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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...

Thousands of feet up in freefall, travelling over 100 miles an hour, Yosef Goodman had only seconds to make a decision. His parachute had become tangled in his commander’s chute above him, preventing both of their parachutes from opening. They were probably twenty second away from certain death, and none of the backup measures were working. On a training jump in the IDF’s elite Maglan paratrooper unit, they were testing a new form of gliding parachute, but something had gone terribly wrong.  With such a short timeframe, and no other possible solution, Yosef, over the protesting screams of his commander, calmly pulled out his army knife and sliced through the parachute chords connecting their chutes, saving the life of his Commander but dooming himself to certain death as he hurtled towards the ground at close to 130 miles per hour. A subsequent investigation determined that his decision was the correct one, and the only way to allow at least one of...

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 —...

 Portion of Eikev Lebanon was a crazy place to be back in the early eighties, but after almost a year and a half in military courses and training I was glad to finally be dealing with the bigger picture. My first 21 months in the IDF were mostly spent in course after course after course. Ten weeks of basic infantry training followed by ten weeks of the armored corps’ tank school training as a tank driver, followed by three months in the field training to be part of a tank crew and then a tank unit, followed by three weeks of intense training prep to be accepted to tank commander’s course, followed by three months of tank commander’s course  in the desert, with a brief study respite leading to an intense month of prep for Officer’s course to 14 weeks of Infantry Officer’s course followed by eight months in Tank officer’s course; just reading the list still makes me weary. So,...

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...

Lebanon was a most unlikely place for a halachic discourse (a dialogue involving a complex legal question of Jewish tradition), but that had never stopped Dani before, and this was no exception. Anyone who ever served in Lebanon, particularly in the springtime, would be familiar with the beautiful cherry orchards that dotted the countryside, and this was equally true for the area that Dani's unit was patrolling. Ripe on the trees, no fruit ever tasted as sweet to me as the cherries you could pick and savor from the trees that dotted the area of Lebanese no-man's land the IDF patrolled in the spring of 1984. During the long hours of patrol, the fruit offered a brief respite from the grueling duties Israeli soldiers had to shoulder day by day. But to Dani, the readily available fruit presented an entirely different image, or rather, a challenge. Whose fruit were these? Where were the Arab owners who had planted and maintained...

Walk into The Old City through the Jaffa Gate, and after a short stroll down Ohr HaChaim Street you will suddenly find yourself looking down upon one of the oldest streets in the world. Known as the Cardo and built by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago, it was the main (cardinal) thoroughfare in Jerusalem for nearly seven centuries, and one can still see the magnificent Roman columns which adorn its path, rediscovered (courtesy of Jordanian mortar shells) after the Six Day War in 1968. Any tourist who has ever visited Jerusalem in the last fifty years has most probably seen and even walked on this magnificent colonnade. But there is a detail concerning this street that changed the way I look at it forever. This street was built by the emperor Hadrian following the Bar Kochba Rebellion. (There are some who suggest it was partly a cause of the rebellion, but many choose our approach.) After the Great revolt, when...