Rabbi Robert Scheinberg's page

These are the comments I shared with the USH community on Friday April 5, shortly after the tragic killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza in an Israeli strike in error.  פתחו לי שערי צדק. לעולם הבא אומר לו לאדם מה היתה מלאכתך והוא אומר מאכיל רעבים הייתי. והם אומרים לו זה השער של מאכיל רעבים הכנס בו.  “Open for me the gates of righteousness.” (Psalm 118):   In the World to Come, a person is asked 'what was your occupation?' When one replies 'I fed the hungry,' they respond:  'this is the gate of those who feed the hungry; enter into it'.  ( Midrash to the Book of Psalms 118 )  Among the vanishingly few matters of general consensus in the world concerning the Hamas-Israel war is that the World Central Kitchen is a truly heroic organization.  With a mission to bring food to troubled spots in the world, it is a rare organization that sees the humanity of all people who are endangered, displaced, traumatized or otherwise affected by th...

At our synagogue's congregational seders for the last several years, we have played the following game: I have collected unusual Pesach stories, and shared three such stories with the community: two true stories, and one fictional story. Participants then have to guess which two stories are true and which one is false. (If you listen to  Wait, wait, don't tell me,  you get the idea, except that only one story is false.) You can see previous editions of this game here  http://rabbischeinberg.blogspot.com/search?q=trivia . This is what was presented at our congregational seder in 2023. Two stories are true; one is fictional. Answers at the bottom!  (And photos inspired by the stories were created by AI...)  STORY #1: Seders have taken place in a lot of strange and remote places in the world.  There have been seders in Antarctica, and on Mount Everest, and on submarines deep under the ocean.  But the seder in the most remote location of all took place las...