Bubala Please Episode 6 -- Make Your Own Passover Haggadah

Bubala Please Episode 5 -- Passover Munchies

A Wicked Passover Video

The Rebbe's Vort A Weekly Dose of Inspiration from the Kosover Rebbe, Shlita

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On Pesach we reached great heights of holiness, by eradicating every trace of Chametz and eating the Matzah.  Matzah, the only food we are commanded by the Torah to eat, is not mere food; it is an item of holiness which elevates us upon consumption. And after eating it for the entire duration of Pesach, we have unlocked true potential - anything can happen now.

Now is the time when we implement the words mentioned in the Hagaddah, "L'maan Tizkor Yom Tzeischa Mimitzrayim Kol Yemei Chayecha" - in order that you remember the day you left Mitzrayim all the days of your life - "Lehavi Limos Hamashiach," - to hasten the days of Mashiach.

 Those who reside outside of Eretz Yisrael celebrate an extra day of Pesach due to uncertainty at the time the calendar was implemented. The Chasam Sofer tells us that even when Mashiach comes we will continue celebrating this extra day, to remind us of our time in Galus. The comparison of exile to freedom, from darkness to light, will be a powerful one. On the eighth day of Pesach - the day that is only celebrated outside of Eretz Yisrael- we read in the Haftorah about the glory of Mashiach, about the peace that will reign as Hashem brings the ultimate light to this world. We read this here in exile to remind us of the potential that we have unlocked during the past week - potential that we must remember despite our bleak surroundings.

Before Pesach we worked endlessly to remove every speck of Chametz - every trace of impurity. We spent a week in pristine surroundings eating holy food. We have reached a lofty plateau and have the power to bring Mashiach. We can bring the Geulah by heeding the words of the Hagaddah and remembering the darkness of Mitzrayim. May we soon merit to compare that darkness to the shining light of Mashiach. 

 

Wishing you a wonderful Shabbos

Israel’s 'Pesach' Goy

What does a Jewish state do with it’s hametz, or all leavened food products, when Passover rolls around? It sells it to a gentile.

According to Torah law, a Jew is not allowed to eat or even to retain ownership over hametz during the holiday. Many Jews sell their bread, pasta, cereal and more to a gentile and repurchase it after the festival ends. They lock the food in a cupboard, which then becomes the property of the non-Jewish purchaser.

In the State of Israel, that purchaser – of the entire country’s hametz – is Jabar Hussein.

Hussein is the food and beverage manager at the Hilton hotel in Jerusalem. An Israeli- Arab from the village of Abu Ghosh just outside of the capital, Hussein has been buying the hametz belonging to every government ministry, the security services and those restaurants that sell their hametz through the Chief Rabbinate for years. Hussein took over the job after his predecessor – who was also from Abu Ghosh – discovered that his maternal grandmother was Jewish.

Sitting in his office at the Hilton, which is lined with photos of himself posing with Israeli leaders from Yitzchak Rabin to Binyamin Netanyahu, Hussein told The Jerusalem Post just what is entailed in the annual ritual of purchasing the country’s hametz.

How many years have you been buying Israel’s hametz?

I have been doing this for 15 years, buying the hametz of the State of Israel. I started 15 years ago when the chief rabbi of the state was Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau. In the course of my work as food and beverage manager for the hotel, I meet all sorts of important figures in the state and MKs in the hotel and as such I got to know Rabbi Lau. He brought me into this and explained to me exactly what the significance is of the sale of hametz and since then I buy it every year.

How does it work?

The country’s finance minister gives the chief rabbis the power of attorney to sell the hametz to someone who isn’t Jewish. So the chief rabbis sell it to me.

I sign a contract at the Chief Rabbinate with many clauses and conditions regarding every matter and I need to come with money to pay.

Is there a ceremony?

There is a ceremony on the 20th of the month at the Chief Rabbinate with the Sephardi and Ashkenazi chief rabbis and the finance minister.

How much do you pay?

I pay a down payment of NIS 20,000 [and I get back] the entire amount after Passover.

They sell me all of the hametz belonging to the State of Israel which is worth more than $150 billion.

So you buy millions of dollars worth of merchandise for several thousand dollars?

