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There is a story told by Rav Ephraim Oshry, one of the last Rabbis of the Kovno Ghetto, in his monumental work of Holocaust responsum: Mima’amakim. When the Nazis arrived in the small villages of the Ukraine with their accursed Einsatzgruppen units, they followed a specific recipe: the Jews were ordered to assemble, any thought of resistance was crushed, and the entire Jewish community was led out of town away from prying eyes, usually into the forests on the edge of town. The people were made to dig ditches, undress and pile their belongings in ordered piles, and then to stand in rows one group after another in front of the ditches…. In one small village, as the Jews were assembled in a clearing in the forest outside of town, it was abundantly clear what was about to happen. The remains of the previous day’s action for a different nearby village were obvious; the ditches were already dug, the piles of clothing...

Love Thyself!! Secrets to Your Ultimate and Everlasting Net Worth Just as a person must believe in G-d, so too, he must afterwards believe in Himself. That is to say, that G-d is involved with him and he is not a waste—that he is here today and gone tomorrow... Rather one must believe that his soul is from the Source of Life, may His name be blessed and that G-d gets pleasure – taanug-- in him and is -- mishtashaya -- playfully involved with him when he does His will. And this is the meaning of the verse “and they believed in G-d and Moses His servant” (Exodus 15). [The soul of] Moses consisted of the 600,000 souls of the Jewish people of that generation --- and they believed that G-d desired them – wants and receives pleasure from the good within them. - Rabbi Tzadok Hacohen: Tzidkat HaTzadick 154 I heard an interview with a famous singer. The interviewer asked her, “What are your feelings...

It is hard to imagine, looking down at the dry, windswept desert floor far below, what it must have been like two thousand years ago, to be a Jewish rebel soldier atop the isolated fortress of Masada. What kept you going, as you gazed down at the might of three full Roman Legions, all bent on your destruction? In the year 70 CE, with the Temple (the Beit HaMikdash) in flames, Jerusalem breached and destroyed, hundreds of thousands of Jews dead, and hundreds of thousands more sold into slavery, the Romans announced that the great revolt had finally been put down. They even minted a coin to communicate their victory to the entire Roman Empire. The coin, known as ‘Judea Capta’, shows a woman, meant to be the Jewish people, cowering at the feet of a Roman legionnaire. The Jewish people had been defeated, and the war was finally over. The only problem was, the Romans were wrong. Two hundred Jewish rebel...

To Serve with Joy Is your life ‘out of service’? “And Moses and Aaron were brought again unto Pharaoh; and he said unto them: 'Go, serve the LORD your G-d; but who are they that shall go?' And Moses said: 'We will go with our young and with our old, with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds we will go; because the holiday of G-d is for us.'” — Exodus 10:8-9 The King of Egypt must have been quite surprised by Moses answer. To serve G-d is not like serving you. It is not about degrading back-breaking slavery rather a joyful celebration for the whole family. To serve G-d is a holiday for us. The Secret to Service Most people think that a mitzvah is a "demand" meant to deprive or diminish our godly self worth. But that is incorrect. A mitzvah is a "command" enabling us to co- operate, associate, identify and thereby consciously bond with G-d and experience His love. This is...

Most people are not aware of the fact that the success of the Entebbe mission was born of a question. In July, 1976 an Air France airliner was hijacked and eventually taken to the Entebbe airport in Uganda. After separating the Israelis and passengers with Jewish sounding names, the Arab and German terrorists announced they would soon begin murdering hostages unless their demands were met. A small group of commanders of the elite Israeli commando units, desperate to find a way to save the hostages, were sitting in a briefing room in Tel Aviv as a mission began to form. The plan was to parachute commandoes with fast attack dinghies into Lake Victoria from where they would come ashore and take the airport terminal. Effie Eitam, who would ultimately command one of the units that participated in the rescue raid that would stun the world, was sitting in the briefing room discussing the options, when an Israeli who had spent some time...

Where is G-d, the Miracle Maker? People often say, “If there is really a G-d, why doesn’t He do outright miracles anymore? I would believe in G-d if I saw the ten plagues in Egypt, the sea split or some other supernatural event.” In the past, G-d did miracles in order to prevent some terrible tragedy from happening. G-d overruled the laws of nature to keep the story going—otherwise, it would have ended. But this type of intervention is not the ideal way that G-d wants to act. G-d prefers not to do miracles. He only does them when there is no other way to teach us about His control of nature. People do not really change by witnessing a miracle. Of course, at first they are strongly moved and seem to change. But the awe quickly wears off, and they return to their old ways. We see this human pattern many times in the stories of the Torah. The Israelites witnessed the...

What makes a great leader? Ask a large enough group of Israelis who they think of when asked to think of a Jewish leader, and someone will come up with the name Menachem Begin. A leader of the Jewish underground Irgun in pre-State Israel, and later Prime Minister of Israel, famous for ordering both the bombing of the British Command Center at the King David Hotel as well as the decision to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, Begin was the most wanted Jewish underground commander in Palestine until the birth of the State of Israel. Eventually he won international acclaim as the first Israeli leader to sign a peace accord with an Arab State (Egypt) in 1978, and became the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. What was the secret of Menachem Begin’s leadership? Some would say his fiery determination: he was a powerful orator and mesmerizing public figure. Others would say his adherence to his beliefs...

Identity Crisis is a Gift: Awakening to the Role and Goal of Your Soul Kirk Douglas, the actor, once told me that when people compliment him on a performance, they often tell him how great he was at losing himself in the part. "You just became Vincent Van Gogh! You were so wonderful." And he answers, "No, you lost yourself in the part. I can't afford to lose myself in the part. I have to pay attention to the director, to the cues. I have to hit the mark just right so the action is in the camera frame. I must stay aware that I am an actor playing a role." A good actor plays his part, but he doesn't get lost in his part. He can't even begin to think he is the character he is playing. On the other hand, he still embraces that role with a tremendous amount of love and gives everything he's got to play his...

In the year 1263 Raymond de Penyafort of Spain challenged the Jewish people to a debate. As the church’s representative, he chose a Dominican friar named Pablo Christiani, a Sephardic Jew who had converted to Christianity, to represent them. The Jewish community came to no less than the Ramban himself, to represent them. The Ramban, Rav Moshe ben Nachman (Nachmanides) was the undisputed great leader of his generation.  (His now famous commentaries on the entire Torah and Talmud established him as one of the greatest scholars in Jewish history.) He agreed on condition that he be allowed to respond in the debate. The church was relying on the fact that the Jews would be hesitant to incur the wrath of the church by responding to Christiani’s suppositions, but King James of Aragon, in whose presence the debate took place granted the Ramban free speech. After the debate the Church published its version of the debate which suggested the Jews had no answers for...