The Hebrew word “Naso” has two separate and very different meanings.  It can mean either to take a census and to lift up.  We normally think of a census as an unbiased collection of data, but it is a choice…

Even in Biblical times, Jews didn’t count the way you would expect.  The book of Bamidbar or Numbers begins with a census, not of all the people but only men of military age, each according to their family and tribe. …

At the 5/14 memorial last week, I walked into the Tops on Jefferson for the first time.  The recently renovated interior was bright and airy, full of the normal sights and sounds of the large supermarket chain.  But it was…

Years ago, my sister and I were in Paris and, of course, being in Paris the most important thing we needed to see was the Mona Lisa.  The day we chose to make our visit to the Louvre it was…

There are 305,805 letters in the Torah.  Given this, the middle point occurred several weeks ago in parashat Tzav in Leviticus 11:42 in the form of the letter vav in the works Gachon, meaning belly.  This is a section pertaining…

Last Shabbat, CSS member Robert Altman celebrated the 64th anniversary of his Bar Mitzvah by reading from the same portion he did as a 13-year-old.  After he finished, I asked him how it felt all these years later?  Was it…

I was in Israel for the first time in 1989, a few years after the Children’s Memorial opened at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem.  Approximately a million and a half children were murdered at the hands of…

There are three nights a year Jews pull all-nighters: Slichot, the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, and the Passover Seder.  The late night element adds a measure of danger and fun to traditional rituals.  On…