It’s a beautiful thing. I become the richest man in the State of Israel for Passover.

But they don’t bring trucks to you full of the country’s hametz.

No. It remains in its place. I also [get] the locations, the storehouses. Wherever there is hametz, it becomes mine during Passover.

You have the legal right to enter and inspect.

Certainly. I have the right to go in and check everything I bought. I have to go around and check these things. I do the rounds.

This is also the hametz of the IDF, the police?

Yes, [as well as] the government ministries and what there is on planes. It all becomes mine.

A restaurant that sells their hametz through the Chief Rabbinate, that also becomes yours?

Certainly. They sell it to them and the Chief Rabbinate sells it to me.

Does this ever feel weird to you?

No. I understand it very well and if I can help, why not? I’ll help with happiness.

According to Halacha it is forbidden for Jews to have hametz so I have no problem to buy it for Passover.

What do your neighbors say?

They are interested and I explain it to them and they take it well.

Have there every been problems with the purchase?

There are no problems, but every time it’s funny because the media does their stories about the man from Abu Ghosh who buys all the hametz. There are also people who call me and say, “send me a truck of flour,” because they think that I have it all with me. It’s funny.

Content provided as courtesy of the Jerusalem Post

Bye Bye Mr. Pharaoh Goodbye

Domino Rally at BGU - Happy Passover 2013

Grape Juice At The Seder By: Rabbi J. Simcha Cohen

Question: May one use grape juice for the arba kosos?

Answer: Many years ago the hechsher on grape juice stated that only the “old, sick, or minors” were permitted to use grape juice for kiddush and thearba kosos.

Rav Nissan Telushkin, a great talmid chacham and the author of halachic works on the laws of mikveh, once articulated his halachic qualms regarding manufactured grape juice. He believed that bottled grape juice was qualitatively different than juice squeezed from a cluster of grapes. Juice that has just been squeezed from grapes may yet ferment into wine. However, bottled grape juice – because of the way it’s processed – will never ferment into wine. It will never have alcoholic content.

But why must it have alcoholic content? The basis for this requirement isPesachim 108b where R. Yehuda states that “it must possess the taste andappearance of wine.” Raba provides the source for R. Yehuda’s statement –Proverbs 23:31: “Look not upon the wine when it is red.” The Rashbam explains that this verse takes it as a given that wine is red. And the redness of wine, writes the Rashbam, implies an alcoholic element to it. What the verse is saying is that the alcoholic content of wine should not be judged by its redness.

Another source for the necessity of wine having alcoholic content is Psalms 106:15, which states, “And wine gladdens the heart of man.” Since wine probably makes people happy because of its alcoholic content, it would appear that wine must have alcohol in it.

Thus, at first glance, it would seem that bottled grape juice, which lacks alcoholic content, cannot be used for kiddush or the arba kosos.

The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim 272:4), however, seems to suggest otherwise. Despite R. Yehuda’s statement in the Gemara that wine must be red, the Shulchan Aruch rules one may use white wine for kiddush.

The Gaon of Vilna (Biur HaGra, O.C. 272:4) suggests that the Shulchan Aruch read R. Yehuda’s statement as a halachic preference rather than a halachic ruling. Moreover, another tanna in Pesachim 108 mentions nothing about wine having to be red, which suggests that he disagrees with R. Yehuda. If so, the Shulchan Aruch is simply ruling like the first tanna against R. Yehuda.

Since the requirement for wine to have alcoholic content stems from the same Gemara that states that wine must be red, it would seem that by ruling that wine need not be red, the Shulchan Aruch is implying that it also need not have alcoholic content. Thus, bottled grape juice would be acceptable for kiddush and the arba kosos.

(It is interesting to note that the Mishnah Berurah (272:10) writes that all authorities believe red wine is preferred lechat’chila. The Mishnah Berurah therefore also likely believes that wine should preferably have alcoholic content.)

Kosher for Passover Salt Water

A Passover quiz published by Yaakov Kirschen

Passover: Breaking News

Celebrating liberty while being deported to a concentration camp Holocaust research center presents personal items Jews took with them as they were being sent to their deaths • Despite the limited items they were allowed to bring, they took things that belonged to their spiritual life and identity, says center's founder.

