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To Pray the Jewish Way At first glance prayer seems to be about whining and begging G-d, "Please heal this person ... please bring me my soul-mate ... please help my business, etc." One could mistakenly think that G-d is holding out on us and gets pleasure watching us grovel. When we are faced with some very serious problems, it is customary to ask others to join together in our prayers. What is that all about? It seems as if we hope to move G-d through force: "G-d, if you don't respond to my prayers, then I will recruit through the e-mail thousands of others to pray." Do we think these strategies really work? What are we actually doing here? If G-d is all knowing then why am I telling Him my problems? He already knows them. If G-d is good then why am I asking for Him to change my situation? Obviously whatever happens to me is for my best and I...

Mrs. Marlit Wendell is a Holocaust survivor who lives in Jerusalem. Marlit, her mother, and older sister were able to survive Auschwitz and the war together. Their arms were numbered with three consecutive numbers. (I believe they are the only living family with three consecutive numbers ...) Eventually, they were able to join their brother in America after the war. In October 1938 in the middle of the night when all the kids were asleep, three Gestapo agents came to their house, and burst into the living room. They were taken to Gestapo headquarters after being told there was no need to take anything with them as they'd come back home; but they never saw their home again. Imagine what that must have been like for a seven-year-old; seventy five years later, Marlit still wishes she could go back to her home to see it and what she left behind, one last time. The parents were out late; when they came home and...

What You See Is What You Get "Daddy, where is G-d?" "Son, wherever you let Him in." — Attributed to Rebbe Pinchas of Koretz How do we open our souls' eyes to let G-d in? The Kabbalah says, "There is no king without a nation." This point requires deep exploration. It may make sense that, in the human world, a king is dependent on having subjects who acknowledge his sovereignty. The last Emperor of China ceased to be emperor when there were no longer people who bowed when he entered the room. Even after the Communist government had exiled him, as long as people recognized him and acknowledged him as their sovereign, he was, in a very real sense, still a king, albeit without the power to rule. But G-d is reality, so how can G-d be dependent on human acknowledgment. The world that you and I live in is a product of our perception of reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant probed this concept. He...

Some time ago, my brother shared with me the following story: Yuli Edelstein the speaker of the Knesset, was visiting a small school in Beitar Illit (Le’tzion Be’Rinah) and shared the following story: On Dec 19, 1984, Edelstein was sentenced by a Russian Tribunal, to three years of hard labor in Siberia. Technically the crime listed on the charge sheet was possession of narcotics, but the real reason was the fact that the Russians had caught him teaching Hebrew. “That day in court”, Edelstein recalled, “was after three solid months of being imprisoned in an isolation cell in Moscow’s infamous Chistopol prison.” “I was taken straight from my prison cell to the court and found it full of Russian military and security personnel, who had clearly filled the court room to ensure there was no room for any of my supporters; only my wife and mother managed to get into the courtroom to hear the sentencing.” After the sentencing, the twenty-six-year-old Edelstein was immediately surrounded...

Funny. You Don't Look Religious Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat I once was hired to organize educational programs for a large Jewish youth group in the United States. To overcome any possible stigmas associated with the word "rabbi" and to encourage the kids to relate to me without preconceived notions, I asked the executives to introduce me as just David Aaron, not as Rabbi David Aaron. They respected my request, but I was dismayed to read in their newsletter the following announcement: "We want to welcome a new member to our staff: David Aaron, our Judaism specialist." This sounded even worse! It made Judaism sound like a rare disease. Don't we go to specialists when we have a problem our general practitioner cannot treat? What do you do with a Judaism specialist? Do you come to him and say, "I've got this problem with Jewish guilt. Do you have a cure, Judaism specialist?" I was in trouble before I even started. I didn't want...

A time comes in your life when you finally get it...when in the midst of all your fears and insanity you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out "Enough." Enough fighting and crying or struggling to hold on. And, like a child quieting down after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears, and through a mantle of wet lashes you begin to look at the world through new eyes. This is your awakening. You come to terms with the fact that he is not Prince Charming and you are not Cinderella (or vice versa) and that in the real world there aren't always fairy- tale endings (or beginnings for that matter) and any guarantee of "happily ever after" must begin with you-and in the process, a sense of serenity is born from acceptance. You stop complaining and blaming other people for things...

Why is Life So Difficult? Making peace with our battle In this week's portion, Jacob asks for peace and relaxation, but G-d had another plan. “Jacob settled (down) in the land of his father's dwellings, in the Land of Caanan.” - Genesis 37:2 The foremost commentator, Rashi, explains: Jacob wanted to settle down in tranquility but then the ordeal of his son Joseph (sale into slavery) fell upon him. The righteous seek to dwell in tranquility but G-d says 'Is it not enough for the righteous what has been prepared for them (reward) in the World to Come that they need to seek tranquility also in this world!'" Some people turn to G-d and religion, hoping to find refuge from all the turbulence of life, from doubt, from inner conflicts and mental turmoil. They want instant inner peace, spiritual contentment, and tranquility for their troubled souls. According to Kabbalah, that is not the purpose of life on earth. In fact, it is just the opposite. We have...

Sometimes it takes someone else to show you what you should have seen all along… I was driving home one day in normal traffic when suddenly a car sped by on my left trying to overtake me and the cars in front of me. Only problem was he had not anticipated the truck coming round the curve and heading straight for him in his lane. There was nowhere for him to go and no space for him to get back into our lane; it was a two-lane highway with only one lane in each direction and as he was parallel to my car there was no-where for him to go. Suddenly realizing I was about to witness a really nasty accident and despite the car behind me I braked and threw my car onto the shoulder allowing him to get back into our lane just in time. The car behind me braked just in time to avoid hitting me and I managed...

Real Love Means Embracing Conflict The Secret of Jacob The Torah (Bible) teaches us that Jacob went to the house Laban, his uncle, and dwelt there for many years. He married Rachel and Leah, Laban's daughters, and had eleven sons there. After years of struggling with Laban constantly deceiving him he finally left to return home and face Esau who hated him. In the middle of the night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two handmaids and his eleven sons, and sent them across the Jabbok River shallows. After he had taken them and sent them across, he also sent across his possessions. Jacob alone remained on the other side of the river. It was there that the famous "stranger" appeared and wrestled with him until just before daybreak: When the stranger saw that he could not defeat him, he touched the upper joint of Jacob's thigh. Jacob's hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him. "Let me leave!" said...

It was a blisteringly hot day, and the shade of the trees offered little respite for the forty prisoners of the Waldkommando (Forest brigade) whose job it was to cut down trees for lumber for the nearby Sobibor extermination camp. Today, environmentalists might rail and protest at the sight of these mighty trees being felled in the forest, but in 1943, killing trees was not even a sidebar as the lumber was meant to keep the fires going in the pits where the bodies of tens of thousands of Jews were being burned in the Sobibor death camps. No one was protesting that incredible loss of life either, in the summer of 1943. Having spent the morning under the watchful eyes of their Ukrainian guards with no respite from the insufferable heat, the prisoners were finally given a break for bread and water. Two prisoners were sent down to the nearby river with buckets to draw water for the Jewish inmates. It...