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In September of 2000, after the Arabs renewed the fighting in Israel over Rosh Hashanah, my unit was called up in the middle of the night as part of the massive call up of reserves that occurred as fighting broke out all over the country. It was the first (and I hope the last) time I was ever called up on a ...
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. (Exodus 31: 14-17)
Most people know what you don...
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. 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...
Is G-d Just a Cosmic Party Pooper?
How to Find Our Mission in Life
I recall a cute comic strip depicting Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments written in stone. ...
Friday night. The sun has long since set, dark clouds hide the stars, and the wind is howling off the Shouf mountain range in central Lebanon.
I had managed to quietly sing the Kabbalat Shabbat service, while en-route to the ambush site, and even pray the evening service while in the staging ground, before giving my men a final inspection, but I had no idea what to do about Kiddush. In such situations we usually ate from our packs, one or two at a time, and we had a system to ensure that we didn...
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...
It is hard to imagine, looking down at the dry, windswept desert floor far below, what it must have been like two thousand years ago, to be a Jewish rebel soldier atop the isolated fortress of Masada. What kept you going, as you gazed down at the might of three full Roman Legions, all bent on your destruction?
In the year 70 CE, with the Temple (the Beit HaMikdash) in flames, Jerusalem breached and destroyed, hundreds of thousands of Jews dead, and hundreds of thousands more sold into slavery, the Romans announced that the great revolt had finally been put down. They even minted a coin to communicate their victory to the entire Roman Empire. The coin, known as ...
