Forward.com

The Teyglach ChallengeAlong with the custom of eating apples, honey and round challah for Rosh Hashanah, many Jewish cultures have developed their own traditional holiday foods. Some Jews of Sephardic origin, for example, serve a baked fish head to symbolize “the head and not the tail,” while in Egypt, black-eyed peas and pomegranates are featured as symbols of abundance. In America, a case might be made for brisket as the star of the holiday table.…Read more

Fruit of the Beautiful Tree“This is a good year for etrogs,” said Levi Zagelbaum, a wholesaler who is president of the Esrog Headquarters Inc. in New York. Despite the fact that the fruit was picked especially early in the season in Israel, in observance of shmitta (the biblical commandment to let soil lie fallow every seventh year), Zagelbaum has high hopes that the green etrogs will ripen in time for Sukkot and help him recoup his investment. Most of Zagelbaum’s stock of several thousand is imported from the Holy Land. Each piece of fruit, together with a lulav made from palm frond, myrtle and willow, will be sold for an average of $50, with the most expensive going for $120.…Read more

Doughy Ruminations — The Meaning of Bread‘Bread is life,” said Noam Ben-Yossef, curator of the exhibition Bread: Daily and Divine, which is currently on display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. “It symbolizes a multitude of things, from fertility, to plenty, to civilization itself.”…Read more

Understanding the Exodus Personally: The Kibbutz HaggadahOn Passover, Jews are told to read the Haggadah (literally “the telling”) as if one personally had been a slave in Egypt and then redeemed. By individualizing the text, each person confronts the narrative in new ways, in terms of his or her own life and times.The result has been a multiplicity of Haggadot through the ages, each…Read more

Unpacking the Mysteries of the Purim BasketWhen Susan Weidman Schneider and her family left New York for Washington, D.C., eight years ago, she found herself dizzied by the chaos of the move. Then the doorbell rang.“My friend and rabbi, Avis Miller, was there with a daffodil and a package of mishloach manot for Purim,” she recalled. “It was enormously sweet of her.”For Schneider,…Read more