Category: Chumash Shemot

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 every...

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. (Exodus 35:2) During the forty years that the Israelites wandered in the desert they carried with them a portable temple referred to as the Tabernacle or the Mishkan. The creative acts that are forbidden on Shabbat are those acts similar to the skills that went into building or assembling the Mishkan. The Talmud outlines 39 different categories of such creative acts that are forbidden to do on Shabbat. They represent our ultimate power of creativity which is to build a temple that accommodates the presence of G-d on earth. Of course we know that G-d does not literally dwell in the Mishkan, however, the Mishkan symbolizes our ability to serve G-d and infuse every moment and every place with the presence of G-d. In other words, the greatest accomplishment of a human being is to serve to make manifest G-d’s presence...

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’Yavneh and has been missing now for over twenty years. At the beginning of the Lebanon War on the first Sunday night in June of 1982, they received word in the Yeshiva that buses would be coming to take the boys up North to fight. Kerem Be’Yavneh is one of a number of very special Yeshivot (Academies for higher Jewish learning) whose boys combine their yeshiva studies with army service in Israeli Combat units. In addition to their regular reserve duty and studies in yeshiva, whenever...

The Gift of Giving: Love’s Secret Service In this week’s Torah Portion we are commanded to bring pure oil to the tabernacle to light the Menorah (candelabra). “And you (Moses) shall command the children of Israel, that they bring to you pure olive oil beaten for the light, to cause a lamp to burn continually.” (Exodus 27:20) The Midrash, which part of Jewish Oral Tradition, asks an obvious question. The entire world is illuminated by G-d’s splendor and yet He tells the Jewish people to bring oil to light the Menorah before Him? The Midrash answers that G-d desires the works of your hands. How can we understand that G-d desires the works of our hand? How can G-d want something from us? What can we give G-d? Does G-d lack anything that we can provide? The Kabbalah teaches that G-d created the world to give us goodness and yet it seems from the Midrash that G-d is not looking to give but really wants to receive. How...

In 1860, a relatively unknown one-term congressman (who had practiced law in the prairie towns of Illinois) named Abraham Lincoln stunned the country by prevailing over three prominent rivals—William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates—to win the Republican nomination for President. But even more surprising was what Lincoln did after being elected President: He appointed all three rivals to his cabinet—Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general. Reading up on Abraham Lincoln, one discovers that this was not an astute political move; rather, it was simply who he was. In fact, even his enemies often became his friends. To quote David Chamber Mearns: “Enemies seemed to be potential friends to Abraham Lincoln. When British writer              Edward Dicey was introduced to the president as one of his enemies, Lincoln’s              response was: “I did not know I had any enemies”.       (Largely Lincoln pg. 93) The same Dicey, in...

Is G-d Beyond Us or Within Us? The Torah recounts that G-d instructed the Israelites to build a sanctuary, telling Moses, “Let them build a sanctuary and I will dwell in them.” Note that G-d did not say, “I will dwell in the sanctuary.” G-d said, “in them.” Is G-d beyond us or within us? One day my son Ananiel and my two daughters, Leyadya and Ne’ema, burst into my study. They had obviously been fighting over something and were very upset. I could see that I was chosen to be the lucky arbitrator to resolve another case of sibling rivalry. They shouted at each other, “You go, you ask Daddy.” “No, no! You go, you go.” Finally Ananiel, who was age five at that time, took the challenge and said, “O.K., O.K. Daddy, isn’t it true that G-d is a boy?” Ne’ema and Leyadya, ages eight and nine, had tears in their eyes. I could hear them silently pleading with me,...

Sixteen hundred Jews, mostly elderly and families with children, protected by barely two hundred fighters; the odds for the besieged Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem in 1948, were beyond impossible. The Jordanian Legion, by far the best fighting force in the Middle East, committed an entire division of 3200 men, their most elite fighting force, to winning this battle. Approximately thirty thousand Arab irregulars, local Arabs with a gun and a cause, supported them; the Jews were in desperate straits.  There were no reinforcements to be had, but the Israeli fighters, against all odds, refused to give up. They had only three heavy machine guns between them, and one of them was set in a sandbag position on the edge of the Churvah Synagogue, a stone’s throw away from the Muslim quarter. Sitting at the strategic juncture of the widest alleyway into the Jewish quarter, the Jordanians mounted daily and often twice-daily attacks, in full battalion strength, against this three-man...

The Divine Wants You to be Happy When Rules Become Delicious Recipes for Your Soul “And these are the judgments that you shall place before them.” — Exodus 21:1 "You shall place before them, that is, like a table that is set and ready for eating." — Rashi “Taste and see that G-d is good.” — Psalms 34 LAWS YOU CAN EAT, ENJOY AND SAVOUR  The job of a teacher of Torah is not to be a philosopher, ethical guide or law giver but rather a gourmet chef. A gourmet chef has the ability to bring the taste out of every ordinary cabbage, every simple bean sprout, as well as present it all in a delicious tantalizing way. Once, I went to someone's home to raise funds for my institute. I thought we would have about a ten minute discussion. Instead, we were talking for five or six hours. I hadn't eaten all day, and I was starving. Finally I decided that instead of asking for a...

Some years ago, the media reported that two days before his execution, Adolph Eichmann penned a letter to then President Yitzchak Ben-Zvi begging for clemency. Facing his imminent death by hanging (the only death sentence ever executed in the State of Israel), the once arrogant Eichmann, finally humbled, was begging for his life. His request was denied, and two days later he was hanged, his body cremated, and his ashes spread over the Mediterranean to prevent his tomb from ever becoming a shrine for hatred. During his time in prison, he took ill briefly, and, experiencing shortness of breath and fever, was seen by the prison Doctor, himself a Holocaust survivor. He would later describe the mix of emotions he felt, as he attempted to divorce himself from his personal feelings and focus on the task at hand, which in his words, was “to view him as any other patient in need of medical assistance”. But is this correct? Is...