Rosh Hashanah

tried to at least, have Shabbat dinner, and would go to synagogue moderately. The pre-k both my brother and I went to was a Jewish one where yearly we would return for Hebrew school until our Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. Year after year we learned about Rosh Hashanah or Purim or the creation of the world. But when I turned twelve, my appreciation for my Jewish faith faded and I no longer continued my quest for learning more about it. As a child you don’t realize the mistakes you are making. I wish I…

However, the holiday's religious significance is far less than that of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Passover, and Shavu'ot. It is roughly equivalent to Purim in significance, and you won't find many non-Jews who have even heard of Purim! Chanukkah is not mentioned in Jewish scripture; the story is related in the book of Maccabees…

learn about each holiday and do a type of celebration to accompany it. At Christmas, a gift exchange and learn about the origins and meaning of the holiday. At Rosh Hashanah, eating apples dipped in honey, as many Jewish people do, to symbolize a sweet start to the New Year; once again, children will learn about the history of Rosh Hashanah and its importance. For Islam, children can celebrate Eid-al Fitr and share treats with each other to rejoice in the end of Ramadan to participate in…

There is an abundance of figurative language in Night, written by Elie Wiesel. He uses a lot of very complicated figurative language to express certain images or feelings, often making his words like a puzzle that one needs to solve in order to understand its meaning. There are three particularly meaningful uses of figurative language throughout the novel, and that show Elie Wiesel’s creativity and amazing writing skill. The first use of figurative language that really stood out to me…

According to Jewish history, the first Yom Kippur occurred after Moses returned from his second trip to Mt. Sinai with the replacement set of tablets containing the Ten Commandments. Moses had broken the first set when he discovered that the Israelite children were not worshipping God, but rather a golden calf. While Moses was making his second trip, the followers fasted from sunrise to sunset hoping that God would provide them forgiveness. Moses descended the mountain on the tenth of Tishri…

prisoner that Elie overheard and it’s one of the few things he said before he died. The truth is that he broke, he couldn’t deal with the things that were going on and he gave up on everything. Just before this, Elie and his father were celebrating Rosh Hashanah when Elie became angry with God. “Praised be Thy Holy Name for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?”(Wiesel, 67). He blamed God for all the death that is happening. This is also a bit ironic because those who lose their…

Mary W. Shelley once said “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” The book Night, a memoir on Eliezer Wiesel life in several Auschwitz Concentration Camps, Eliezer faced many challenges throughout the book an example being the death of his Mother, Father, and sister. All of the challenges he faced shaped and changed Elie in a way that affected him throughout his life. This shows that when we are faced with problems we try to adapt and change to solve them. In the…

Genocides, such as the Holocaust of World War II, test their victims both mentally and physically. In surviving virtual Hell, the dehumanization process enacted upon the victims strips them of their personality, both inside and out. Through standard uniform and a robbery of one’s name, replaced with a number cruelly etched into one’s skin, the walls of a concentration camp physically make the many into one. The degradation that occurs mentally is yet even more tragic. Elie Wiesel, survivor and…

A big part of this was that he slowly and very cautiously pulled out of Judaism, his religion. One of the most noticed pieces of evidence is when he did not fast on the eve of Rosh Hashanah(the Jewish New Year ), “I turned that act[not fasting] into a symbol of rebellion, a protest against Him”(Page 69). This represents the first major act of rebellion against Him, a sign that he has begun to give up faith. Even later in the text…

In the handout on Anti-Semitism and the excerpt titled, How Jews Became White Folks by Karen Brodkin, it is clear that the structure of injustice presented in both of these pieces was that of institutional anti-Semitism. According to Michael Lerner, the definition of anti-Semitism is “the systematic discrimination against Jews and against Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious heritage” (Adams pp. 135). Prior to the readings, I had the misconception that anti-Semitism strictly occurred in…