It’s been a crazy week. The world with all its worries and bothers is still clamoring for your attention. The first step is to forget all that. Leave it behind. Enter into a timeless space, where you, your great-grandparents and Moses   all coincide. The beginning of all journeys is separation. You’ve got to leave somewhere to go somewhere else. It is also the first step towards freedom: You ignore the voice of Pharaoh inside that mocks you, saying, “Who are you...

The whole point of the seder is to ask questions. This is your time to ask about things that confuse you, things you don’t understand, or even things you don’t agree with. There really is no is no such thing as a stupid question, especially tonight.  - Joy Levitt (age 16) Questions are not only welcome during the course of the evening but are vital to tonight’s journey. Our obligation at this seder involves traveling from slavery to freedom, prodding ourselves...

  Elijah has advised that due to COVID-19 restrictions in his own organization, he will not be able to attend in person. He is learning how to use Zoom (like the rest of us).

Passover is a time of rememberance and connection - not just to others at the table, but to forefathers and foremothers and to the entire history of the Jewish people. Not just to the Jewish people, but people everywhere, all over the world, who share experiences of opression, liberation, and struggle. In this moment, where the world is facing political and economic upheval over a worldwide pandemic that has us all sheltering away from others, it is perhaps now more than...

The Torah speaks of four kinds of people who use Zoom:  The Wise The Wicked The Simple The One Who Does Not Know How to "Mute"  The Wise Person says: "I'll handle the Admin Feature Controls and Chat Rooms, and forward the Cloud Recording Transcript after the call."  The Wicked Person says: "Since I have unlimited duration, I scheduled the meeting for six hours - as it says in the Haggadah, whoever prolongs the telling of the story, harei zeh 'shubach,...

Loneliness hurts. It is psychologically distressing and so physically unhealthy that being lonely increases the likelihood of an earlier death by 26 percent. But the feeling may serve a purpose. Psychologists theorize it hurts so much because, like hunger and thirst, loneliness acts as a biological alarm bell. The ache of it drives us to seek out social connection just as hunger pangs urge us to eat. The idea is intuitively satisfying, yet it has long proved difficult to test in...