Courtesy of Megan Dyer (Spring ’12, Spring ’13)
Now that the craziness of preparing for Pesach and the seder itself is over, I have time to write about the Golan Tiyul. It was so beautiful! Flowers in bloom everywhere! Last week we experienced such a different climate than in Jerusalem, it was rainy and much cooler. We were joined by the families of several Pardes faculty members, which was really nice. Of all the tiyulim we have gone on this year, this has been the one with the most “modifications”. Rain made our first hike interesting, it was very muddy. As someone with a reasonable fear of slippery surfaces ( in 7th grade, I broke my ankle when I lost my footing on some wet leaves on a hill), I was not a happy camper. At the end of the hike, I was ready to throw out my mud saturated sneakers, but a friend brought them to the bus for me. Even though I felt like I never wanted to hike again, this was a good thing because after a good night sleep I was ready to do the hike the next day. Continue reading
I am going to fall in love
Mordechai Rackover is a Pardes Alum, a member of the PEP 3rd Cohort. He currently lives in Providence, RI with his wife Nechama Lea and their four kids. He is the associate university chaplain for the Jewish community of Brown University and the Rabbi of the Brown RISD Hillel Foundation He can be reached at 
The Book of Esther, the Megillah, was my first Biblical love. I had opportunity to delve into it as a McGill undergrad prior to my first yeshiva experiences and discovered that it is a brilliant text. The Megillah is balanced and suspenseful, sacred and absent of God, deadly serious and filled with [ribald] humor. In this short essay I want to show that an essential factor in the reading of the stories of the Megillah is the obedience and disobedience of the characters. We have been trained, as it were, to look for obedient God-fearing Biblical characters as role-models. But, a closer reading, will show that disobedience is often a critical positive shaper of the unfolding biblical narrative.