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Making Every Day Count
The Key to Making Life Worth Living
One day as I was waiting for a friend, an old woman sits down next to me. Suddenly she jumps out of her seat, turns to me and yells, "I should have never leftMexico!"
I look at her and ask, "When did you leaveMexico?"
"Thirty years ago!" she cries. "And I regret it every single day of my life!"
You would think that after 30 years a person would finally get used to where they were. But people often live in the past.
One of my students, age 28, told me that his father insulted him when he was age 12 and till this day he continues to feel hurt and angry. I explained to him that although his father hurt him when he was twelve he has allowed his father to continue to hurt him for another sixteen years by holding on to the pain and constantly remembering it. I suggested that...
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Enjoying Heaven on Earth
In this week's Torah portion G-d appeared to Abraham and yet He said nothing.
"G-d appeared to [Abraham] in the Plains of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of the tent in the hottest part of the day. [Abraham] lifted his eyes and he saw three strangers approaching and ran towards them."
Until now G-d appeared to Abraham to instruct, promise or bless him. The Talmud (Sotah 14A) comments that G-d was visiting sick Abraham who was recuperating from his circumcision. What does this mean?
When you visit a person who is ill it is not in order to say something; your mere presence communicates your pure desire to identify with this person in his/her time of need. You go for the sole purpose of being there. So it was when G-d visited Abraham. For the first time G-d appears to Abraham only to be with him, identify with him and share this special moment.
Sometimes the highest...
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Abraham: The Master of Personal Transformation
In reading the Torah's (Bible) account of Abraham, we cannot but be surprised and disturbed by the obvious omissions. Abraham appears upon the stage of history as a virtually anonymous character, without lengthy introduction or background or any real character references. The Torah recounts his genealogy and the migration of his family from one Mesopotamian city to another. It mentions his wife Sarai (who is later renamed Sarah) and her barrenness. It also mentions the death of his father and brother. But these are all mundane vital statistics that do not hint at Abraham's spiritual status.
Suddenly, yet in an oddly matter-of-fact way, the Torah relates a momentous revelation, one of the most crucial scenes in the entire Torah. G-d bursts into the personal life of this one man, calling to him, demanding of him a radical renunciation and promising that he will become prosperous, famous, the progenitor of a great nation which will be...
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The winter of 1944 was an extremely bitter winter in Poland, and none felt it more than the Jews lost in the world of the lagers, the concentration camps.
Often in life, it is the little things one remembers years later, and if you ask Rav Yisrael Lau what got him through that bitter winter as a seven year old boy in Buchenwald, he will tell you about Fyodor from Rostov, and a simple pair of ear muffs.
Every morning, the Nazi guards would rush into the barracks screaming and yelling and swinging their rubber truncheons every which way; the prisoners had only seconds to jump out of their bunks and stumble out in the snow; anyone not standing in roll call when it began was often killed on the spot.
As the guards walked up and down the lines in the bitter cold morning, their Alsatian dogs straining on their leashes, they watched for any puddles in the snow.
None of the...
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Are You Ready for the Ultimate Pleasure?
The generations following the sin of Adam and Eve proceeded upon a path of moral degeneration. Cain, in a jealous rage, impulsively killed his brother Abel. In the next generation, Tuvel- Kain perfected the crime of Cain through manufacturing weapons. Then, Lemach boasted to his wives of committing pre-meditative murder. Idolatry flourished during the time of Enosh. Organized crime was established by a group of hoodlums called ...
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There are moments that seem to hang in time, lasting a life-time; moments that stay with you forever.
Dani was such a moment. His twinkling blue eyes beneath wavy, blonde hair still look across the hall at me, enjoying watching my mouth drop open...
I had just recently completed my first stint of infantry and tank basic training and Sergeant's course in the Israeli army, and was enjoying a six- month leave before returning for Officer's course. Dani was definitely one of the reasons I made it through. A couple of years earlier, he had taken this green, gullible , American kid and taught me the ropes, making sure I got to know all the guys I would be serving with, forcing me to break my teeth and learn Hebrew , without which I don't know how I would have survived basic.
The Yeshiva program I was in, allowing boys to study before and during their army stint, was full of guys...
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Created in the image of love
The power to be who you are
In the very opening sentences of the Torah (Bible) we are told that the first human being was created in G-d's own image. And what was that image? The first human being was actually a man and a woman ...
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Endings and beginnings: the black and white of life.
Sixty 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?
Sixty years later Rav Yisrael Lau remembers watching as the commandant of the Gestapo approached his father, the Rabbi, with murder in...
