I grew up using the Birnbaum Siddur. For years I stared at a line in its commentary about a prohibition of the recital of the

Although there are many theories, no one knows when and why the practice of the Haftarah was instituted. The ArtScroll Siddur includes the following statement:

Ve-higadeta le-vincha bayom hahu… (“You shall tell your son on that day”) is a key verse of the Seder night. But what exactly does vehigadeta

The background to the late 19th-century Jewish settlements in Israel was a wave of pogroms in Russia in 1881. This made most of Russian Jewry

Erev and boker are words that are well-known to us. But exactly how did they develop the meanings of “evening” and “morning”? The verb ayin-resh-bet

I spent many years researching this topic. It is time to keep everyone up to speed. Until the 19th century, a search in secular sources

Today, we pronounce the letter sin the same way as the letter samech. Was this always the case? And why do shin and sin share

As part of the Shema, we recite: ve-shinantam le-vanecha, ve-dibarta bam. But what exactly does that first word mean? From the context, we would expect

Although we are used to thinking of the Tanach as entirely Hebrew, sometimes words from other languages creep in. One of the languages that sometimes

The root shin-nun-heh has two meanings in Tanach. On the one hand, it means “to repeat.” (Of course, the word sheni, second, comes from this

The life of Abraham Ibn Ezra can be divided into two periods. The first was a stable one. According to the most recent scholarship, he

Every Shabbat, after the haftarah, our custom is to recite a prayer for the government. The prayer begins “HaNoten teshua la’melachim, He Who gives salvation