Sho’a Nightmares

Posted on 2009/04/21 by davka

In April of 1997 I wrote (as an aside) to a forum of colleagues:

I think every teenage Jew­ish child ought to have a week of Sho’a relat­ed night­mares. If we can reen­act the Exo­dus and liv­ing in Sukkot, why not the Sho’a?

Only one per­son respond­ed. How­ev­er, that response was quite intense. I will not quote from that response, but para­phrase some of the exchange that ensued

My cor­re­spon­dent strong­ly dis­agreed with my sug­ges­tion that we “impose” Sho’a night­mares on chil­dren. Sug­gest­ing that it is one thing for an indi­vid­ual to make a con­scious deci­sion to engage in the par­tic­u­lar painful exer­cise, and quite anoth­er to impose it on some­one. My cor­re­spon­dent sug­gest­ed that (while cer­tain that I had not intend­ed to con­vey such an idea) none of us are put on earth to cre­ate new night­mares or forms of abuse.

And so, I respond­ed. Con­tin­ue read­ing →

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Why Wine?

Posted on 2009/04/17 by davka

[cross post­ed at the Jew and the Car­rot].

Kurt Weill

At Pesach we drink a lot of wine. Why is it called the sym­bol of our joy?

In an arid envi­ron­ment, wine can be seen a method of preser­va­tion. If you do not live or work near a well or a spring or some oth­er source of fresh water you need to have some­thing else to drink dur­ing the day.

  • Milk does not last with­out refrig­er­a­tion; actu­al­ly, we can think of cheese as a form of dried milk (that is a form of pre­serv­ing milk).
  • Crush­ing olives obtains oil, which while high­ly use­ful, does not quench thirst.
  • Squash­ing pome­gran­ates pro­duces a very tart juice, but it does­n’t last long at room temperature.
  • Squeez­ing dates cre­ates a very sweet paste our ances­tors called “dvash”.
  • And figs don’t pro­duce much in the man­ner of a drink­able juice either.

The Grape

But, that oth­er fruit men­tioned among the sev­en species, the grape, under­goes an amaz­ing trans­for­ma­tion when it is crushed, squashed and squeezed. With just the right amount of expo­sure to oxy­gen it becomes a drink that, like a good per­son, becomes more dis­tin­guished as it ages.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →
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