much food as we could, so hastily that we could not wait for the dough to raise and bake bread … We left Egypt carrying only a few Matsot with us.
The Matsa, thus, reminds us of this merit: that we did not hesitate to leave Egypt and go to the unknown, surrendering ourselves faithfully and lovingly in the hands of Bore Olam.
This great merit of the people of Israel is mentioned with much emphasis by the prophet Yirmiyahu, when he said in the name of HaShem, referring to the departure from Egypt: “I remember your merit of your youth; your unconditional love [for Me]: when you followed me to the desert, to a dry land [without water, and without food] … “ (Jeremiah 2: 2).
To be continued….
SHABBAT SHALOM
The Verdict , by Judge Ezra Goldstein
Stephen Hawking and the Enemies of Israel
אתם עדי, נאום השם
Last Wednesday, Stephen Hawking, one of the most famous scientists in the world, passed away. His contributions to science have greatly impacted the world which we live in now, and his courage with which he faced his disease became an inspiration to so many. I truly admire his perseverance!
Hawking, on the other hand, had an ambivalent relationship with the State of Israel. He visited Israel many times, he participated with the Israeli scientific community and had a cordial relationship with the Hebrew State. But in the last 10-15 years years, this has changed. Hawking was no longer a great friend of Israel, but rather a participant in the BDS movement, an “anti-Semitic” organization that promotes not only the boycott of the State of Israel but also, albeit surreptitiously, its disappearance.
In 2013, for example, Hawking decided to boycott a conference held in Jerusalem in honor of the 90th anniversary of Shimon Peres, the former Israeli president. This attitude of Hawking provoked indignation in Israel and much of the Jewish world. The organizers of the conference wrote, “The academic boycott is, in our opinion, scandalous and improper, certainly for someone [like Hawking] for whom the spirit of freedom is based on his human and academic mission. Israel is a democracy in which all individuals are free to express their opinions, whatever they may be.The imposition of a boycott is incompatible with an open and democratic dialogue “.
And although many musicians and artists have previously refused to visit Israel, Hawking was the first scientist of his stature to openly support the boycott movement towards Israel. Many accused him of absolute anti-Semitism and others of cynicism, since the computer system through which Hawking could communicate worked on a chip designed by the Israeli team of Intel.
Why did Hawking become such an enemy of Israel?
Some newspapers write that this new negative attitude towards the Jewish state was due to the influence of Noam Chomsky, a very important scientist, founder of modern linguistics. Chomsky is a Jew, but an atheist activist, and infamous for his visceral antagonism and opposition to Israel.
This might be a valid reason…
In the next lines, however, I would like to contribute a personal idea about another possible reason for Hawking’s new anti-Israelism.
I had the opportunity to read many of Hawking’s works when I wrote my book “Awesome Creation”, where I deal with the biblical narrative of Creation vs. the Big Bang and other cosmological theories. In the first chapter, in a footnote I quote one of Hawking’s most famous expressions, in his “Brief History of Time” (1988) where he says that when modern scientists would be able to formulate the unified theory of physics, then we would be able to ” know the mind of God.” With that note I point out the arrogance of this statement and I compare it to what Bil’am (Balaam) declared. Balaam was the only man in the Bible who attributed himself to knowing the Divine Mind (although the Tora shows that Bil’am was not even able to understand the mind of his donkey …).
Now, although what Hawking said about God was arrogant, it was clear that Hawking DID believe in God (or at least he was an agnostic). But his belief changed over the years, perhaps due to his personal tragic disease. Hawking became a very influential voice for atheism when he published his book “The Great Design” (2010), which states that it is not necessary to invoke God to justify the existence of the universe. “There is no God”, he said, since “the laws of gravity may have created the universe without God’s intervention.” Now, explaining the origin of the laws of physics, is obviously as difficult as explaining the origin of the universe. Hawking’s statement, which Rabbi Jonathan Sacks categorized as an intellectual “fallacy”, would sound childish and almost silly, since it assumes that physical laws, gravity etc., pre-existed the appearance of the universe, and were not created , designed, calibrated, etc. But because Stephen Hawking was saying so, these superficial ideas that denied God’s intervention in the act of Creation gained some credibility…
Anyways, what I would like to analyze is another point. The relationship between “not believing in God” and the “opposition to the existence of the State of Israel,” particularly in modern Western society.
