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Look Who’s Talking: The Truth About Gossip “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” ~~Jane Austen “Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.” ~~George Elliot Whoever speaks with an evil speech- lashon hara – is as if he denied G-d . . . Evil speech kills three people – the one who says it, the one who accepts it, and the one about whom it is said. (Maimonides Hilkhot Deot 7:3) A philosopher once said, “If a man finds himself, he has a mansion in which he can live for the rest of his life.” I would like to add: If a man does not find himself he can build mansion after mansion and try to compensate for the loss of self, but huge as his mansion may be, it won’t do the trick. The real...

Is there a point past which a person can no longer change; can no longer be forgiven? On the one hand, Jewish law clearly teaches that for some transgressions, such as murder, a person is put to death, suggesting that such a person can no longer redeem him or herself in this world. On the other hand our tradition also teaches us in the name of Rabbi Eliezer (Avot 2:10) “repent the day before you die “ and in the Talmud (Shabbat 153) he explains this to mean that a person should always repent as he never knows when he might die, the clear implication being everyone can repent. Rav Ephraim Oshry one of the last rabbis of the Kovno Ghetto, in his powerful responsum from the holocaust, Mima’amakim, shares that a fellow came over to him in the DP camp, after the war, with an intense question. He had been a Chazan (cantor) before the war, and some of his fellow former...

Sick Minds, Sick Bodies The power of our beliefs to heal or harm The Jewish Sages gave a spiritual rather than physiological explanation for the disease tsara'as (generally translated as "leprosy") which affected not only the body but also clothing and the walls of houses. According to one source several sins could possible be the cause: R. Shmuel bar Nachmani said in the name of R. Yochanan: Because of seven things the plague of leprosy is incurred, namely, slander, the shedding of blood, a vain oath, incest, arrogance, robbery and envy. (Arakhin 16a) However, most Sages concur that the main cause for tsara'as was slander and gossip. HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND THE PHYSICAL IMPACT OF OUR MORAL AND SPIRITUAL ACTIONS? The Kabbalah teaches that the world you and I live in is a product of our perception of reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant probed this concept. He asked: Do we see reality or do we see our perception of reality? Kant's answer is that we do...

In 1948, things did not look promising for the Jews.  The Arab armies of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and forces from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria prepared to attack the newly declared State of Israel as soon as the British pulled out in May of 1948, vowing to push the Jews into the sea.  In Tzfat, where 80,000 Arabs surrounded approximately 3,000 Jews living in the Jewish quarter, the Jews were braced for the worst. One night, a few weeks before the pullout, the British told the Jewish community they were leaving Tzfat in the morning and had reliable intelligence that the Arabs were planning a massive attack immediately following their departure. Predicting a massacre, they urged the Jews to leave the city, even making room for them in the convoy. With eight hours’ notice, they assumed the Jews would panic, but not a single Jew left the city.  Sure enough, as the empty British trucks pulled out of Tzfat, thousands of Arabs armed...

Why Eat Kosher? The Talmud tells a story about the famed author of the Mishna, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. The rabbi was walking down the street one day, when a little calf ran up to him and hid under his cloak. Apparently, the calf had run away from the slaughterhouse. The rabbi said to the calf, “Go back to be slaughtered, for this you have been created.” At this point, a Divine decree was made against him because he had not shown pity on the creature. As a result he become sick and suffered for many years, until one day he showed pity on a family of young rats and was suddenly healed. We know that Judaism permits us to eat meat as long as the animal was slaughtered properly, so what did Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi do that was so wrong? He incorrectly said, “for this you were created.” The Talmud is teaching us that, contrary to his declaration, animals were not created for...

How important is it that we listen to our rabbis and teachers? On the one hand, there is something beautiful about a leadership that encourages its students to think for themselves, rather than relying completely on their rabbis and teachers’ opinions. As an example, I distinctly recall my Roshei Yeshiva, Rav Lichtenstein & Rav Amital’s strong reaction to students in the yeshiva who opposed their political views; stating unequivocally that such opposition was healthy, especially as they both felt Halacha (Jewish law) did not mandate a specific political opinion. In fact, this seemed so refreshingly different from the ‘Chareidi’ world whose rabbinic leaders seemed to regularly demand fealty to every political and administrative decision. And yet, the Torah nonetheless clearly commands us to follow our Torah leaders’ rulings as stated clearly in the Torah: “You shall do according to what they tell you…and keep it according to all which they teach you. According to the Torah they will teach you … you...