Keep the Faith with Shammai Engelmayer Shammai Engelmayer (Rabbi)

The way to have constructive and meaningful s'darim next week is to study the Haggadah beforehand.  That requires some help from more modern versions and haggadah commentaries. This episode explains why. It's being released several days early to give everyone time to buy one of these volumes and to study it.
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What do I know about Jewish law? I'm a heretic. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that nonsense over the years—including from some members of my own family. So this week I'm going to let someone else say the things about keeping kosher that I've been saying—an Orthodox rabbi, no less. This episode is a newly edited version of one I presented last year.
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Purim begins after Shabbat ends and lasts until sundown on Sunday. You might think you know all there is to know about Purim. If you do, this episode may show how much more there is to know about the book from which Purim sprung--Megillat Esther, the Scroll of Esther. This episode runs for about a half-hour but I hope you find it both interesting and informative.
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What with last Thursday having been Leap Day, with the leap month of Adar II beginning on Saturday evening with Rosh Chodesh, and the Muslim month of Ramadan beginning on Monday, I thought it would be interesting to leap into a discussion of how the secular and Jewish calendars we use today came to be. Did you know, for example, that there was one year that was 445 days long? Do you know why there is a leap day in the secular calendar, a leap month in the Jewish calendar, or why Ramadan and the other 11 Islamic months regress every 32.5 solar years through the entire secular calendar?
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At 10 a.m. this morning, when I recorded this episode, there already had been 2,266 people who died by guns so far this year. That number is now up to 2,294. That averages out to nearly two gun deaths every hour since the new year began.
Between January 1st and today, there have been 55 mass shootings and eight mass murders.
As of this morning, 37 children under the age of 11 had been killed by guns; it’s up to 38 now. It’s up for teenagers between ages 12 and 17. It was 172 this morning and it’s 173 now.
We are in the midst of a major gun violence crisis that must be addressed. That’s the subject of Episode No. 139.
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The weather these days is a killer--literally. Scores of thousands of people died in 2023 of severe weather-related causes, and deaths are already mounting in the first six weeks of 2024. Judaism has much to say about our role in minimizing the threat climate change is posing on us.
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