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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 —...

Some years ago, I received this fascinating story* via e- mail: At the turn of the twentieth century, two of the wealthiest and most famous men in America was a pair of Jewish brothers named Nathan and Isidor Straus. Owners of R.H. Macy's Department Store and founders of the A&S (Abraham & Straus) chain, the brothers were multimillionaires, renowned for their philanthropy and social activism. In 1912, the brothers and their wives were touring Europe, when Nathan, the more ardent Zionist of the two, impulsively said one day, "Hey, why don't we hop over to Palestine?" Israel wasn't the tourist hotspot then that it is today. Its population was ravaged by disease, famine, and poverty; but the two had a strong sense of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren, and they also wanted to see the health and welfare centers they had endowed with their millions. However, after a week spent touring, Isidor Straus had had enough. "How many camels, hovels, and yeshivas...

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...

When Rav Yitzchak Hutner (Author of the Pachad Yitzchak ) was learning in Slobodka Yeshiva in the early 1900’s, one of the students went from Slobodka to Berlin to be with Rav Dovid Tzvi Hoffman. When he returned to Slobodka, the Alter of Slobodka (the head of the Slobodka yeshiva) asked for his impressions of the German people. Among other things, the student shared that the Germans were a kind people. They had a polite way of speaking. As an example, when giving directions, a German, after sharing the instructions, would politely ask "nicht wahr?" (Is this not so?) This showed refinement. He would not say anything definitive; he would always end the sentence with a tentative, 'nicht wahr?' At that point a debate broke out between the students of the Yeshiva. Was it right to praise the Germans? Some suggested true and lasting ethics should be culled from our own sources.  But there was one student who persisted and suggested that...

We Are Never Alone Walking and Talking with the Divine And in the wilderness where you have seen how that the LORD your G-d carried you as a man does bear his son in all the way that you went until you came into this place ----- Deuteronomy 1:31 Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you, G-d, are with me. ----Psalms 23 Really!!-- The Zohar Vol. 2 pg. 57 In the world at large, if your boss sends you on a mission, he generally stays at the office, while you go off to accomplish the assigned task. But that's not the case when G-d sends you on a mission. G-d comes along. This is the meaning of the verse in Psalm 127: “If G-d doesn't build your house, your labor is for nothing.” Now you might think that if G-d is going to build your house, why do you have to labor at all? The...

Visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust Museum, and wander off to the paths behind the plaza dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and you will come across an actual cattle car, one of the many used by the Nazis to transport hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the infamous concentration and death camps across Poland. Engraved on the bannister opposite the box car is a powerful poem, (by Dan Pagis) found written in pencil in a railway-car: Here in this carload I am Eve With Abel my son If you see my other son Cain son of man Tell him I… Whenever I see this poem, in that place, I am always moved by the abrupt ending of Eve’s (mother of humanity) words: what would she say if she were able to finish her sentence? Why does she not finish her thought? What goes through the mind of Eve along with her son Abel (as in Cain and Abel) on their way to the slaughter?...