Holidays 480 articles

Pesach is what we call it, while Hashem calls it Chag Hamatzos. The Berditchever Rebbe famously explained: Pesach is what Hashem did for us. Chag Hamatzos is our great leap of...

”In each and every generation” – and in fact every single year – we are obligated to see ourselves as having personally left the slavery of Egypt, no doubt an educational...

The stage is set – the table is bedecked in fine linen; the chairs, with soft pillows. The props are in place – the Seder plate, Elijah’s cup, the matzot. The...

The Shulchan Aruch states that it is forbidden to eat a bread meal from the tenth hour onward on Erev Pesach (SA OC 571:1). (Of course the reference is to matza...

The hand matzah you’ll eat the nights of the seder could have come from any one of a number of bakeries, but if it came from the Charedim Matzah Bakery in...

Imagine the following Seder “teaching” technique. (Full disclosure: my wife has forbidden me from actually doing this at our Seder this year. Or any year.) After Kiddush, sometime after eating the...

Moses is described as the “safra rabah, the great scribe of Israel” (Sotah 13b). Moses was surely a scribe in the technical sense; as Rambam noted in his Introduction to the...

The Torah forbids a Jew, during Pesach, not just from eating chametz but even from deriving benefit from his chametz. Furthermore, there is an additional prohibition of even owning chametz on...

Matzah — The festival of Passover is the celebration of our freedom. Passover not only commemorates an act of liberation in the dim past, but reminds us that the aspiration to...

On their face, there could not be two more unlikely holidays to wed than Yom Kippur and Purim. Even the youngest child knows that Purim is a holiday meant for fun...