Category: Chumash Shemot

Ready to HotSync Your Soul? Secrets to a Super-Natural Life of Freedom and Synchronicity Years ago, I saw these sandals I really liked. At the time, I knew nothing about these shoes other than I just liked the way they looked. So I went into a store and I tried on a pair, but they didn't feel right. They had all these funny bumps inside of them. I told the salesman, "There is something wrong with these shoes." He said, "No there is something wrong with your feet. You must understand that these shoes are designed to support the shape of a natural foot." "What's unnatural about my feet. They're in their natural place — at the end of my legs." He laughed. "You don't understand. Your feet have taken the unnatural shape of the shoes you've been wearing. And the shoes you've been wearing are good for killing cockroaches in tight corners, but they are not meant to contain feet." I felt insulted so I took...

In April of 1988 I was called up for my first reserve duty. The first intifada had exploded just a few months earlier, and we were stationed for a month in a nasty little piece of real estate called Jebalya which was a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Needless to say, things were pretty intense. One day I was given an assignment to take six men and set up a lookout position on the roof of an Arab house that overlooked the main road passing by Jebalya where Jews often travelled. There had been a number of incidents that week, including riots, Molotov cocktails, burning tires laid across the road and rock throwing at moving vehicles; our job was to help get things back under control.  It was an extremely uncomfortable feeling, to be setting up a military position on someone’s roof, but from a strategic point of view, it made sense, and, reminiscent of western laws of...

Love Thyself!! Secrets to Your Ultimate and Everlasting Net Worth Just as a person must believe in G-d, so too, he must afterwards believe in Himself. That is to say, that G-d is involved with him and he is not a waste—that he is here today and gone tomorrow... Rather one must believe that his soul is from the Source of Life, may His name be blessed and that G-d gets pleasure – taanug-- in him and is -- mishtashaya -- playfully involved with him when he does His will. And this is the meaning of the verse “and they believed in G-d and Moses His servant” (Exodus 15). [The soul of] Moses consisted of the 600,000 souls of the Jewish people of that generation --- and they believed that G-d desired them – wants and receives pleasure from the good within them. - Rabbi Tzadok Hacohen: Tzidkat HaTzadick 154 I heard an interview with a famous singer. The interviewer asked her, “What are your feelings...

One of the greatest gifts we have in this world is the ability to make choices in our lives. Though sometimes, we might wish we didn’t have to make those choices. They had trained us for just such a moment. Again and again, this exact question had come up; in fact, an entire day in Officer’s course had been dedicated to this very question. What would you do? How would you respond? And all of us, without fail, had reached the same conclusions. Intellectually the choice was very clear and made infinite sense. But that didn’t make the choice any easier. One of the most important topics, drilled into you again and again is what they call “Todah”, recognition of enemy weaponry. In fact, every Friday morning in tank Officer’s training, (usually done when you are already in dress uniform, literally with the bus engine running, waiting to take you home for a weekend pass,) there was a pop quiz on...

To Serve with Joy Is your life ‘out of service’?   “And Moses and Aaron were brought again unto Pharaoh; and he said unto them: 'Go, serve the LORD your G-d; but who are they that shall go?' And Moses said: 'We will go with our young and with our old, with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds we will go; because the holiday of G-d is for us.'” — Exodus 10:8-9 The King of Egypt must have been quite surprised by Moses answer. To serve G-d is not like serving you. It is not about degrading back-breaking slavery rather a joyful celebration for the whole family. To serve G-d is a holiday for us. The Secret to Service Most people think that a mitzvah is a "demand" meant to deprive or diminish our godly self worth. But that is incorrect. A mitzvah is a "command" enabling us to co- operate, associate, identify and thereby consciously bond with G-d and experience His love. This is...

What is the power of a hug?  Sometimes it’s all about the context… Recently, someone sent me a story regarding a fellow named Yankel, who was a survivor of Auschwitz. Sharing his story, he recalled his journey when he was loaded onto a cattle car and sent to Auschwitz, in the winter of 1944. In an effort to efficiently ensure the transports arrived at the camp to be immediately processed, trains were often held en-route until the crematoria schedule was ready for them. As such, the cattle cars would often sit on the tracks in stations overnight and even for days on end with no food and of course no blankets or supplies for the frozen and desperate Jews inside. That first night in the cattle car it was bitterly cold, and the Jews locked in the cattle car were shivering with no blankets and no way to keep warm. Yankel was a teenager, freezing along with all the other townspeople that...

Where is G-d, the Miracle Maker? People often say, “If there is really a G-d, why doesn’t He do outright miracles anymore? I would believe in G-d if I saw the ten plagues in Egypt, the sea split or some other supernatural event.” In the past, G-d did miracles in order to prevent some terrible tragedy from happening. G-d overruled the laws of nature to keep the story going—otherwise, it would have ended. But this type of intervention is not the ideal way that G-d wants to act. G-d prefers not to do miracles. He only does them when there is no other way to teach us about His control of nature. People do not really change by witnessing a miracle. Of course, at first they are strongly moved and seem to change. But the awe quickly wears off, and they return to their old ways. We see this human pattern many times in the stories of the Torah. The Israelites witnessed the...

One of the strangest dialogues in the entire Torah occurs in this week’s portion: Va’Era: At the behest of G-d, Moshe shares with the Jewish people that their redemption is at hand. But “… they do not listen to Moshe from their despair and hard labor “ (Exodus 6:9) Then, Hashem (G-d) tells Moshe to go to Pharaoh and tell him (again) to release the Jewish people from Egypt. And Moshe struggles with this command. After all, he reasons: ‘If the Jews did not listen to me, why should Pharaoh? ‘(6:12). It’s a good question, which God does not seem to answer. Eventually, G-d repeats his command to Moshe to see an audience with Pharaoh, and again Moshe questions whether Pharaoh will listen to him (6:30), at which point (7:3) G-d repeats his command adding that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will not listen! (6:3-4) Which makes one wonder what the point of this entire exercise is? Why is Moshe being sent to...

Identity Crisis is a Gift: Awakening to the Role and Goal of Your Soul Kirk Douglas, z”l, the actor, once told me that when people compliment him on a performance, they often tell him how great he was at losing himself in the part. "You just became Vincent Van Gogh! You were so wonderful." And he answers, "No, you lost yourself in the part. I can't afford to lose myself in the part. I have to pay attention to the director, to the cues. I have to hit the mark just right so the action is in the camera frame. I must stay aware that I am an actor playing a role." A good actor plays his part, but he doesn't get lost in his part. He can't even begin to think he is the character he is playing. On the other hand, he still embraces that role with a tremendous amount of love and gives everything he's got to play...

Zvika had just been given two weeks leave; Having been accepted to the prestigious Company Commanders course, he had been given two weeks leave and was at home on his Kibbutz Lochamei Hageta’ot near Haifa when, at exactly 2pm on the afternoon of October 6th, 1973, the Yom Kippur War began. Nearly two thousand Syrian tanks poured across the border in the Golan Heights while hundreds of thousands of Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal in the Sinai, and Israeli troops, suffering unspeakable losses, scrambled to try and hold back the onslaught. Twenty-one year old Captain Zvika Greengold, a tank officer, sensed how bad things were and frantically started making his way across the country to the Golan Heights where he understood the situation was dire; Syrian tanks were just a few hours away from Tel Aviv and there was not much standing in their way.  Arriving at the IDF Command center in Nafach on the Golan, a couple of...