Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!
This week, the fourth season premiere concludes.
Episode 4.2 “Man’s Best Friend Part 2”
(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on September 23rd, 1987)
Picking up where last week’s episode, this episode opens with Alex (Danny Pintauro) visiting Jake the Siberian Husky at the big home that Jake shares with Jenny (Elisabeth Harnois), her grandfather (William Schallert), and her parents, Paul (Stan Ivar) and Michelle Raines (Laurie Walters).
Yay!
Alex’s attitude improves so much that it’s decided to move him into a foster home.
Uhmm….what about the Raines family?
The surrogate hired to carry Paul and Michelle’s baby loses the baby. Paul and Michelle are heartbroken.
Uhmm….hey, I think Alex needs a family….
Jenny gives Jake to Alex.
Awwww!
Alex’s foster family lives in a building that doesn’t allow pets.
Oh no!
Alex and Jake run away and, after nearly dying in the desert, they end up with the Raines family’s home.
I see where this is going….
If you guessed that Paul and Michelle announce that they’re going to adopt Alex and that Jake is going to continue to live with them on the ranch, congratulations! You could have been a Highway to Heaven writer!
This episode didn’t make me cry as much as last week’s, mostly because it was pretty easy to see where things were heading from the beginning. Even when Alex and Jake were lost in the desert, I knew they would be okay because this is Highway to Heaven. Children and their adorable dogs don’t die on this show. (Except, of course, for those two times that they did. Actually, three times, now that I think about it.) That said, I was still relieved when Jake was rescued because seriously, that dog was adorable!
This was a good conclusion to last week’s episode. Everything worked out for the best. At the end of the episode, Mark said that he understood why “they call them man’s best friend.” Michael nodded and then said, a little sadly, “Shouldn’t man’s best friend be …. man?”
You tell ’em, Hippie Angel!
You tell them.
Through the Shattered Lens 
the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ
Aharon N. Varady (transcription)·opensiddur.org·8h ago
Concluding Prayer for Hallel in the Home Service for the Festival of Passover, by Rabbi J. Leonard Levy (1896)
This is a concluding prayer in the Hallel service at the Passover seder by Rabbi J. Leonard Levy to his Haggadah or Home Service for the Festival of Passover (1896) pp. 32-34. The prayer does not appear in subsequent editions. The prayer threads the needle between the particularly Jewish communal focus of Passover and the…
What separates תפילה from תחנון? A blessing requires שם ומלכות. Shemone Esrei does not contain שם ומלכות. Yet it functions as the definition of a blessing. As does kadesh, which also lacks שם ומלכות. For that matter so does ברכת כהנים וגם כן קריא שמע. The k’vanna of חנון has nothing to do with the formal prayer written in the Siddur. Why? Because all these “mitzvot” qualify as tohor time oriented commandments which require k’vanna. What’s the k’vanna of תחנון through which it defines תפילה?
Word translations amount to tits on a boar hog when the new born piglets are ravenous and the sow died after giving birth! The 5th middah of the revelation of the Oral Torah at Horev – חנון, serves as the functioning root שרש of the term תחנון תפילה. The tohor time-oriented commandment of תפילה learns from the additional metaphor of תחנון. Consider the Order of the Shemone Esrei blessings … 3 + 13 + 3 blessings. 6 Yom Tov and 13 tohor middot revealed to Moshe, 40 days after the ערב רב Israelites – Jews assimilated and intermarried with Egyptians, no different from the kapo Jewish women who slept with Nazis. This ערב רב, according to the Torah – as expressed in the memory to war against Amalek/antisemitism – they lacked fear of אלהים. This same ערב רב referred to their Golden Calf substitute theology by the name אלהים. This tie-in explains the k’vanna of the term “fear of heaven”.
The ערב רב Jews lacked “fear of Heaven”, and therefore their avoda zarah profaned the 2nd Sinai commandment. Hence when Jews assimilate and intermarry with Goyim who do not accept the revelation of the Torah at Sinai (neither the Xtian Bible nor Muslim Koran ever once brings the שם השם first revealed in the 1st Sinai commandment – the greatest commandment of the entire Torah revelation at Sinai and Horev! Do Jews serve to obey the Torah revelation לשמה או לא לשמה? Observance of all the Torah commandments and Talmudic halachot hangs on this simple question.
Therefore תפילת תחנון interprets the k’vanna of תפילה, through the concept that a person stands before a Sefer Torah and dedicated specific and defined tohor middot which breath life into the hearts of the Yatrir HaTov of the chosen Cohen oath brit people. The verb תפילה most essentially entails the k’vanna of swearing a Torah oath. What Torah oath? The dedication, think korban, of some specified tohor middot…. Hence the concept of תפילת תחנון.
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