Category: Chumash Devarim

Thousands of feet up in freefall, travelling over 100 miles an hour, Yosef Goodman had only seconds to make a decision. His parachute had become tangled in his commander’s chute above him, preventing both of their parachutes from opening. They were probably twenty second away from certain death, and none of the backup measures were working. On a training jump in the IDF’s elite Maglan paratrooper unit, they were testing a new form of gliding parachute, but something had gone terribly wrong.  With such a short timeframe, and no other possible solution, Yosef, over the protesting screams of his commander, calmly pulled out his army knife and sliced through the parachute chords connecting their chutes, saving the life of his Commander but dooming himself to certain death as he hurtled towards the ground at close to 130 miles per hour. A subsequent investigation determined that his decision was the correct one, and the only way to allow at least one of...

You Get Back What You Put In The Joys of a Commandment-Driven Life The Zohar, which is a Jewish mystical classic, written two thousand years ago, states that there will come a time when people will be performing tradition and rituals like cows eating grass. Essentially, the cow chews its food, stores it and then chews its cud, thereby re-chewing the food, over and over again. The Zohar is using this metaphor as a symbol for something that is done mindlessly without intention or taste. In Jewish tradition, there is a concept called taamei mitzvos, which can be described as the "reason for the commandments." But taamei mitzvos can also mean the "taste of the commandments." In Hebrew, taam means both "taste" and "reason" — and there is definitely a connection between the two. Without understanding the reason behind the life of commandment it can become mindless and tasteless. Imagine a man who observes Sabbath, but it has no meaning to him —...

(reprinted from 2005) Theirs was a moment that captured the Nation. After over a year of speeches, talk shows, political debates, rallies, letters to politicians, bumper stickers and banners, it all came down to a small farming village a few Kilometers from the Gaza strip called Kfar Maimon. On a hot summer’s day, beneath the blistering desert sun, fifty thousand protesters, desperate to stop, or at least delay what they view as a national tragedy, the abandonment of twenty-one towns and villages along the sea in the Gaza strip, squared off against no less than twenty thousand Israeli soldiers and policemen. The Israeli government had cast the die, and the stakes were enormous. They could not afford to let tens of thousands of protesters enter the towns and villages of Gush Katif en masse, and the protesters knew it. Whether they were right or wrong we will never know, but the assumption was that if fifty thousand Jews could swamp the...

What Do We Know? Humble Words to Console When we try to understand G-d, we face an inherent obstacle with the very process of knowing. When I attempt to know anything, I am the subject and the thing that I seek to know is the object. In addition, there must be some degree of distance and separation between the subject and the object. Your eye can see almost everything, but it cannot see itself. “Knowing” implies two separate entities: the knower and the known. However, you cannot know G-d in this normative way, because G-d is the source of all knowing. G-d is the source of all consciousness. Your very ability to think comes from G-d, who is the source of all thinking. How can you think about the source of all thinking? How can your mind hope to comprehend the source and ground of all minds? Yet if you want to know G-d, then you must seek the source of all knowing....

Is there any comfort? It’s been fifteen years and many of us have moved on, since that terrible summer of 2006 and the Second Lebanon War. But for the families whose loved ones never returned, it is like yesterday, and the heroes whose larger-than-life stories fill our hearts, still occupy empty chairs and shattered dreams, as if they had only just walked out the door. Such a hero was and is Michael Levin. Absolutely refusing to take no for an answer and determined to enlist in the IDF and fulfill his dream of becoming a paratrooper, he actually climbed in to the draft center through a second floor window to get his papers. (The enlistment officer told him he was sometimes responsible for ensuring draftees did not illegally get out of the army, but had never seen a recruit avoid the guards in order to get in to the army!) When the second Lebanon War broke out Michael was actually on...

We Are Never Alone Walking and Talking with the Divine And in the wilderness where you have seen how that the LORD your G-d carried you as a man does bear his son in all the way that you went until you came into this place ----- Deuteronomy 1:31 Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you, G-d, are with me. ----Psalms 23 Really!!-- The Zohar Vol. 2 pg. 57 In the world at large, if your boss sends you on a mission, he generally stays at the office, while you go off to accomplish the assigned task. But that's not the case when G-d sends you on a mission. G-d comes along. This is the meaning of the verse in Psalm 127: “If G-d doesn't build your house, your labor is for nothing.” Now you might think that if G-d is going to build your house, why do you have to labor at all? The...

How did it come to this? How could it be that a Former Israeli Chief Rabbi had been indicted for taking millions in bribes, and faces trial for numerous counts of bribery fraud and money laundering? I am not commenting on the case itself, nor am I offering any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the former Chief Rabbi, as my information comes only from the media[1] which is not a court of law. But if a Chief Rabbi can be put on trial for bribery and fraud, something is obviously dreadfully wrong. If a Chief Rabbi can become corrupted, how can we avoid the same pitfalls? Is there a recipe for remaining true to one’s ethical principles? This Shabbat we begin reading the fifth and final book of the Five Books of Moses, Sefer Devarim (Deuteronomy). In this book Moshe gives his farewell soliloquy to the Jewish people as the first verse suggests: “These are the words that Moshe spoke to the...

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 Israel could not...