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(print version) Sometimes, the meaning of life is all about getting the right perspective. Take the story of the sixth ladder company firefighters on duty on the morning of September 11th. Minutes after the first plane hit the towers, they were rushing into 1 World Trade Center to try and reach the survivors on the floors above. On the twenty-seventh floor, they heard and felt the other tower collapse, and the captain, Bill Jonas, decided they needed to get back down. Clearly, they needed to get out; if one tower could collapse, then so could the other. Somewhere around the 14th floor, they met a middle-aged woman named Josephine Harris. She had walked down from the 73rd floor and was totally exhausted. Bill Butler, another of the firemen, folded her arm around his neck and kept moving. ...

(print version) Prophecy 101: Ego is a Non-Prophet Venture This week we begin to read from the fourth of the five books of Moses. Although this book is referred to in English as the Book of Numbers, in Hebrew it is referred to as Bamidbar because of the opening verse; "And the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness (Bamidbar) of Sinai ..." The Midrash, Jewish Oral Tradition, derives a somewhat puzzling insight from the fact that G-d spoke to Moses in the wilderness : Unless one makes himself hefker (open and ownerless) like a wilderness he cannot acquire wisdom and Torah. (Bamidbar Rabbah 1:7) In other words, to be receptive to the revelatory word of G-d you must be like the wilderness completely open and ownerless ...

(print version) A windswept hill, where the leaves rustle on the olive trees, and the ground lies silent... almost in silent memorial, to the sounds that echoed here forty-two years ago.... The view today is mostly obscured; where once the hill overlooked the Northern side of Jewish Jerusalem, from across the Jordanian border, today the homes and streets of Ramat Eshkol, a neighborhood that sprouted up after the Six Day War fill the landscape. And where once Jordanian guns trained on Israel, forcing civilians to seek refuge behind makeshift protection, toady children play soccer in a new school that sits just below the ridge. But take a walk below the old Jordanian police academy, along the rows of trenches that snake their way across the hill, and close your eyes, and you can still hear the echoes of gunfire, and the cries of the soldiers that rang out here, on Ammunition Hill, in June of 1967. In May of 1967, with Arab armies massed...