The Times of Our Life

- Why did the League of Nations and the United Nations propose a calendar that threatened the observance of the Jewish Sabbath?-Why is Israel's Independence Day celebrated as a religious holiday?-How did the plague of frogs help resolve a border dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia?-Why did the biblical judge Deborah convene her court under a palm tree?-What practical lessons can we learn from the behavior of the villain Haman in the book of Esther?These are just a few of the fascinating topics that are discussed in Eliezer Segal's latest collection of essays inspired by the cycles of the Jewish religious calendar. As in his previous volumes the elaborate sequence of holy day serves here as an incisive prism for eliciting exotic facts, ideas and legends that reflect the diversity of the Jewish experience over a vast range of history and geography.