Ripple in Still Water

          We went to a wedding yesterday. Well, not exactly. We huddled around my wife's computer and attended a zoom wedding. With two phone cameras on tripods one under the chuppah and one six feet away, we watched on split-screen while a friend officiated the weddings and the young couple performed the rituals beneath the chuppah. One set of parents stood on a neighbor's lawn and the other set of parents stood on the other neighbor's lawn. The couple was beaming. She circled him, they drank from two cups of wine, he placed the ring on her finger, he broke the glass and everyone watching screamed mazal tov. I know.  some are wondering how a wedding took place during the Sefirat Ha'Omer, during the counting of the Omer (The Counting of The Omer) when customarily this sad period of time is marked by NOT conducting weddings. Because Pesach just concluded last Thursday night and we are still in the Hebrew month of Nisan (until this Friday and this Shabbat); we are still i

          It never seems to fail. I greet each holiday, each Chag with anticipation. Well, maybe I don't enjoy all the preparation and all the work and all the chaos in my home, However when my wife and daughters light the candles that correspond to the commencement of one of the Shalosh Regalim (Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot), my son and I finish praying Maariv, the evening service, and we finally sit down to the first of what will be numerous festival meals; I am full of happiness and excitement.  By the end of the Chag? OY! I can't wait to return to my ordinary routine. Needless to say, I was counting down the minutes when my wife, kids and I could begin returning our kitchen back to Chametz. when Pesach was put away, and we were back to Chol, just an ordinary weekday moment. Yet when I woke up this morning, there it was Erev Shabbos. Our kids used to sing a song they learned in school, "Shabbos is coming, we're so happy...." Well, it feels more like "Shabbos is

          We are up early this morning helping to prepare for the last days of Pesach. No there is no seder, no Hagadah. No special foods. Yet the two mantras that constitute the observance of a Jewish holiday remain poignant: 1) Eat, Sleep, Pray, Eat, Sleep, Pray. and 2) They tried to kill us, We won. Let's Eat.  However, there is always another aspect to the final days of any Chag including Pesach: Remember -Zachor. The idea of Zachor has been something we have been invoking as we have said Yaaleh V'Yavoh every morning in in the Shacharit Mincha, Maariv Amidah as well as in the Birkat Hamazon. We have been asking God to remember us. as a people and a nation.  We have been asking God to remember his covenant with us.           My wife showed me something on youtube called " Saturday Night Seder ". It is a fundraiser for the CDC- The Center for Disease Control. Certainly, there were parts I did not particularly find tasteful, but overall I thought the message was in

          Normally, I don't enjoy the Chol HaMoed, the intermediate days of a holiday, Pesach and Sukkot.  Usually, my wife will usually want us to go out on a family outing, to participate in a "family activity", to "explore" another neighborhood in Toronto. I usually want to do nothing, take care of whatever food shopping that we need to do as we head in towards the final days of the Chag. When our children were younger,  I had few allies since they welcomed my wife's idea and request with great enthusiasm. As our children grew older, I had more allies in my desire to do nothing. Our kids greeted their mother's request with an eye roll and a desire to hang out with friends. Well, this year is different.  Our family activity was to watch a movie. The other family activity was encouraging our teenagers to get some fresh air.  The other family activity has been to watch our children stand 6 feet apart on our driveway and sidewalk with their friends.  This

          I am always amazed at how three days can be so exhausting: the first two days of Pesach and then Shabbat, three days of praying, eating and taking walks.  Now we have a couple of days until the last days of the Pesach which are also a Yom Tov. No, there are no more seders to prepare for, rather just Pesach food. One of the additions we make to the liturgy is the same addition we make when it is Rosh Chodesh and when we say Birkat HaMazon. We add the prayer Ya'Aleh v' Yavo . Throughout the prayer, the word V'Zichron appears throughout. Other forms of ZaChaR also appear including Zichroneinu and Zacharnu. Throughout the prayer, ask God to remember us. A few nights ago, when we sat at the Seder table, the Hagaddah reminded us to see ourselves as if we were slaves and we were the ones leaving Egypt. Well, in the narrative of Yetziat Mitzrayim,  we are told that God heard the cries of Bnei Yisroel and remembered his covenant with the patriarchs. In a sense, the proce

As Pesach preparations wind down, I am reminded just how different this night is from all other first night of Pesach. On all other Sedarim, children, grandchildren parents and friends sit together and ask questions, tell the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, sing and eat too much. This year borders are closed, families who are concerned for the welfare of those at risk remain physically apart. This year, when we say the Eser Makot - the 10 plagues, we now can empathize with what a plague means. This year, we can understand the commandments relating to the last plague. They were told to mark their doorposts and remain inside their homes until the plague passed over. So we will remain sheltered in place, and hopefully, remain safe.  This year when we say: "Next Year in Jerusalem", we can now appreciate the sense of looking forward to a future Pesach that is more complete and I suppose, just "more". So my Bracha for all who are celebrating Pesach and participating in a Se

