Taking a quick blog break...

Things have been extremely busy in the last month or so...school work has been an all-encompassing occupation, along with the final few meetings of my Intro to Judaism class. My major paper of the semester is written and Sunday will be the final class and final exam for Intro, so I am taking a much-needed break and trying to catch up a bit on my favorite blogs. No blogging experience would be complete without checking out this week's Haveil Havilim, hosted currently at Ima on the Bima's blog. It was through HH that I found this gem of Passover hilarity:

The Facebook Passover Haggadah

Huge hat-tip to the Tikkun Olam blog for this post, which brightened my afternoon considerably. There are several other wonderful posts in this week's HH, so please go check them out!

And I'm not the only one...

Just after I published the quick post about my stand on the Matzav below, I did what I've been doing since the first announcement of Israel's Gaza campaign: move through every J-blog I have on favorites, and then click links like a mad woman to get as much info as possible.

How could I have forgotten to link to some of the wonderful bloggers who are making my up-to-dateness possible?

First, Leah shares that she, too, is standing with Israel...admittedly, last Friday well before I made that statement. Amazing how these things come together!

Second, this week's HH was hosted at Ima's blog...appropriately titled "The We Can't Stop Twittering/Blogging/Reading/Worrying/Watching/What's Going On in Israel Right Now Edition.... or....The Stuck To My BlackBerry Like Glue Edition.... "

A huge feature on Haveil Havalim is the blog of Jack, where he has posted myriad roundups and updates on the Gaza offensive...an excellent resource for information. (That's 16 links from "roundups" on...as I said, truly a wealth of information).

With all the blogging going on, of course there are what Jack politely terms "the opposition." Frume Sarah received a trollish comment, but rather than simply deleting she went one better...she answered him/her, point for point.

And my favorite blog, to which I have returned again and again. This woman speaks with poignancy about her son Elie, who serves in the IDF artillery. She calls herself simply, A Soldier's Mother.

Please check all of these links and follow up...Israel is not a terrorist state, she's a state under fire, acting as humanely as possible given the circumstances.

Thank you to all the bloggers who have made this possible, those listed, and those they link. Shalom.

Don't forget to check out Haveil Havalim!

I never seem to remember to post this, but I do enjoy reading Haveil Havalim from time to time (when I find a spare few minutes)...

This week HH is over at Ima on the Bima's blog.

If you haven't heard of HH before, here's the quick explanation:

Founded by Soccer Dad, Haveil Havalim is a carnival of Jewish blogs -- a weekly collection of Jewish & Israeli blog highlights, tidbits and points of interest collected from blogs all around the world. It's hosted by different bloggers each week and coordinated by Jack. The term 'Haveil Havalim,' which means "Vanity of Vanities," is from Qoheleth, (Ecclesiastes) which was written by King Solomon. King Solomon built the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and later on got all bogged down in materialism and other 'excesses' and realized that it was nothing but 'hevel,' or in English, 'vanity.'

Enjoy!