Look Who’s Talking:
The Truth About Gossip
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” ~~Jane Austen
“Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.” ~~George Elliot
Whoever speaks with an evil speech- lashon hara – is as if he denied G-d . . . Evil speech kills three people – the one who says it, the one who accepts it, and the one about whom it is said. (Maimonides Hilkhot Deot 7:3)
A philosopher once said, “If a man finds himself, he has a mansion in which he can live for the rest of his life.” I would like to add: If a man does not find himself he can build mansion after mansion and try to compensate for the loss of self, but huge as his mansion may be, it won’t do...
R. Smulyan, in his book ‘5000 B.C….’, posits the question of two identical twin brothers, one who always lies, and the other who always tells the truth. The truth-teller always tells the truth and is always accurate; whatever is indeed true he actually believes to be true. The liar on the other hand, always lies, and his responses are always false, such that whatever is true he will always believe to be false and whatever is false he will always assume is true.
Thus, posits Smulyan, each brother will always give the same answer to the same question, but for different reasons:
“For example, suppose you ask whether two plus two equals four. The accurate truth- teller knows that it is and will truthfully answer yes. The inaccurate liar will believe that two plus two does not equal four (since he is inaccurate) and will then lie and say that it does; he will also answer yes.” (Much like the...
Sick Minds, Sick Bodies
The power of our beliefs to heal or harm
The Jewish Sages gave a spiritual rather than physiological explanation for the disease tsara'as (generally translated as "leprosy") which affected not only the body but also clothing and the walls of houses. According to one source several sins could possible be the cause:
Shmuel bar Nachmani said in the name of R. Yochanan: Because of seven things the plague of leprosy is incurred, namely, slander, the shedding of blood, a vain oath, incest, arrogance, robbery and envy. (Arakhin 16a)
However, most Sages concur that the main cause for tsara'as was slander and gossip.
HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND THE PHYSICAL IMPACT OF OUR MORAL AND SPIRITUAL ACTIONS?
The Kabbalah teaches that the world you and I live in is a product of our perception of reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant probed this concept. He asked: Do we see reality or do we see our perception of reality? Kant's answer is that we do not...
In September of 2000, in the wake of what has become known as the second intifada, my unit was called up as part of the massive call up of reserves that occurred as fighting broke out all over the country. We had no idea how long we would be in for, which of course made the experience all the more difficult.
Our unit was given the task of patrolling the ‘border’ between Efrat, where I live, and Beit- Lechem (Bethlehem) and its environs, which lay a short ten-minute, walk to the North.
One afternoon, I got an urgent call from one of our lookouts that there seemed to be a large crowd gathering in one of the Arab villages near Efrat, and that it seemed they were surrounding a Jewish man with a gun.
Given the context of those days, a Jew caught in an Arab village amidst a mob, was certainly a life and death situation so we pulled out all the...
Why Eat Kosher?
The Talmud tells a story about the famed author of the Mishna, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. The rabbi was walking down the street one day, when a little calf ran up to him and hid under his cloak. Apparently, the calf had run away from the slaughterhouse.
The rabbi said to the calf, “Go back to be slaughtered, for this you have been created.” At this point, a Divine decree was made against him because he had not shown pity on the creature. As a result he become sick and suffered for many years, until one day he showed pity on a family of young rats and was suddenly healed.
We know that Judaism permits us to eat meat as long as the animal was slaughtered properly, so what did Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi do that was so wrong? He incorrectly said, “for this you were created.” The Talmud is teaching us that, contrary to his declaration, animals were not created for...
Screaming and yelling; and then then freezing air when my blanket was thrown off finally woke me up; it was 3 am and for some reason the light was on in our tent; we had seven minutes to get dressed in full uniform and be outside in perfect rows of threes or… there was no or. No one wanted to risk finding out what would happen if we were not standing at attention outside when the sergeant arrived.
We had finally been allowed at 1 am, to go to sleep after an incredibly long day in basic training, and for some reason we had been awoken again a mere two hours later; I was so tired I could barely stand. And then ‘Sergeant Itzik‘ showed up. It could not get any worse; he was a sadist, no doubt about it; we knew we were in trouble as soon as he opened his mouth, we just had no idea why.
“Did you...
