Author: admin

To Pray the Jewish Way At first glance prayer seems to be about whining and begging G-d, "Please heal this person ... please bring me my soul-mate ... please help my business, etc." One could mistakenly think that G-d is holding out on us and gets pleasure watching us grovel. When we are faced with some very serious problems, it is customary to ask others to join together in our prayers. What is that all about? It seems as if we hope to move G-d through force: "G-d, if you don't respond to my prayers, then I will recruit through the e-mail thousands of others to pray." Do we think these strategies really work? What are we actually doing here? If G-d is all knowing then why am I telling Him my problems? He already knows them. If G-d is good, then why am I asking for Him to change my situation? Obviously, whatever happens to me is for my best and I...

It was finally the day; after over a year of training I was finally about to get my bars and join the very special family of IDF Officers. My parents had flown in from the US for the occasion along with my younger brother and were on their way down for the ceremony, which was a couple of hours away, deep in the desert on the Shizaphon Armored Corps base.  We were being inspected by the base sergeant-major an hour before the ceremony when we would be receiving our officer’s bars at long last. The Army Chief of Staff (Moshe Levy) would be attending so everything had to be perfect. He stopped in front of me and, looking down, saw my Tzitzit (religious fringes) hanging down to my knees and snapped an order: “tuck those in immediately! I had better not see those hanging out during the ceremony!”  To be honest, I don’t normally wear my tzitzit out; they have been wrapped...

What You See Is What You Get "Daddy, where is G-d?" "Son, wherever you let Him in." — Attributed to Rebbe Pinchas of Koretz How do we open our souls' eyes to let G-d in? The Kabbalah says, "There is no king without a nation." This point requires deep exploration. It may make sense that, in the human world, a king is dependent on having subjects who acknowledge his sovereignty. The last Emperor of China ceased to be emperor when there were no longer people who bowed when he entered the room. Even after the Communist government had exiled him, as long as people recognized him and acknowledged him as their sovereign, he was, in a very real sense, still a king, albeit without the power to rule. But G-d is reality, so how can G-d be dependent on human acknowledgment. The world that you and I live in is a product of our perception of reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant probed this concept. He...

It should have been one of the most powerful and exciting days of my life; I can still see all the guys, in their dress uniforms, preparing for the final ceremony; instead, it was one of the most depressing. After eight of the longest, most grueling months I had ever experienced, I was three days away from receiving my officer’s bars. A month-long test (navigation, desert survival, weapons proficiency etc.) to enter infantry officer training, followed by nearly four months of infantry officer’s training in the desert, best described as hell on earth, and then the most difficult four months I have ever experienced; tank officer’s course. Averaging three hours sleep a day for 18 weeks, under intense pressure; this was where tank commanders were trained by the IDF to become platoon leaders. And then, three days before I was meant to receive my bars, I was told by the battalion commander that for me, there wasn’t going to be...

Funny. You Don't Look Religious Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat I once was hired to organize educational programs for a large Jewish youth group in the United States. To overcome any possible stigmas associated with the word "rabbi" and to encourage the kids to relate to me without preconceived notions, I asked the executives to introduce me as just David Aaron, not as Rabbi David Aaron. They respected my request, but I was dismayed to read in their newsletter the following announcement: "We want to welcome a new member to our staff: David Aaron, our Judaism specialist." This sounded even worse! It made Judaism sound like a rare disease. Don't we go to specialists when we have a problem our general practitioner cannot treat? What do you do with a Judaism specialist? Do you come to him and say, "I've got this problem with Jewish guilt. Do you have a cure, Judaism specialist?" I was in trouble before I even started. I didn't want...

Many years ago, a fellow walked into a class I was giving (in a co-ed Jewish outreach program) with his girlfriend, and something about him immediately caught my attention. The class was on the Holocaust and the challenge of our relationship with G-d in a post Holocaust world; halfway through the class he raised his hand and when he spoke, I realized what it was that had caught my attention: he was German, with a strong German accent.  He was not Jewish, though he had a Jewish girlfriend who had joined him, and they ended up signing on for a three-week program we were running in Jerusalem’s Old City.  Eventually, I found out his story: He was from Munich and was in Israel on a summer volunteering program. A year earlier he had been going through a box in his grandparents’ home and accidentally found his grandfather’s Nazi membership card. This led him to an eventual confrontation with his grandfather. And the...