In every generation they rise up to destroy us, says the Haggadah, traditionally read at the Passover Seder. On Thursday, the Shem Olam Holocaust and Faith Institute showcased items that may have been used for Passover rituals at the Chelmno death camp in western Poland. They were discovered as a result of excavations at the site, in pits containing prisoners' belongings.

One item is a worn out and partially torn Haggadah that was burned by the Nazis. Several portions dealing with the search for chametz (leavened bread that is prohibited on Passover) and other sentences managed to survive. This gives the passages a new, chilling meaning that reflects on the unbelievable horrors the Jews had to endure during the Holocaust. "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt; but God took us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm" (Deuteronomy 6:21) is one such sentence.

Shem Olam was founded in 1996 by Avraham Krieger. It is located in Kfar Haroeh, just north of Netanya. One of the institute's projects deals with how Jews coped with the day-to-day struggles during the Holocaust.

"The Nazis told Jews who had been deported to Chelmno that they were being relocated to a village faraway in the east; they told them each person could bring only lightweight items with a combined weight of 3 to 4 kilograms (7 to 9 pounds)," Krieger said.

"Because of the limited number of items they were allowed to carry, the Jews brought their most important items, but many brought with them things that belonged to their spiritual life and identity, things that represented the past, the present and their personal attachment to tradition.

"They probably wanted to make sure what they added to their luggage did not weigh too much and did not waste space, but the mere fact that they added these things shows that they were loyal to their faith, to the holiday and to tradition; they demonstrated that they did not let the Germans break their spirit.

"Most of the death camps had no such items left behind, but since Chelmno was the first death camp on Polish soil, the Nazis had yet to have at their disposal a sophisticated apparatus and consequently, some of the property was buried, and survived."

Passover & Overcoming Life's Challenges - Rabbi Tzvi Sytner

PESACH AND LOCUSTS by Rabbi Berel Wein

Over the past weeks the plague of locusts in a relatively minor form has infested our area of the world. The locusts apparently did do great though not catastrophic damage to crops in Egypt before crossing the Sinai peninsula and turning north to invade Israel. The Israel Agricultural Ministry has sprayed extensively from the air to destroy the streams of aggressive locusts and has achieved success in controlling the situation without any great harm to Israeli crop fields. Since this event happened in our season of the Pesach holiday and since the plague of locusts is listed in the Bible as being one of the ten plagues that the Lord visited on Egypt leading to the exodus of the Jews from slavery, the arrival of the locusts in Egypt and here received wide public interest and media coverage. Which led me to think about the plagues as recorded in the Bible that befell the Egyptians. Were they all miraculous completely or were they natural or at least semi-natural events that the Lord ordered to occur at that time and at that place? Rambam seems to view almost all miracles as being miraculous as to the time and place of occurrence while event itself is part of the order of nature. He allows only for rare exceptions to this view. Other great rabbinic scholars took issue with this view and saw the entire matter of miracles in the Bible as being outside the purview of nature entirely. The matter of miracles thus remains miraculously mysterious until today though most Jews probably follow the latter view presented here than the Maimonidean opinion previously advanced.

What if Pharaoh would have possessed pesticides and spraying airplanes would he have been able to overcome the plague of locusts that invaded his country?  What if he would have possessed an extensive electricity grid that encompassed his country would the plague of darkness have truly affected him and the Egyptians? If he would have had an outstanding medical dermatological faculty would he have been able to deal with the plagues of lice and boils? In other words, were all of those plagues that visited the Egyptians and finally broke their slavery hold on the Jewish people effective only because they happened thousands of years ago to a country and civilization then lacking modern technology and scientific knowledge? Or would the plagues have been of so miraculous and supernatural a nature that they would be uncontrollable even today as well? The answer to this intriguing question is naturally dependent upon how one views and defines miracles. In Marl Twain’s famous book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the Yankee outduels Merlin the Magician par excellent of King Arthur by simply introducing more modern technology and scientific knowledge into a mainly illiterate tenth century civilization. What was a miracle to King Arthur is electricity to the nineteenth century Connecticut Yankee.  Yet can we not view electricity as being a miracle? We are able to explain how electricity operates but not why it works that way. In Halacha the great rabbinic scholars are still wrestling with achieving an halachic understanding of electricity. The mystery of electricity itself renders it to be almost miraculous in its essence.

