Category: Chumash Vayikra

(reprinted from 2016) Visit the Synagogue of the Maharal (Rav Meir Leibush Lowe) of Prague (known as the Altneu Shul, in Prague), and you will immediately notice its most distinctive feature: with the exception of some Hebrew letters very high up near the ceiling, the walls are completely blank; devoid of any art or decorations. Standing in stark contrast to all the other Jewish Synagogues of Prague (not to mention all over Europe) this detail demands explanation.  There is an intensity to this shul with its history of hundreds of years; perhaps this is why:  On April 17, 1389, Easter Sunday, a Priest apparently leading a procession past the Jewish community of Prague was hit with sand thrown by a few Jewish children. (It may be some sand kicked up by a game they were playing landed on the Host (the Eucharistic wafer representing their Lord.)  Claiming they had denigrated Christianity and desecrated the Host, his incitement led the clergy to encourage the mobs...

Recently, on a Pesach program, an elderly gentleman named Yaakov Gross asked a few of us if he could speak before the Yizkor service. He wanted to share the story of his bar mitzvah in Bergen Belsen. This is the story he shared: In January of 1945 the Nazis were still trying to convince the world that they were treating the Jews well. So, they invited a delegation of the Red Cross to visit the camp. As part of the ‘show’ that they prepared, they ‘invited’ a few of the boys from the kinder-lager, the children’s’ barracks, to celebrate their bar mitzvah in Bergen Belsen; true story. And for the occasion, they erected a platform (read: bimah) in the middle of the square where roll calls and hangings were normally held. And, no less incredible, they secured a Sefer Torah for the event! And so, young Yaakov Gross, who was thirteen, along with five other boys, ascended to receive an Aliyah...

Achieving Sacred Selfishness Happiness through holiness I had a student that once came into my office and said, "My father who passed away was an atheist and a fantastic human being. He was such a moral human being. He was such a good human being. I don't believe that had he been a believer, he would have been any better. He was the epitome of being a good person. So I have a problem with Torah because I really don't believe that it would have made a difference." So I told him that it isn't the goal of Torah to merely become a moral person. There is a lot more to it. Morality is important, but morality is a stage in the journey. The destination is holiness — being whole. Morality is an aspect of that, but it is not that. So I asked him, "Do you think your father might have been more holy?" That shocked him, he never even thought about holiness. What...

Some time ago, after a lecture on the ethical challenges of the seventh commandment (“Thou shalt not steal”), I was approached by a fellow from Vienna who was a Holocaust survivor.  “Why do you assume stealing is always wrong?” asked the fellow, “Sometimes, it is even an obligation.” “I always had a strong desire to take things, and I never understood why,” he continued,  “And it wasn’t that I necessarily needed the things I took, I just loved the prospect of being able to steal things out from under people’s noses. I became quite good at it, though my conscience always bothered me. Often, I was able to resist the temptation to take things that weren’t mine, but it was always a struggle. I often wondered why G-d had burdened me with this particular challenge. I knew it was wrong to steal, and never rationalized theft; I just loved the ‘thrill of the take’. Why did G-d create me with this challenge? It...

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 the trick. The real...

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: R. 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...

In 1948, things did not look promising for the Jews.  The Arab armies of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and forces from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria prepared to attack the newly declared State of Israel as soon as the British pulled out in May of 1948, vowing to push the Jews into the sea.  In Tzfat, where 80,000 Arabs surrounded approximately 3,000 Jews living in the Jewish quarter, the Jews were braced for the worst. One night, a few weeks before the pullout, the British told the Jewish community they were leaving Tzfat in the morning and had reliable intelligence that the Arabs were planning a massive attack immediately following their departure. Predicting a massacre, they urged the Jews to leave the city, even making room for them in the convoy. With eight hours’ notice, they assumed the Jews would panic, but not a single Jew left the city.  Sure enough, as the empty British trucks pulled out of Tzfat, thousands of Arabs armed...

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...

Decision Moments: What Makes a Person a Leader  Explosions; gunfire; the sounds of battle; ‘lashab’: (lechima be’shetach banui) urban warfare: fought in close quarters; no place to hide, nowhere to run, very little room to maneuver, and no time to think.  There are many things the army teaches you; especially in officer’s training. One of the most valuable is the ability to make decisions often of life or death in seconds. Such was the moment Lieutenant Eitan (full name with-held for security purposes) of the elite recon unit of the Givati Infantry Brigade found himself in a few summer’s ago in Gaza.  The point reconnaissance squad (Palsar Givati), led by Company Commander Benayah Sarel, had just located the entrance to a Hamas tunnel, on the edge of Rafiach in the Gaza strip. Almost immediately the men came under heavy fire from Hamas terrorists who most probably had been lying in wait, waiting for a patrol to come across the exposed tunnel.  In the ensuing...