Category: Chumash Shemot

(print version) One of the strangest dialogues in the entire Torah occurs in this week...

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(print version) It is more than twenty years now, and yet it seems like yesterday. There are moments you can taste, even smell, forever. Forty yards, or perhaps it was only thirty? Time has a way of coloring the details. We had come under heavy fire, and we were doing everything right; by the book. The force was split up and the cover position was already in place laying down heavy suppressing fire, while we moved into place to charge their position. Six of us, trained and experienced, we were running in a straight line up the hill. In such moments, you discover whether all the training had really been worth it. In the movies, they always make it seem like the officer is a hero, cool under fire, and wise enough to know exactly what to do. But in reality, the training just takes over. It isn...

(print version) Unmasking Nature: G-d...

(print version) Sometimes, it's that one extra word that makes all the difference. It was only a fraction of a moment of my time in the army, but it was a lesson I never forgot, though to this day I am undecided as to whether I agree with it. I was desperate to get a day off; we were still in basic training, and I had barely been in the army three months, but my folks were landing at the airport the next afternoon, and I was hoping my commanders would give me a break as I had not seen head or hair of any family in the two months since I had joined up. My folks had done me the enormous favor of landing on a Thursday afternoon, which was the best possible day of the week for a tank crewman to get extra leave. Thursday was "Tipul She'vui" day, which meant the weekly servicing and cleaning of every last inch of...

(print version) Successful People are Unaccomplished Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you a holy, a day of solemn rest to the Lord....

(print version) A number of years ago at a parlor meeting of the coalition for the Israeli Soldiers missing in action, someone stood up to share a few words about a close friend of his with whom he had both studied and gone to war: Yehuda Katz. Yehuda Katz, a soldier who, along with Zack Baumel and Tzvi Feldman, has been missing in action since the battle of Sultan Yaakov in June of 1982, studied in Yeshivat Kerem Be...

(print version) Shabbat: Rest Assured Keep the Shabbat for it is holy unto you..... because in six days G-d made heaven and earth: and on the seventh day He abstained from work and rested....

(print version) Sabra and Shatilla; for most of us, the names of these Arab refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon evoke images of controversy and confusion as the sites where Christian Phalange soldiers massacred over seven hundred civilians: men, women and children in September of 1982. And most people will associate this controversy with the question of whether Israeli troops controlling the area should have or even could have prevented these terrible events. But for the men of the 202nd battalion of the Israeli paratroopers, including my older brother, these names and that time recall a very different memory. I only got the full story a few months later, when my brother and I managed to get together for Shabbat in our rented apartment in Jerusalem. Late Friday night, I awakened to strange, muffled sounds coming from his room, and discovered him, in the midst of a nightmare. The sounds of his cries were muffled because in the midst of his dream he...

(print version) Is G-d Beyond Us or Within Us? The Torah recounts that G-d instructed the Israelites to build a sanctuary, telling Moses, ...