I have felt that the mystery of God’s handiwork in nature and our vast universe that is slowly being revealed to us through our advancing technology and scientific knowledge and research is itself miraculous. The more we know, the more amazed we become at the complexity and beauty and order of our world and its mysteries. Judaism views nature itself as being purely miraculous. That is really the root cause as to why it has been so difficult to define miracles to everyone’s satisfaction. If everything is miraculous then really nothing is miraculous in the popular sense of the word. That is really the basis of Rambam’s view of the matter. Only the locality and the time of the event make it extraordinary. The event itself is only one item in the continuing and ongoing miracle of nature and creation. So we could therefore say that the fact that Pharaoh did not possess crop-spraying airplanes is what made his plague of locusts miraculous and dreaded to him and his society while our experience with the locust swarms that invaded our country is merely an interesting newspaper item. However, I feel that the fact that 3325 years later the people of Israel commemorate their exodus from Egypt in the same manner and precise detail as did their ancestors over all of that length of time is certainly to be considered miraculous. 

Shabat shalom

Chag kasher v’sameach

Berel Wein        

FRUM SATIRE: Get a matzo case for your iPhone by HESHY FRIED

I haven’t really gone on an anti-smart phone rant in some time and that’s a good thing, because just last week I became the last person in the first world to get a phone with a camera and internet. I was always anti-smart phone, but joining my wife’s plan made sense and the dumb phones cost more than the iPhone which was free. Of course, I hear having a smart phone hurts your shidduch resume and general rapport with the rapidly shrinking community of anti-internet frummies. So I’ve had an iPhone for a week and I’m totally down with it and I now have my first case for it, which looks like a piece of machine made matzah.

I’m fairly certian that the folks making the matzah case for the iPhone (matzo for the secular crowd) didn’t actually go into the fact that most people hold that you must eat shmurah matzah at the sedarim to get a mitzvah. The person who sent me the matzo case merely asked if I had an the 4 or 5 version of the iPhone and not whether or not I wanted the case to look like machine made, hand made, shmurah, sephardic, temani, wheat, spelt, oat, rye or quinoa matzah. And so I am stuck with the regular old manishevetz (may not even be kosher for pesach) iPhone matzah case.

NYT: Inside The Matzo Factory

There are two giants in the Matzo business. Streit's uses machinery that hasn't been updated since World War II. Manischewitz uses state-of-the-art equipment. But Streit's has one advantage: Its customers hate change.

NYT: Why a Haggadah?

I SPENT much of the last several years working on a new Haggadah — the guidebook for the prayers, rituals and songs of the Seder — and am often asked why I would want to take time away from my own writing to invest myself in such a project.

All my life, my parents have hosted the Seder on the first night of Passover. As our family expanded, and as our definition of family expanded, we moved the ritual dinner from our dining room to our more spacious, mildewed basement. One table became many table-like surfaces pushed awkwardly together. I always knew Passover was approaching when my father would ask me to take the net off the ping-pong table. All were covered in once matching, stained tablecloths.

At each setting was a Haggadah that my parents had assembled by photocopying favorite passages from other Haggadot and, when the Foers finally got Internet access, by printing online sources. Why is this night different from all others? Because on this night copyright doesn’t apply.

In the absence of a stable homeland, Jews have made their home in books, and the Haggadah — whose core is the retelling of the Exodus from Egypt — has been translated more widely, and revised more often, than any other Jewish book. Everywhere Jews have wandered, there have been Haggadot — from the 14th-century Sarajevo Haggadah (which is said to have survived World War II under the floorboards of a mosque, and the siege of Sarajevo in a bank vault), to those made by Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel during Operation Moses.

But of the 7,000 known versions, not to mention the countless homemade editions, there is one that is used more than all others combined. Since 1932, the Maxwell House Haggadah — as in the coffee company — has dominated American Jewish ritual.

Having confirmed in the 1920s that the coffee bean is not a legume but a berry, and therefore kosher for Passover, Maxwell House tasked the Joseph Jacobs ad agency to make coffee, rather than tea, the drink of choice after Seders. If this sounds loony, note that Maxwell House coffee has always been particularly popular in Jewish homes.

