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I can still remember the exact moment and his words, thirty years later. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein z”tzl, our Rosh yeshiva ( head of Yeshivat Har Etzion where I was studying) was giving his advanced Talmud lecture to a group of about sixty students and as he was wont to do, looked up from his books scanning the students, and you could feel the tension in the air. Most students, myself included, were terrified of this moment. The word genius does not do justice to who Rav Lichtenstein was; beyond being one of the greatest rabbinic leaders and Talmudic minds of our generation, he was uncompromising in his pursuit of truth and his determination to arrive at a full and accurate understanding of every topic and every question we studied. Often, he would call on a student to read which would usually result in a series of questions that tested the students’ knowledge of the topic at hand and put him...

When the Loser is a Winner The Talmud teaches that King Solomon wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes after he saw prophetically that his kingdom and the Temple that he worked so hard to build would be destroyed. Imagine what a devastating realization that must have been to know that what you invested your entire life will be destroyed. We can understand why he bemoaned, “Futility of futilities ... what profits does a man have from all his work under the sun.” However, his ultimate resolution was “Revere G-d, live by His commandments -- for this is all man is.” King Solomon realized that our real accomplishments in life is not building the kingdom or the temple on earth, but what we make of ourselves -- the kingdom and temple we build in our inner world. This does not mean that you should not build in this world but rather that you should recognize that what you build on the outside is not the goal...

One of the saddest stories of ‘what might have been’ to come out of the Holocaust was the story of Joel Roth. In the spring of 1944 the Jews of Poland, Western Europe, Belarus and the Ukraine were largely gone, and the Nazis set their sights on the last great Jewish community on the European continent: the Jews of Hungary. As the Germans took over and the Nazi recipe of ghettos and deportations began to unfold Joel Roth, an accomplished politician, saw what was coming. Desperate to avert the inevitable, he had a plan to save the Jews of Hungary by negotiating a deal between the Allies and the Germans. At the time, the Germans were being over-run on all fronts and their largest problem was their overextended supply lines. The Allies were bombing the rail tracks and most trains still moving were busy transporting Jews to Auschwitz, so Roth proposed a simple deal: 400 trucks for 400,000 Jews. Called in...

Living G-d’s Life Quite frankly, I don’t believe in G-d. The word spelled G-O-D does nothing for me; in fact, it interferes with my true belief. I am not alone. Jews don’t believe in G-d. Indeed, the word “G-d” is not found in the Torah or the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Moses never heard of G-d nor heard from G-d. The name in the Torah that has been translated as G-d or Lord is Adonai. The word Adonai means “Master.” In Jewish law, whatever a servant owns actually belongs to his master; the servant has no possessions whatsoever. This law also governs our spirituality: G-d is our Master, and in essence we own nothing. For example, it is incorrect to say “my” life because it is really G-d’s life. We do not own the life force within us. This is a difficult concept to accept for many people because it is not a concept—it is a self-evident experience. Consider this: If we are...

I can still remember the exact moment: we had just come in from manning an impromptu roadblock all day and I was still on edge. Six of us had been tasked with setting up a road block round a bend in the road in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley no more than a few kilometers from the Syrians, and you could not help but tense up every time a car or truck came around the bend. Would they stop or try to run through us? Would they be armed? Open fire? As the officer in charge, it was nearly impossible to ensure all the men were adequately protected; all you could do was set up a couple of the guys in cover fire positions and do your best to keep everyone on their toes for eight hours in the sun…. By the time we got back in the late afternoon, my nerves were fried and I was completely exhausted. But as soon as I entered...

Beating Jealousy Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive. --Havelock Ellis In this week’s Torah portion Korach, a member of Moses' tribe the Levites and other communal leaders challenge Moses’s leadership and the appointment of priesthood to Moses’ brother Aaron. Motivated by envy toward Moses and Aaron they argue for equality. We are all holy. How can there be a hierarchy in holiness within Israel? They came as a group to oppose Moses and Aaron and said to them, "You have gone too far! The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the LORD is with them. Why then do you set yourselves above the LORD's assembly? Moses responded to Korach: Now listen, you Levites! Isn't it enough for you that the G-d of Israel has separated you from the rest of the Israelite community and brought you near Himself to do the work at the Lord's tabernacle and to stand before the community and minister to...

Sometimes, the most powerful experiences are the ones you least expect. Such was the case on a recent trip to Poland. Tucked in between our visits to the Lodz Ghetto in the morning and the Warsaw Ghetto in the afternoon, we made a brief stop in a town called Czestochowa where we found ourselves on an innocuous city street off a town square. There were 30,000 Jews in Czestochowa before the war; today it is Judenrein; no Jews are left.  We were not sure where our guide was taking us as we entered an apartment building and walked down the stairs into the basement until we suddenly found ourselves squeezed into a cellar that had been dug as a bunker under the street. The walls were still raw rocks and mud, and the dank musty smell of damp and rot was overpowering.  When the last Jews of Czestochowa were being deported to Treblinka in the summer of 1943 a certain Mr. Fishman,...

From His-tory to Her-story Is G-d male or female? One day my son Ananiel and my two daughters, Leyadya and Ne'ema, burst into my study. They had obviously been fighting over something and were very upset. I could see that I was chosen to be the lucky arbitrator to resolve another case of sibling rivalry. They shouted at each other, "You go, you ask Daddy." "No, no! You go, you go." Finally Ananiel, who was age five at that time, took the challenge and said, "O.K., O.K. Daddy, isn't it true that G-d is a boy?" Ne'ema and Leyadya, ages eight and nine, had tears in their eyes. I could hear them silently pleading with me, "Please no, please no. Tell us it's not true. It's bad enough our brother is a boy. Surely, G-d is really a girl." I said to them, "G-d is not a boy and G-d is not a girl. G-d is beyond that. We may talk about...

Many years ago, an elderly man approached me following a lecture on the topic of Emunat Chachamim (the faith we are meant to have in our sages). ‘Do you know why I am no longer religious?’ he asked. ‘It’s because when I asked the greatest Rabbi in our town whether I should avail myself of an opportunity to leave Poland and join the pioneers settling the land of Israel in 1935, I was told to stay in Poland because the Torah centers of the Jewish world were in Europe, and Jews who left for Palestine would die a spiritual death.’ Puzzled, I naively asked him: ‘but you survived; how did you get out?’ Upon which he explained that listening to the sage advice of his Rabbis he stayed in Poland, ended up in the camps and lost most of his family. But a friend of his who never asked the Rabbis made it to America in the early thirties and eventually got most...

Getting the Divine View on You How to make worlds of a difference And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the picture of the LORD shall he view           (Numbers/BaMidbar 12:6-8) Several years ago, I gave my kids Cheerios for breakfast. It said on the front of the Cheerios box that on the back of this box is a three-dimensional Cheerios bumblebee. So I looked at the back of the box and saw a distorted, blurry thing. Have you ever looked at a 3-D book without the goggles? You see a mishmash of misprinted, distorted images. There were no goggles inside the box of Cheerios,...