Forward Loves Haggadot.com

The Forward reviews new haggadahs and they love the web site haggadot.com.

We are confused by the site. And we are not exactly technically illiterate. Still we cannot figure out how to assemble a haggadah on this site.

We think Google docs, for instance, offers a better platform for collaborative project of assembling a document like a custom haggadah. On our desktop or notebook, we'd use powerpoint to make a custom haggadah. Much easier. And yes, you could always make your own haggadah by photocopying whatever you wanted in it and stapling that together.

The other new haggadahs reviewed in the Forward in their bloglike-brief snippets are these:

A Passover Haggadah: Go Forth and Learn
By Rabbi David Silber
Jewish Publication Society of America, 232 pages, $18

Creating Lively Passover Seders: A Sourcebook of Engaging Tales, Texts & Activities
By David Arnow
Jewish Lights Publishing, 464 pages, $24.99

Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families
By Cokie and Steve Roberts, illustrated by Kristina Applegate-Lutes
HarperCollins, 192 pages, $19.99

The Szyk Haggadah
By Arthur Szyk, translated by Byron Sherwin
Commentary by Irvin Ungar
Abrams, 128 pages, $40

The Washington Haggadah
By Joel Ben Simeon
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 248 pages, $39.95

The Urban Family Passover Haggadah
By Arielle Mir and Tsilli Pines
Alef Betty, 64 pages, $14

The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative & Religious Imagination
By Marc Michael Epstein
Yale University Press, 344 pages, $65

You Must Bury the Dead Holy Books

As most Jews know, when holy books die they must be buried with dignity, not discarded, not burned. It's called geniza, as in the Cairo Geniza, subject of a new book, published today, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza.(Although in this famous case, the discarded books and papers were not buried, they were stored in an attic in a synagogue - go figure.)

Jon M. Sweeney at Huff Post tells us that the same is true for books of other religions. At the end of their useful lives, they too must be buried with respect.

How to Properly Dispose of Unwanted Holy Books

You don't burn them. You never, ever burn them.

An unwanted holy book, be it Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or any other scripture, can be disposed of humanely and appropriately, but not burned.

A holy book is afforded the same respect as a human being in every religious tradition in the world -- except, apparently, the one practiced by one pastor in Florida.

You bury them.

I've actually buried quite a few Bibles in the last decade. At my old church in Vermont, I was in charge of the annual book sale. Donations would pour in over a six-week period, and I would weed through them all, sorting, pricing and packing them into cartons, where they waited until the day of the fair on the village green.

Newsweek: Madonna's Philip Berg Kabbalah Center Raising Malawi Scandal

It is sad to report that instead of doing good for impoverished children in Africa, Madonna's project Raising Malawi has become a "disaster" according to Newsweek ("Madonna's Malawi Disaster").

The story implies that Philip Berg and Kabbalah Center are to blame.

Was Gandhi Jewish?

No, political leader Mohandas Gandhi was not a Jew. He was a Hindu.

A new book described in a review in the WSJ (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India, by Joseph Lelyveld) reports that Gandhi had a longtime lover who was a Jew and a Zionist.

WSJ: Among the Hagiographers
Early on Gandhi was dubbed a 'mortal demi-god'—and he has been regarded that way ever since
By ANDREW ROBERTS

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals...

...the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Times: Where to Buy Shabbos Flowers in Brooklyn

Amazing to us that we turn the pages of the paper and find this story in the Sunday Times. Where to buy your Shabbos flowers in Brooklyn - and a perfect shop for Seder guests to buy flowers from Paul Berger, "Where Every Bouquet Tells a Story."

ON Friday afternoons, the headquarters of the Chabad sect of Orthodox Judaism comes alive as men in black jackets and hats stream like worker bees in and out of the subterranean entrance on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Those exiting scatter across Crown Heights to prepare for the Sabbath — Shabbos in Yiddish — many drawn a block east by the overpowering smell of lilies and the ebullient welcome of Chani Frankel to Mimulo, a flower shop on Albany Avenue.

“Shalom, rabbi! How are you?” she asked one customer on a recent Friday, greeting others with a “Happy Shabbos!” ...more...