The Tora and especially King David in his Psalms, identified the enemies of Israel with the enemy of God. The existence of Israel, our miraculous departure from Egypt, the incredible journey of three million people through the desert, the providential conquest of the promised land, and especially the inexplicable survival of Israel in a hyper-hostile diaspora for almost two thousand years, can only be explained as a miracle or a series of miracles. If Israel exists, it is because God exists. But if Israel disappears, one could doubt His existence (ח”ו) .This concept was beautifully formulated by the prophet Yesha’ayahu who said (43:10): אתם עדי, “You – the Jewish people – are the witnesses, the living testimony of My existence. “
And what was true for 1900 years, became infinitely more true since 1948, when miraculously the same people who were systematically “exterminated” only three years before, were now establishing their own state in their original homeland. Something absolutely unprecedented !! Their children returned from all the countries of the world, fulfilling literally the oldest prophecies of the Bible. Israel fought against countless enemies, ALL her neighbors, in a ratio of 0.5 against 100 ! The countries that are antagonistic to the existence of Israel are rich, have the largest oil reserves in the world, and enjoy the support of 99% of the countries of the world. Israel is currently the only country on the planet whose existence is explicitly threatened, the only country permanently condemned and demonized by the United Nations…and despite all this, far from being a country in a state of emergency, corruption or desperation, Israel is a military, cultural, economic and technological “superpower”. Far from being a country where its inhabitants live in a permanent state of fear, tension and depression due to the dangers that they face, Israel is according to the new 208 statistics the 11th happiest country in the world! (USA ranked 18th)
THERE IS NO WAY to explain or justify the existence, survival, prosperity and happiness of Israel in a non supernatural manner, intelligent and informed people know it. And I think that this is why many people who do not believe in God, who are intelligent and well informed, resort to the last line of psychological defense that helps them sustain their atheism; demonizing Israel and directly or even indirectly, seeking its destruction.
When Hawking, Chomsky, Soros and many other atheist activists become the “irrational” enemies of Israel, they confirm once more the words of Yesha’ayahu: that our existence is a miracle. And that the people and the state of Israel, are the irrefutable testimony of the existence of God.
Daily Mishne Tora In English – Hames uMassa Chapter 2, by Rabbi Jacob Bitton
List of Products Authorized for Pesah 5778
DOWNLOAD HERE 2018 Pesah List
By Rabbi Yehuda Boroosan , for Sephardic Communities only
Hilkhot Hamets uMatsa (Laws of Pesah) from Maimonides MISHNE TORA CHAPTER 1
IS RICE CHAMETZ? 🍚
We’ve already established that chametz comes specifically from one of five grains: wheat, barley, spelt, rye, and oats. That means rice, by definition, is not chametz — and this isn’t a modern ruling or a recent leniency. It goes all the way back to the Gemara.
In fact, the Talmud records an explicit debate on this very question. Rabbi Yochanan ben Nuri — a sage from the Land of Israel who lived in the first century of the Common Era — argued that rice should not be eaten on Pesach. But the other sages pushed back, and the Gemara’s conclusion is unambiguous: rice is not chametz, and it may be eaten on Pesach. The Talmud even tells us that Rabbah, one of the most celebrated sages of Babylonia, used to eat rice at the Pesach Seder itself. 📖 (Pesachim 114b)
So the halacha is clear. Case closed — or so you’d think.
