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...

Some time ago I had the privilege of meeting a World War II veteran with a fascinating story to share:  Born in Germany, he was lucky enough to be born to parents who saw the writing on the wall, and sent him away for High School to boarding school in England. Visits home, while full of the wonderful memories of family and home cooking, were also filled with tension, as he watched Adolph Hitler’s rise to power, along with the Nazi impositions on Jews and Jewish living.  Eventually, his family succeeded in getting out, and he wound up a young Jewish immigrant with a German accent in America. As World War II grew into a worldwide conflagration, and the storm clouds of conflict approached America’s shores, Victor, (we’ll call him), succeeded in enrolling in a prestigious Ivy-League University. He was eventually drafted into the U.S. Army.  As a college student he’d succeeded in being part of a special technical program in engineering,...

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...

In retrospect, it seems almost trivial, but one of the difficulties of my time in Lebanon, was the lack of space; the sense of being on top of one another. I particularly recall once, during the scramble to get down into the bunker when the siren went off (signaling the possibility of an incoming mortar or artillery barrage) squeezing into one of the small rooms with three-tiered bunk beds, to wait out the alert. As the workload of missions in the area had increased, and the infrastructure of the positions (mutzavim) had not, the army used a system for quarters known as ‘mitah chamah’ or ‘warm bed. This meant that when you had time to sleep for a few hours, you did not get your own bed, and certainly not your own room; you grabbed an empty bed as someone was always out on a mission or patrol. But this time, the alert had sounded as the patrols had just returned...

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...