The resulting Haggadah is one of the longest-running sales promotions in advertising history. At least 50 million copies have been distributed free at supermarkets, and they are exactly as inspiring as you would imagine them to be.

And yet, many people feel fondly toward the Maxwell House Haggadah, for the giddy comfort it evokes. We like it like we like Jewish jokes. The Maxwell House version, is, itself, a sort of Jewish joke — try mentioning it to a group of Jews without eliciting laughter. What’s more, it’s free, and, like the no-frills caffeine beverage it promotes, satisfies a most basic need.

The most legendary of all Seders — which is, in a postmodern twist, recounted in the Haggadah itself — took place around the beginning of the second century in Bnei Brak, among the greatest scholars of Jewish antiquity. It ended prematurely when students barged in to announce that it was time for the morning prayers. Even if they read the Haggadah from beginning to end, fulfilling every ritual and singing every verse of every song, they must have been spending most of their time doing something else: extrapolating, dissecting, discussing. The story of the Exodus is not meant to be merely recited, but wrestled with.

If the Maxwell House Haggadah never rose to meet the Seder’s intellectual and spiritual demands, it adequately served the ritualistically literate Jews of a generation or two ago. But the actors no longer know the script. In a further sort of exodus, American Jews have moved: from poverty to affluence, tradition to modernity, acquaintance with a shared history to loss of collective memory.

Our grandparents were immigrants to America, but natives to Judaism. We are the opposite: fluent in “American Idol,” but unschooled in Jewish heroes. And so we act like immigrants around Judaism: cautious, rejecting, self-conscious, and feigning (or achieving) indifference. In the foreign country of our faith, our need for a good guidebook is urgent.

Though it means “the telling,” the Haggadah does not merely tell a story: it is our book of living memory. It is not enough to retell the story: we must make the most radical leap of empathy into it. “In every generation a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt,” the Haggadah tells us. This leap has always been a daunting challenge, but is fraught for my generation in a way that it wasn’t for the desperate assimilators of earlier generations — for now, in addition to a lack of education and knowledge of Jewish learning, there is the also the taint of collective complacency.

The integration of Jews and Jewish themes into our pop culture is so prevalent that we have become intoxicated by the ersatz images of ourselves. I, too, love “Seinfeld,” but is there not a problem when the show is cited as a referent for one’s Jewish identity? For many of us, being Jewish has become, above all things, funny. All that’s left in the void of fluency and profundity is laughter. 

About five years ago, I noticed a longing in myself. Perhaps it was inspired by fatherhood, or just growing older. Despite having been raised in an intellectual and self-consciously Jewish home, I knew almost nothing about what was supposedly my own belief system.

And worse, I felt satisfied with how little I knew. Sometimes I thought of my stance as a rejection, but you can’t reject something that you don’t understand and that was never yours. Sometimes I thought of it as an achievement, but there’s no achievement in passive forfeiture.

Why did I take time away from my own writing to edit a new Haggadah? Because I wanted to take a step toward the conversation I could only barely hear through the closed door of my ignorance; a step toward a Judaism of question marks rather than quotation marks; toward the story of my people, my family and myself.

Like every child, my 6-year-old is a great lover of stories — Norse myths, Roald Dahl, recounted tales from my own childhood — but none more than those from the Bible. So between the bath and bed, my wife and I often read to him from children’s versions of the Old Testament. He loves hearing those stories, because they’re the greatest stories ever told. We love telling them for a different reason.

We helped him learn to sleep through the night, to use a fork, to read, to ride a bike, to say goodbye to us. But there is no more significant lesson than the one that is never learned but always studied, the noblest collective project of all, borrowed from one generation and lent to the next: how to seek oneself.

A few nights ago, after hearing about the death of Moses for the umpteenth time — how he took his last breaths overlooking a promised land that he would never enter — my son leaned his still wet head against my shoulder.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, closing the book.

He shook his head.

“Are you sure?”

Without looking up, he asked if Moses was a real person.

“I don’t know,” I told him, “but we’re related to him.”

Jonathan Safran Foer is a novelist and editor of “New American Haggadah.”