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Getting From the Real to the Ideal The Journey of Personal Transformation When you go forth to war against your enemies, and the Lord your G-d has delivered them into your hands, and you have taken them captive, And you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her, and take her for a wife - Then you shall bring her home to your house... ... and she remain in your house and weep for her father and mother for a month, and after that .... she shall be your wife. And if you do not want her, you shall send her out on her own; you shall not sell her at all for money, you shall not treat her as a slave, because you "violated" her. (Deut. 21:10-14) The Torah permits this only as a compromise to the yetzer ha-ra (evil urge). (Talmud Kiddushin 21b) 'And you shall take her unto you as a wife' - the Torah only permits this in...

“Achi!” “My brother!” These were the words that always greeted me when I got to the meeting point for reserve duty every year, and it was the most common word on everyone’s lips. Men who had not seen each other often for nearly a year and commonly had little or nothing to do with each other during the year for a few weeks a year rediscovered a brotherhood for those weeks of reserve duty. It’s a funny word “Achi” which does not easily translate as ‘my brother’; there is a power to it in Hebrew as in Israel it connotes much more than a blood relation, being closer to a ‘brother in arms’, and it means that these are men who would lay their lives on the line for each other, quite literally. I never imagined I would see this anywhere else but in the context of the army, perhaps subconsciously assuming it was the product of intense sometimes life threatening...

The Prophet Powered Life “I (G-d) will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto you (Moses); and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (Deut. 18: 18) Through using methods such as meditation and music, the prophets of ancient Israel were able to induce altered states of consciousness in which they experienced a direct revelation from G-d. Sometimes they received a message for the entire world. When such messages had eternal significance, they were recorded and later incorporated into the Hebrew Bible. Only fifteen prophets’ revelations are included, with another dozen or so prophets mentioned by name in the various Biblical books. The Talmud, however, tells us that there were as many prophets in ancient Israel as Israelites who came out of Egypt during the Exodus, in other words, approximately three million. The Talmud also tells us that after the Temple was destroyed, the period of...

During the Holocaust, the Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabi Yekutiel Halberstam, passed through the gates of hell many times. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the work camps and death marches and the final unspeakable horror, Auschwitz, the Rebbe lost his wife and their eleven children in less than a year, yet never sat shiva, (the seven days of mourning), refusing to take the time to mourn for his own children, while so many thousands were being lost every day. Throughout his harrowing experiences, he vowed that if he survived, he would build a monument to chesed (loving-kindness) that would be his response to the inhumanity he had witnessed. Today, Laniado hospital in Netanya, Israel is that monument. It took the Rebbe fifteen years to raise the funds to build Laniado hospital. He was determined to show the world the light of Judaism’s model for human behavior, after so many years of darkness. At the hospital’s dedication, asked why a rabbi had chosen to...

A Short-Cut to a Life of Blessings You get what you give “Thou shalt not harden thy heart, nor shut thy hand from your needy brother; surely open thy hand to him.” — Deut. 15:7-8 Is there a short-cut to the spiritual wealth of life? One of the most powerful and immediate ways to connect the circuit of life, and let the blessings flow is Tzedaka, that is charity. The Talmud teaches: "Tzedaka saves from death." When we need an incredible influx of life force — because we are facing impending physical death or impending spiritual death, the act of giving to charity can be one of the most powerful antidotes. As proof for the statement, the Talmud tells the incredible story of the daughter of the famous Rabbi Akiva, who lived some 2,000 years ago. A star-gazer told Rabbi Akiva that his daughter would die on the day of her wedding. Rabbi Akiva replied that just because it is written in the stars...

I can still see the terrified look on his face, as we both realized, in the same moment, we had been set up.  We were in the midst of a month-long stint of IDF army reserve duty in Ramallah, during the first intifada, where daily stone throwing and Molotov cocktails had become the norm. We were into the second week of our tour, and the frustration had already begun to set in, particularly on this particular stretch of road alongside El Bireh; a ‘refugee camp’ on the outskirts of Ramallah. Every day while on jeep patrol we could get calls that rocks had been thrown by Arab youths, at Israeli cars driving along the road, but by the time we got there, all we would find was the rocks strewn on the road, often along with shattered glass, and the perpetrators long gone. Until this particular afternoon; We happened to be only a few hundred yards down the road when the...

You Get Back What You Put In The Joys of a Commandment-Driven Life The Zohar, which is a Jewish mystical classic, written two thousand years ago, states that there will come a time when people will be performing tradition and rituals like cows eating grass. Essentially, the cow chews its food, stores it and then chews its cud, thereby re-chewing the food, over and over again. The Zohar is using this metaphor as a symbol for something that is done mindlessly without intention or taste. In Jewish tradition there is a concept called taamei mitzvos, which can be described as the "reason for the commandments." But taamei mitzvos can also mean the "taste of the commandments." In Hebrew, taam means both "taste" and "reason" — and there is definitely a connection between the two. Without understanding the reason behind the life of commandment it can become mindless and tasteless. . Imagine a man who observes Sabbath, but it has no meaning to him...

(Reprinted from 2005) Theirs was a moment that captured the Nation. After over a year of speeches, talk shows, political debates, rallies, letters to politicians, bumper stickers and banners, it all came down to a small farming village a few Kilometers from the Gaza strip called Kfar Maimon. On a hot summer’s day, beneath the blistering desert sun, fifty thousand protesters, desperate to stop, or at least delay what they view as a National tragedy, the abandonment of twenty- one towns and villages along the sea in the Gaza strip, squared off against no less than twenty thousand Israeli soldiers and policemen. The Israeli government had cast the die, and the stakes were enormous. They could not afford to let tens of thousands of protesters enter the towns and villages of Gush Katif en masse, and the protesters knew it. Whether they were right or wrong we will never know, but the assumption was that if fifty thousand Jews could swamp...

What Do We Know? Humble Words to Console When we try to understand G-d, we face an inherent obstacle with the very process of knowing. When I attempt to know anything, I am the subject and the thing that I seek to know is the object. In addition, there must be some degree of distance and separation between the subject and the object. Your eye can see almost everything, but it cannot see itself. “Knowing” implies two separate entities: the knower and the known. However, you cannot know G-d in this normative way, because G-d is the source of all knowing. G-d is the source of all consciousness. Your very ability to think comes from G-d, who is the source of all thinking. How can you think about the source of all thinking? How can your mind hope to comprehend the source and ground of all minds? Yet if you want to know G-d, then you must seek the source of all knowing....