Now, with the passing of Tisha B’Av and the three week period, we now enter the wedding season. Appropriately, there is a new book on the laws and customs of weddings. The book, Beyom Chasunaso, by R. Zev Cinamon, is in English with Hebrew footnotes. The book is highly readable and covers just about every practical aspect of a modern Jewish wedding. There is a discussion about untying knots, the recent emphasis on praying under the Chuppah, removing jewelry and…
No more Bentchers: A Review of a Sefer Given as a Wedding Giftby Eliezer Brodt A wedding carries with it many customs, one of which is an attempt to use this ceremony to disseminate Torah. There was an old custom in many communities for people to write poems in honor of the simchas chasan and kallah. Others even wrote plays in honor of the bride and groom. One example is the Ramchal who wrote the play Ma’ashe Shimshon (as well…
R. Brodt has already discussed the custom of azharot on Shavous, I wanted to discuss another Shavous custom – akdamut. Akdamut is the poem in Aramaic which is said around the time of the reading of the Torah on the first day of Shavuot. This poem, composed by R. Meir ben Isaac who lived in Worms in the 11th century. He was also know as R. Meir Sha”tz (Shiliach Tzibor). The poem itself describes what happens in heaven when the…
The Custom of Azharot on Shavousby R Eliezer Brodt The Yom tov of Shavous called Yom Matan Torahsenu as it is the day we received the Torah thousands of years ago at Har Sinai. It has many minhaghim that we do to remind us of this such as putting up grass and flowers or eating dairy dishes. Another minhag which many Jews have is to say azharot today. In this post I would like to discuss a bit of interesting…
Mossad HaRav Kook has just published the eighth and final volume of Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber‘s Minhagei Yisrael. This final volume includes a complete and comprehensive index of all eight volumes volumes of Minhagei Yisrael. For this reason alone this volume is worthwhile, as anyone who has used the prior volumes knows, at times topics are spread over multiple volumes, sometimes in footnotes, which makes it difficult to locate particular topics. The first index is comprised of multiple indices; Mishna,…
The Pesach Drasha of the Rokeach by Eliezer Brodt Every once in a while we are privileged to have the venerable printing house Mikezei Nerdamim release something special from the great rishonim (aside from their great journal Kovetz Al Yad). Last year they published the drasha of R. Eliezer Rokeach for Pesach edited by Professor Simcha Emanuel. In this post I would like to discuss some of the many things of interest in the work and also comment on the…