SO WHY DON’T ASHKENAZIM EAT RICE ON PESACH? 🤔
Here’s where things get interesting. Ashkenazi Jews refrain from eating rice on Pesach — but not because they consider it chametz. That’s an important distinction. The Ashkenazi tradition is to avoid an entire category of foods known as kitniyot: legumes, certain grains, and related products. Rice falls into this category, and so Ashkenazim don’t eat it on Pesach. This is a very old custom, and it remains widely observed to this day.
But where did this tradition come from? The answer is rooted in very practical, very real historical concerns.
Think about what the world looked like 100 or 200 years ago — or even more recently than that. Food wasn’t sold the way it is today, neatly packaged in sealed bags on supermarket shelves with clear labels and ingredient lists. 🛒 Food was sold in open-air markets, by weight, in bulk. Merchants would scoop out whatever you needed using shared scoops, pallets, and scales — the same tools they used for every other grain they sold. Rice and wheat sat in neighboring stalls. Sometimes in neighboring sacks.
And it gets even closer than that. The fields where rice was grown were often right next to — or even mixed in with — fields of wheat and barley. When harvest time came, it wasn’t unusual at all for a few grains of wheat to end up mixed in with the rice. 🌾
Now here’s why that matters so much: the prohibition of chametz during Pesach is extraordinarily strict. So strict, in fact — as we will discuss in more detail later — that a single grain of wheat is enough to render an entire plate of rice forbidden. Just one grain. Given that reality, and given how easily and how commonly wheat and rice got mixed together, it’s completely understandable why communities developed the practice of avoiding rice on Pesach altogether. Why take the risk?
And there’s another reason that reinforced this concern: rice and wheat look remarkably similar. The ears and grains of brown rice bear a strong resemblance to wheat. Rice flour and wheat flour are nearly indistinguishable by appearance alone. 👀 The average person — and even the careful person — could easily confuse one for the other.
Put all of that together: similar appearance, shared markets, shared tools, adjacent fields, and a prohibition so strict that one grain makes the difference — and the kitniyot custom starts to make a lot of sense.
BUT WAIT — ASHKENAZIM AREN’T THE ONLY ONES 🌍
It might surprise you to learn that avoiding rice on Pesach is not exclusively an Ashkenazi practice. Among Sephardic communities, the question of rice is actually a point of division.
Moroccan Jews and Jews from other North African communities — with the exception of Egypt — also refrain from eating rice during Pesach. So this caution around rice is not something unique to Eastern European Jewry.
On the other hand, Jews from Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other Middle Eastern communities do eat rice on Pesach — and rice plays a central role in their Pesach cooking. If potatoes are the Ashkenazi Pesach staple 🥔, rice is the Middle Eastern equivalent 🍚. It’s on the Seder table, it’s in the soups, it’s in the side dishes — it’s everywhere.
To address the concern about accidental wheat contamination, the custom in these communities is to check the rice carefully — not once, not twice, but three times — before using it for Pesach. That triple-checking is the practical safeguard that allows them to use rice with confidence.
ONE MORE THING WORTH KNOWING 📌
Here’s something that genuinely surprises many people, even those who are quite familiar with Pesach laws:
Even if you follow the tradition of not eating rice and other kitniyot during Pesach, you are completely permitted to keep them in your home. You do not need to throw them out. You do not need to sell them. They can sit in your pantry throughout all of Pesach without any problem. This is explicitly stated in the Shulchan Aruch (Rama, 453:1). The kitniyot restriction is about consumption — not about possession.
And there’s a further nuance, noted by Rabbi Eliezer Melamed in his Penine Halacha, based on the Mishna Berura (ibid., 9): the custom to avoid kitniyot applies when the kitniyot product is the food, or when kitniyot constitute the majority of a given product. But if kitniyot appear as a minor ingredient, or as a food additive — think corn starch, corn fructose, and similar substances — that food is not forbidden during Pesach, even for those who observe the kitniyot restriction.