Times: Demille's Ten Commandments on a 6 DVD Gift Set

A perfect gift set from the Seder guest. From the Times, "When DeMille Parted the Red Sea":

CECIL B. DeMILLE would probably have approved of the concept behind Paramount Home Entertainment’s 55th anniversary gift set edition of “The Ten Commandments,” an appropriately colossal undertaking that includes three Blu-ray discs and three standard DVDs, a commemorative book, reproductions of the original program and assorted documents and costume sketches. It’s all packaged inside a dictionary-size box with a lenticular 3-D image of the Red Sea on the front; when the sea is “parted” on a built-in hinge, a plastic reproduction of DeMille’s sacred tablets rises majestically into view.

The tablets themselves split open to reveal the six discs, which contain both DeMille’s famous 1956 version of the story starring Charlton Heston and his 1923 silent feature with Richard Dix that was his first pass at the material. The discs are loaded with commentaries, newsreels, trailers and a new 75-minute documentary, “Making Miracles.”...more...

Is Passover Catholic?

No, Passover is not a Catholic holiday. Even so, a new book certainly shows how important Passover is to the essences of Catholicism.

Brant Pitre's, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper, is a work of immense and approachable scholarship. It is a constructive theological treatise that surely will influence how Catholicism understands itself and specifically its place in relation to Judaism.

Pitre has written the kind of book that we prize. It is an American style theological treatise. That means it is written with the intent that an average educated Catholic can read and follow its premises and arguments. We'd say that this book is a masterwork of concision and clarity, two rarities in the theological universe.

Pitre connects the dots between Passover and the Eucharist (see p. 180) because he had to do this to satisfy himself. There can be no better motive for writing a tome.

Cablevision Optimum TV Anywhere in Your House on the iPad App

Newsday reports, "Cablevision Systems Corp. Saturday launched a service that allows subscribers to view 300 live digital cable channels on an iPad in the home. With the free Optimum App for iPad, the tablet device essentially can be used as another TV set."

It works on our iPad at home here in Teaneck.

Are Independent Minyans bad for the Jews?

Are Independent Minyans bad for the Jews? We think the trend towards ad hoc voluntary prayer groups -- called Indie Minyans -- is good for Judaism, enabling more choices, more competition and greater spirituality, and at less cost to financially strapped young people.

However if you are a rabbi or a cantor looking for a job, you should conclude that Indie Minyans are not a good thing for you.

Ben Dreyfus does not address this point directly in his otherwise perceptive op-ed on the subject in the Forward, "The Bum Rap Against Independent Minyanim".

Recent months have seen a wave of opinion pieces and statements — in these pages and elsewhere — that have been critical of independent minyanim. Minyanim are portrayed as too independent and not independent enough, and their participants are painted as both selfish ingrates who take from the community without giving anything back and energetic super-Jews who would automatically revitalize any synagogue they joined if only they were willing to set foot in one.

Let’s set the record straight.

“Independent” means that these minyanim are not affiliated with any of the Jewish denominations or with institutions such as synagogues. That is all...Read more...

That is not all. Indies as a rule have no professional employees: no rabbi, no chazan, no shamash... all told, this means lower costs for synagogue services and fewer jobs for synagogue professionals.

Is Passover Jewish?

Is Passover Jewish. Yes and no. Jenna Joselit informs us in her (poorly titled) Forward essay, "How Religious Customs Take Their Toll" that Passover is no longer exclusively Jewish.

Christians have taken a fancy to Passover celebrations, especially to celebrating the Seder. This trend used to be condemned as "Judaizing" in the early church. Apparently in the modern American pluralistic context, curiosity rules. Few Christian leaders fear that mass conversions to Judaism will follow a dinner started with the eating of matzah and horseradish.

As Joselit puts it:

...More pronounced by far is the frequency with which this millennial Judaic phenomenon has appeared over the course of the past decade or so within avowedly Christian — and largely evangelical — contexts. I have in mind here the Holy Land Experience, a religious theme park in Orlando, Fla., where, day in and day out, visitors in shorts queue up in front of the Shofar Auditorium to see the “Passover Seder Presentation.”