VeZot HaBerachah and the Hoshana Rabbah custom of striking the ground with willow twigs tl;dr Incense (ketoret) means “binding,” which we interpret as entanglement; the
“Ein simchah ke’hatarat ha-sfeikot”—there is no joy like the resolution of doubt. On the eve of Rosh HaShanah, our sages describe a cosmic pause: the
In many Ashkenazi communities, the day after Yom Kippur is nicknamed Gott’s Nomen, Yiddish for “G-d’s Name.” Chassidic sources associate the four days between Yom
Sukkah: the portal into the Holy Land Sitting with my wife in our sukkah-hut recently, I was struck by a memory from some four decades ago.
Abstract This essay explores the profound connections between language, philosophy, physics, and spirituality in the context of Rosh HaShanah. By examining the linguistic roots of
And ye shall take you on the first day the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of
Jews have a very strange custom to take four species (Heb. arba’a minim)—a fruit of a citron tree (etrog), a branch of a date palm (lulav), boughs from the myrtle tree (chadassim),
Today is Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot – the intermediate days between the first and the last days of the holiday of Sukkot. These days are not
In the last post, Tishrei—Past, Present, and Future, we discussed how all Tishrei holidays – Rosh HaShanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah – are
The months of Tishrei is full of holidays, and they all share a common theme—the unification of time—past, present, and future. It all starts with
Why is this night different from all other nights, asks a child on the Seder night. On this Simchat Torah I asked a different question—why
Albert Einstein had a lifelong quest—to develop a unified field theory—the theory that would describe as a single field gravity and electromagnetism (just as Maxwell