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I’ve known many people who dislike the holiday of Purim. They object to the glorification of violence at the end of the Megillah, where in Chapter 9, verse 5, we read, “And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.” They are uneasy about the raucous, uninhibited nature of the holiday, which seems to be a pure expression of what Freud called the “id”, expressing our hun

One of the primary values in Judaism is hachnasat orchim – welcoming guests. In our siddur (pg. 107) we find a passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Kiddushim 39b) that lists hachnasat orchim among several things that reward us in our lives and in “the world to come”. Tradition holds that Abraham modeled hachnasat orchim when he welcomed the three strangers who came to tell him that Sarah would have child (Gen. 18) He was sitting at the opening of his tent, they tell u