           I attended a wedding yesterday. Actually, I watched a wedding.  I have been watching Amazon's The Hunters . It is a 10 episode story about a group of Holocaust survivors living in 1977 New York teamed up with several other younger  Americans with certain special skills. They hunt Nazis that were brought to the U.S. during Operation Paperclip. Operation Paper Clip occurred after WWII when the U.S. secretly brought Nazi Scientists to the U.S. to help in its cold war and arms race with the Soviet Union. The Hunters are after those Nazis who are secretly trying to create a 4th Reich in the U.S. During one episode, two of the hunters are a couple who lost a son in the Shoah, who were later blessed with a daughter born in the U.S. In this particular episode, with concern that this might not be the best time for the wedding, the leader of the Hunters, also a survivor, explains to the youngest member of the team ( a 17-year-old Jewish kid from Brooklyn) that "we need to cel

          With Pesach preparations in full gear, we are very aware that Pesach this year will be very different. We will be missing our eldest daughter who remains in Boston in her own "shelter in place". This year will be different since there will be no grandparents at the Seder. I have always experienced a certain kind of Joy, as I sat a seder table that was multigenerational, a table where grandparents and sometimes great grandparents would be able to transmit to grandchildren and great-grandchildren their wisdom and their experiences. With its focus on telling a story, with its focus upon those four sons (children); the Seder is geared toward children and the transmission of wisdom, experience, and information to children. The message is clear. Children symbolize the future, they symbolize hope, they symbolize the purity and innocence of the previous generations who have had to compromise, who have, perhaps, grown cynical, or just a little less optimistic about the futur

          Under normal circumstances, at the conclusion of Shabbat, I turn on my phone to check the scores of my favorite teams.  These are not normal times. Our family finished Havdalah and there were no sports, no favorite teams, no scores to check. In fact, I dreaded turning on my phone and the television. I knew that the first thing I was going to check, was the increasing number of infected, and the increased number of deaths from this plague. I looked in Toronto, and then New York and California. The number only seems to go up and go up faster.  After spending 15 minutes catching up on the news, not much of it too good,  I turned to my evening project. With Pesach beginning on Wednesday, my first task was Family Shlepper. It is my job to bring all the Pesach boxes from the basement up to the kitchen so my wife can begin the monumental task of making our kitchen kosher for Pesach as well as begin cooking. However, my task is the first task of this intricate chain of Pesach Kitchen

           I heard the most re-assuring sound this morning. We sleep with our bedroom window slightly opened. Well, around the time when I normally wake up along with the sunrise, I heard the sounds of birds chirping. It took me a second to realize that birds were chirping, but as I opened my eyes and saw the clear blue sky and the first rays of sunlight, the sweet sounds of birds chirping re-assured me. It sounded like spring outside, it looked like spring outside and when I went downstairs and stepped outside for a moment to breathe; it started to smell like spring. It used to be, that after the smell, sounds, sights and inhaling the fresh spring air occurred, I would check the baseball scores and see how my team did the night before. Well, with no baseball due to COVID-19, there was no baseball.  Still, I felt a sense of reassurance, a sense of normalcy, a sense that something out there was working correctly. Yes, spring technically began two weeks ago. And in the more southern part

          With communities and society now virtually a remote society, the word "emergency" has taken on a new meaning. My wife teaches Gan (kindergarten). She teaches two zoom session. She has zoom meetings with her fellow Pre-Schook staff. She has zoom meetings with the entire faculty. Our children have all their High School and University classes through zoom. They connect with their friends through WhatsApp or Zoom. They meet with teachers administrators or student council through Zoom.  We see our daughter in Boston,  and grandparents in San Francisco and Rochester via internet-based platforms such as WhatsApp and Zoom. So if the wireless internet becomes spotty, if the service is not even throughout the house, or if our wireless printer which is connected in the basement cannot pick up the modem's signal then we are unable to print. First of all, I have become the designated IT person and yet I know nothing about IT. Second of all, what had been inconveniences befor

          Like any High School-age children, ours take math and are studying Trigonometry, you remember sine (SIN) and cosine (COS), cotangent (COT) and triangles, lots of triangles. By the way, that is about all that I remember about trigonometry except for the Trigonometry matchbook that had all four-digit numerical values for these various sins because the Math Textbooks were written before scientific calculators. In any case, as I was looking over our son's math homework and vaguely recalling all these terms and images.  The images of Sine and Cosine became most evident when projections of the COVID -19 modeling was shown at the President's press conference from the day before. On a graph,  the Sine curve  "0" it slopes upward reaches an apex and then slopes downward back to "0" and then begins to curve upward again. Those are like the "waves' we see in radio waves etc. The Cosine curve does not begin at "0" on the graph but rather on