Category: Chagim

Simchat Torah: The Joy of Torah More than truth, Torah is a living encounter with G-d. The experience at Mt. Sinai was not only a revelation of G-d’s truth, but more importantly, it was a revelation of G-d’s love. Torah was and continues to be G-d’s love letter to the Jewish people. Imagine one day you receive a love letter. You are at work and eating lunch at the employee cafeteria, and someone drops a letter in front of you. You see that it’s a letter from the one you love. Do you rip open the envelope and start to speed-read through the letter? No, of course you don’t. You save this letter. You’re going to read it in a very special place because this letter deserves more. Now imagine you’re in that special place. You open the letter carefully, you start to read your beloved’s words and you actually begin to hear her voice. And then you feel her presence. If you’re anything...

His steely eyes should have given him away, but over thirty years ago, I was a new immigrant, only four months into my Israeli army service, and I had no idea who this Lieutenant General really was. We were finishing our second stage of tank training at the Israeli Armored Corps school, and, graduating as a tank driver, I was being awarded my first rank: private first class (Turai’-Rishon) by someone whom I would later learn was and still is an Israeli legend. This particular rank has almost no value and was awarded a few of us who represented the battalion as outstanding cadets at the final ceremonies of the course. (I wore it on my arm for one day, only so that I could outrank my older brother, who was a few days away from completing his sergeant’s course in the paratroopers; I demanded that he “get off his feet for a soldier who outranked him!”) Looking back, the true value of that...

Getting the Forgiveness You Want and Need  Yom Kippur is all about love and forgiveness. It's about how we are always inseparably close to G-d. On Yom Kippur we get a glimpse of ourselves, our choices and our relationship to G-d from another perspective--G-d's perspective. This is the transformational power of Yom Kippur that makes it into a Day of Atonement and forgiveness. There is a cryptic verse in the Book of Psalms (139:16), which, the Sages say, refers to Yom Kippur:  The days were formed, and one of them is His. Every day of the year we see the world from our perspective but there is one day --   G-d’s day -- when we get a glimpse of the way the world looks from His perspective and everything changes in light of that perspective. On Yom Kippur we see it all from the perspective of the World to Come where you get to see the whole picture. The Talmud teaches that in this...

The thundering sounds of artillery fire echoed through the valleys beneath the Golan Heights and across the Sea of Galilee. All across the Northern border with Syria, civilians were huddled in their bunkers and bomb shelters, wondering when this latest round of violence would abate. On the face of it, this was nothing new; for nineteen years the Israeli citizens of the North had endured an almost daily barrage of shellfire from the Syrian guns perched in the Heights above. In fact, an average of one thousand shells a day fell on the Kibbutzim, towns, and villages within range of the Golan, when the Syrian army had control of the Heights. But this time it was different. It was June of 1967, and Israel had finally decided enough was enough. For five weeks, Israel, in response to the Arab armies massed on her borders, had mobilized her reserves, and the economy had ground to a halt; it was a situation...

Crowning Our King Secrets to a Great New Year The Kabbalah says, “There is no king without a nation.” This point requires deep exploration especially on Rosh Hashanna when we acknowledge G-d as our King. 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 asked: Do we see reality or do we see our perception of reality?...

More than what he was saying, it was his face that caught my attention. Flicking on the television absent-mindedly as I was getting dressed for a wedding, I came across the middle of a program on what, after a moment, I realized was a story from that summer's war in Lebanon. A young man, who had clearly been there, was describing some of the events surrounding a particular battle, though I had missed the beginning of the program and do not know exactly where these events took place. He was sharing what must have been an extremely difficult experience: the house his unit had taken refuge in was hit by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile, a number of his comrades had been killed and wounded, and he himself wasn't sure he would make it. But what made me stop and listen was his face. The events he was describing must have been extremely painful, and yet there was no pain in...

A Love Letter from the Divine After the miraculous Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people traveled in the desert for 49 days until they reached Mount Sinai on the 6th day of the Hebrew month of Sivan. There they experienced the ultimate revelation and communion with G-d. They encountered G-d face to face, heard the voice of G-d and received the Torah and its commandments—the mitzvoth. Whereas, Passover is the birthday of the Jewish people, this holiday, which is referred to as the holiday of Shavuot, can be likened to the Bar Mitzvah of the Jewish people. It is a time to celebrate the Mitzvot—the responsibilities implicit to the loving relationship we enjoy with G-d. Recently a friend asked me if I would meet with his son, Sam, and help him prepare his Bar Mitzvah speech. I generally don’t teach thirteen-year-olds, but for a friend I made an exception. So I got together with Sam and I began to share with him some...

Purim: Secrets Behind the Purim Mask Purim celebrates the salvation of the Jews from the wicked Haman's scheme to exterminate all the Jewish men, women, and children living in the Persian empire in the year 357 B.C.E., which essentially meant all the Jews in the world. Some of the commandments of Purim, such as hearing Megillat Esther, which recounts the Purim story, and enjoying a festive meal, are obvious ways to commemorate this deliverance. Other commandments and customs have no apparent connection to what happened on Purim. Why are we required to give charity to the poor, send two food items to a friend, and get so drunk that we do not know the difference between Haman, the villain, and Mordechai, the righteous hero of the story? (This last commandment, I understand, is very rigorously kept in college dorms all year round.) What is behind the customs to dress up in costume and to eat hamentaschen, delicious, sweet tarts named literally, "Haman's...