As always, check with your rabbi about the specific traditions of your community. 🙏
For the merit of virtuous women the children of Israel were freed from Egypt
CHAPTER 1
15: The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16: “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17:The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18: Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?” 19: The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.” 20: So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. 21: And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. 22: Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”
CHAPTER 2
1: Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, 2: and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. 3: But when she could hide him no longer, she got a basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. 4: His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.5: Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. 6: She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said. 7: Then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” 8:“Yes, go,” she answered. So the girl went and got the baby’s mother. 9:Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you.” So the woman took the baby and nursed him. 10:When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”
ESTHER: 5:13 Haman’s Unlimited Arrogance
The villain of the Purim story is Haman ben Hamedata, descendant of Amaleq. King Ahashverosh appointed Haman as his prime minister and gave the order that all court officials should kneel before him. All the officers obeyed the king’s order except for one man: Mordekhai. And when Haman knew that Mordecai was not kneeling before him, he decided to eliminate all the people of Mordechai: destroy the Jewish nation.
Haman had a plan, his own version of “the final solution”. First, he had to persuade king Ahashverosh presenting a matter in a way that would sound benefiting to the king and hide his personal thirst for vengeance against Mordekhai and his people. Persuading the king was not very difficult. Haman showed the king a plan with “zero” operating costs and in exchange for the king’s executive order, Haman offered a large amount of money for the royal treasury: 10,000 large bars (in Hebrew: loaves) of silver, which was a more than the money that was collected from taxes in one year throughout the Persian Empire (9,880 silver bars per year).
Now, how was Haman going to recruit hundreds of thousands of soldiers to find and execute hundreds of thousands of Jews, scattered throughout the Persian Empire, from Turkey to the West, Ethiopia to the South, and India to the East?
Haman designed a perverse plan that the Megilla briefly describes with two words: ושללם לבוז (“and their belongings will be for dispossession”). Haman’s decree said more or less this: “On the 13th day of Adar —a day chosen by chance (pur) by Haman — all the citizens of the empire will be allowed to kill Jews. Law enforcement officers will not prosecute anyone, because it wont be a crome but a service to the Empire. And the incentive for this massacre? If you kill a Jew you can keep his money, property, values, etc.” Haman’s plan was” diabolically great “. There was no need to distract the army from its obligations, nor to transport the Jews to concentration camps or kill them in gas chambers. Our Rabbis explain that there was no shortage of volunteers. People, even those who did not hate the Jews, fought among themselves to reserve to right to be first and keep s much as possible of the Jews’ assets.
The letters were sent to every major city in the empire. And if his diabolical plan would have worked, (and it was very close!) It would have been ח”ו the end of our people.
In the end, with the help of HaShem, as we all know, Queen Esther and Mordekhai were able to reverse the evil plan of Haman, who ended up paying his wickedness with his own life on the gallows.
The Megilla also offers us a glimpse of Haman’s psychological profile. In chapter 5, verse 13, when Haman is at home with his wife, after having attended as a guest of honor an exclusive dinner with the king and queen, and without even suspecting that Esther had a plan in place to stop Haman’s plot, an unusual dialogue took place, almost a monologue, in which Haman displays a kind of catharsis of his feelings. In the first place, Haman “confesses” his immense power, his incredible wealth, his honor, etc. And what follows next is amazing. Haman, incredibly admits the following: “And all this [my power, my wealth, my family] is worth nothing to me, when I see Mordekhai the Jew, sitting at the door of the royal court, not kneeling before me”]. “
Haman was probably one of the richest and most powerful men in the history of mankind. And yet, the fact that even if one person, Mordekhai, did not revere him, exposed the incredible fragility of the ego of this powerful man. Haman suffered from a very high dose of arrogance, at the level of megalomania: the obsession with exercising power, dominating and controlling others.
Arrogance destroys. Haman’s arrogance could have annihilated our people, and ultimately it led to his own end.