Category: Chagim

I hadn’t planned on stopping to watch, but something about him caught my attention. Maybe it was his eyes, which was where his smile began; before it spread to the rest of his face; you could see it coming in the twinkle in his eyes. Or maybe it was the fact that, knowing his history as a Holocaust Survivor, it seemed so powerful that on a day such as this, he could tell his story, with such a smile. It was Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the anniversary of the day our Temples were destroyed, the city of Jerusalem ransacked and hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered or sold into slavery, and he was being interviewed on Israeli television. A day full of painful memories for the Jewish people and yet here he was, smiling; so I stopped to hear his story. He began... “How old are you?” The question hung in the air as the Kapo in...

These words of Torah are dedicated l’ilui neshama Bayla Simma bat Rut, z”l, Barbara Sharon Bernstein, beloved grandmother of Zach Bernstein (Orayta year 12), marking the shloshim of her passing on Lag b’Omer. May her neshama have an Aliyah. 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...

Few things in this world are as beautiful as the night sky in the desert. Most people rarely get the chance to see this beauty, far away from the bright lights and cacophony of sounds in the city: the black velvet of a dark night sky full of stars that seem so close you can reach out and touch them. It never fails to fill me with a deep sense of awe.  In the army, no matter how challenging the particular situation, I was always able to take comfort from the familiar constellations and quiet power that seem to emanate from the stars at night.  I remember the wave of relief that would wash over me as the big dipper rose high in the night sky, making it easy to find the North star, the most constant point of reference for navigation at night.  No matter where you are, if you can find that star, you can always find your way home. It...

Chanukah: The Light of Love Most people who have read a little about Kabbalah probably know that this mystical tradition of Judaism talks a great deal about light – what it calls the Endless Light. The Kabbalah teaches that through our actions we draw and increase this Divine Light into the world or diminish its presence. For a long time, I had difficulty in understanding this Kabbalistic metaphor until one day it all came together. As a way of explaining this difficult concept, let me ask you to imagine for a moment that you have walked into a magic store. And there, they are selling special flashlights equipped with magic lights of different kinds. For example, you can buy the light of science, and when you point that flashlight at your hand, you see not a hand, but cells and blood vessels and tendons and ligaments. Or you can buy the light of art, and you point that flashlight at your hand,...

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...

There is a powerful story I heard many years ago but never shared publicly, considering it too fantastic to possibly be true. But recently having read an accounting of it in Yitta Halberstam’s Small Miracles of the Holocaust, (Dancing with G-d pp. 178-181) I had the opportunity to ask a Hungarian Auschwitz survivor who recalled that this story had made the rounds in Auschwitz.  It is difficult for me to imagine that the story is true, and yet, who could make up such a story? Apparently, in the fall of 1944, as the last remaining Jews of Hungary were being sent to the gas chambers, a Commandant decided to consign every Jew under the age of 18 to their fate. Normally youth in their later teens were sent to the labor battalions, receiving a reprieve from the infamous selections, but for some reason this Officer was determined that all Jews under 18 should be gassed. It was a well-known fact 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...