Category: Science and Health

Many a parent has told their reluctant toddler to “eat your greens!” There’s lots of scientific evidence that richly-colored plants are an important source of vitamins and minerals. Today’s daf echoes this wisdom with its own discussion of the healing properties of cress.  Garden cress, scientific name lepidium sativum, is native to much of the Middle […]

Today the Gemara continues its discussion of a mishnah introduced on the previous page which describes how the high priest measures out incense to be offered in the Holy of Holies in Yom Kippur. Rav Pappa dominates the page, raising a total of six questions, four of which end with the word teyku — ”let it […]

Today’s daf tells us the story of a remarkable woman named Kimchit:  The sages taught: Kimchit had seven sons, and they all served in the office of the high priesthood. The sages said to her: What good deeds did you perform to merit this? She said to them: In all my days, the beams of […]

The Health Ministry is expected to announce its decision next week, Head of Public Health Sharon Alroy-Preis told Army Radio. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this month that children as young as 12 could get the jab. Some 49% of the general public said they would bring their children to be […]

If you walk into a synagogue today, you’ll find a light burning in front of the ark. This light, the ner tamid (literally: “eternal light”), has come to symbolize God’s eternal presence in sacred spaces. The practice is derived from a number of biblical sources, including Leviticus 6:6, which mandates that a fire be kept burning on the […]

Winston Churchill is said to have said: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. “   Parshat Beha’alotcha is a Torah portion of both difficulty and opportunity. Here’s the sequence of events in this portion. 1. The Levites prepare for service in the Tabernacle.  2. The commandment […]

Pfizer administered the first set of jabs to volunteers of a new study of subjects 65 and older, exploring the co-administration of the company’s 20-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (20vPnC) candidate when followed by a booster shot of Pfizer’s current COVID-19 vaccine, the company said on Monday.The 20vPnC vaccine candidate is currently in development to prevent […]

Tashlich is a Jewish ritual, dating to the Middle Ages, that involves tossing bread into a live body of water between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The bread symbolizes a person’s sins, and the water is meant to wash them away. This practice has spawned a whole genre of contemporary jokes. What do you toss into […]

A massive global scientific collaboration has been launched to help crack the secrets of how whales communicate with one another, and maybe see if humans can understand it. Known as the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), the program is a massive collaborative effort between research institutions all over the world, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology […]

When is a “man” not necessarily a man? When we’re on page 43 of Tractate Yoma, among many, many other places. Traditional Hebrew, like many languages, is locked into a gender binary. People, objects, concepts, even verbs and adjectives, are linguistically either masculine or feminine, often in unpredictable ways. Why is “chair” masculine and “conversation” feminine? […]