Tongue of the Prophets The rebirth of Hebrew as a spoken modern language in Israel is truly a great miracle! A bit of history will help us to understand the magnitude. The Bible (T’nakh) clearly teaches that God created Adam and Eve with the gift of language. It is clear from Genesis 11:1 that[…]
Thank God for Israel!! At 4:00 pm on Friday, Iyar 5th, 5708 (May 15th, 1948), David Ben Gurion (who would be the first Prime Minister of the new state) stood in the Tel Aviv Museum (today known as Independence Hall) and opened the ceremony to which about 250 guests were in attendance – by invitation[…]
Remember the Six Million A few years ago at the Yom HaShoah ceremony here in Charleston, one of the Rabbi’s present reminded everyone that Jewish people always take their past with them forward into the present. He gave the example of the children of Israel taking the bones of Joseph with them as they[…]
Birth of the Miracle Nation Mah Nishtanah HaLila HaZeh MiKol HaLayLot …And so begins the Passover Seder as the youngest person present traditionally gets to ask what is know as “the Four Questions”. In Hebrew, we actually “sing” them and it turns out that the “Four Questions” are really four answers to one big question: “Why[…]
Life on the Edge In the last Nugget, we discussed the steep and jagged cliffs, often called the cathedral cliffs, that ring the western shore of the Dead Sea and guard the entrance to the Judaean Desert (Hebrew: מִדְבַּר יְהוּדָה Midbar Yehuda). This steep and treacherous area is the home of the Ibex. The[…]
Eden in the Wilderness Steep and jagged cliffs ring the western shore of the Dead Sea guarding the entrance to the Judaean Desert (Hebrew: מִדְבַּר יְהוּדָה Midbar Yehuda). The geographical term for the Judaean Desert is a “rainshadow desert”. Rainshadow deserts occur in many places on the earth and are formed when prevailing westerly[…]
For Such a Time as This The holiday of Purim (Hebrew: פּוּרִים – Pûrîm “lots”) commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people in the ancient Persian Empire where a plot had been formed to destroy them by the second-in-command of the Persian empire – Haman. takes place in the Persian (Hebrew: פרס) royal city of[…]