Endings and beginnings: the black and white of life.
Close to 80 years later, the image still remains, burned into his memory, as if it were yesterday.
He was five and a half years old, but already an adult, standing in the central square (the umshlagplatz) of the Piyotrekov ghetto, next to the synagogue. His father, the Rabbi of the town, stood tall and proud in the middle of the square surrounded by the men of the village, distinguishable by his long full beard and his black rabbinic frock. The men were all on one side of the square and the women and children, by decree of the Nazis, off to one side.
Tension filled the air, with an intense, silent fear of the unknown, as they stood waiting in the square from where Jews were sent to... where?
Seventy-eight years later Rav Yisrael Lau remembers watching as the commandant of the Gestapo approached his father, the Rabbi, with murder...
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...
There are few things as painful as the desire to give birth when faced with the inability to do so. Countless treatments, endless tears, hopes dashed and dreams unrealized; even with all that modern medicine has to offer, sometimes, for reasons we will never understand, a woman, no matter how hard she tries never succeeds in becoming pregnant… But I once met a woman who took all that to an entirely different level…
We were halfway through the afternoon Mincha service when one of our students came over to me and clearly wanted to ask me something. Normally I don’t speak until the service is over, having learned there are very few things in life that cannot wait five minutes. But something suggested this was an exception to the rule. As it turned out, there was a woman in the back of our Beit Midrash who had walked in and started wailing; literally. She was actually standing at the entrance to...
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...
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. Gambling that the Syrians would never expect a surprise attack on such strategically superior positions, the Israelis were climbing the Golan in an attempt to remove, once and for all, the Syrian...
Many years ago, a fellow walked into a class I was giving (in a co-ed Jewish outreach program) with his girlfriend, and something about him immediately caught my attention. The class was on the Holocaust and the challenge of our relationship with G-d in a post Holocaust world; halfway through the class he raised his hand and when he spoke I realized what it was that had caught my attention: he was German, with a strong German accent.
He was not Jewish, though he had a Jewish girlfriend who had joined him, and they ended up signing on for a three week program we were running in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Eventually, I found out his story: He was from Munich and was in Israel on a summer volunteering program. A year earlier he had been going through a box in his grandparents’ home and accidentally found his grandfather’s Nazi membership card. This led him to an eventual confrontation with his grandfather....
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...
The vision of what it would mean to command men, was evaporating before my eyes. Two weeks after completing IDF Officer’s course, I had been looking forward to the challenges of mission control, decisions under extreme stress, and leading by example, but these two young conscripts, one of whom had only recently completed his eight months of basic infantry and tank crew training, presented me with nothing of the sort.
They were arguing over an ammo cartridge, each claiming it to be his, and with a gear inspection coming up in the morning, this somehow became significant as neither wanted to fail the inspection.
I had made the mistake of telling my squad, on the first day I met them, that they should feel free to share with me any problem they had, no matter how small, and I was fast regretting the decision. It wasn’t even a case of one claiming the other stole it, rather, the cartridge had...
The Secret to Happiness
If you think religion is going to give you a quick fix you are wrong. And if you think that religion will put you on easy street you are deluded.
Very often religion is presented as offering the secret to ultimate happiness. I have heard religious leaders try to entice people towards a religious lifestyle promising them that through the synagogue or the church they will find happiness and bliss.
This approach is really no different than any other marketing strategies. People want to be happy and are looking for the magic formula. Marketers bombard us daily with promises for a better life. Blondes have more fun, toothpaste gives your mouth sex appeal, lose weight and feel great. It is too easy to point to a million things that we are missing that are the cause of our unhappiness. People think that all they need is the more and the right. If only I had more hair, more...
When I was in Officer’s course, we had a Battalion Commander named Eyal, who made an indelible impression on me. A Kibbutznik from the Golan, he was a rather short fellow, of slight build, not exactly the image of the mighty war hero. But he was one of those men who had been there; he was a veteran of the Yom Kippur war, and during the first week of the course he told us a story that came with a challenge.
He had actually been stationed down along the Suez Canal when the war broke out and was part of a company of British-made Centurion tanks caught in the catastrophic Egyptian advance deep into the Sinai. At that point he was still a tank driver with the rank of private first class, so his position was in the driver’s compartment. In order for the turret to rotate, the driver sits in a compartment separate from the rest of the crew,...
