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...

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...

Who is G-d to Judge? How to Celebrate a Day of Judgment I did not grow up in a religious home but we did go to shul (synagogue) every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I remember one Rosh Hashanah the rabbi got up and said, “We’re about to open the ark. It is customary for the congregation to stand while the ark is open, but it will be open for quite some time. So if you get tired, you can sit down.” I thought to myself, “I only come here twice a year, so if standing and going through a little torture is going to take away my sins, then why not stand for the whole thing?” When they opened the ark, everyone stood and then everyone sat. I was the only one who remained standing. I figured, how long could it last, five minutes, ten minutes? I stood there in terrible pain for an hour and a half, figuring ‘OK. I guess...

Tisha B'Av: Does G-d Cry? On Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av (which this year begins at nightfall August 13), Jews mourn over the loss of the Holy Temple, Beis HaMikdash in Hebrew, that stood in Jerusalem. On this day, the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., and the Romans demolished the Second Temple in 70 C.E.. Each Tisha B'Av, we have a custom to read Eicha, or the Book of Lamentations, a painful account of the prophet Jeremiah's intense sorrow over the destruction of the First Temple. In addition to reading the Eicha, we abstain from any physical pleasures the entire day. We are not allowed to eat, drink, wash our bodies for enjoyment or wear leather shoes. A little less-known Halacha, or Jewish law, is that we are not allowed to say hello to each other. This law is perhaps the most difficult for me and yet the most meaningful. In Jerusalem in the...

This week we celebrate the festival of Shavuot, commemorating a moment, thirty-two hundred years ago, when we all stood together, beneath a wind-swept mountain, deep in the Sinai desert. The power of that moment, was that, more than at any other time in our history as a people, we truly became one; one people, experiencing a desire to receive and to share, together. There is a legend about Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the well-known German composer, who was far from being handsome.  Along with a rather short stature, he had a grotesque hunchback.            One day he visited a merchant in Hamburg who had a lovely daughter named Frumtje. Moses fell helplessly in love with her. But Frumtje was repulsed by his misshapen appearance.            When it came time for him to leave, Moses gathered his courage and climbed the stairs to her room to take one last opportunity to speak with her. She was a vision of heavenly beauty, but...

Wonder Bread Tapping the Transformational Power of Faith During the seven days of Passover we are required to eat only Matza-- unleavened bread that looks somewhat like a cracker and is made of just water and flour. The Matza reminds us that we were slaves to the Egyptians who treated us as if we were subhuman and fed us brittle and tasteless unleavened bread. The Matza is therefore referred to as the “bread of affliction.” However, Matza also reminds us of how we left Egypt in an astounding record time, faster than it takes dough to leaven into bread. How can Matza be both a sign of our painful affliction and our joyous freedom? The Zohar, the Kabbalah classic, refers to Matza as the “Bread of Faith.” In other words, when we eat the Matza, we are internalizing the message of faith that it embodies. That message is -- know that even if you hit rock bottom and feel far and alienated from G-d, G-d is right there to help you and free you from...