Category: featured content

(click here for print version) 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. ...

(click here for print version) The year, 2003. The sound of the train pulling in to the Kfar Saba station filled the air on another beautiful afternoon, as passengers made ready to embark on their journey...home? Hundreds of people getting on and off a second train across the platform, beneath the beautiful new glass and stone ceiling of the modern, new station just opened only two weeks before. An innocent scene, full of hellos and goodbyes, and the promise and potential of beginnings. At the entrance to the crowded station any number of people coming in and going out, young and old, passing through the automatic doors, beneath the alert eyes of the security guard who, like thousands of other security guards across Israel, holds the line in the war against terror. One teenager, a boy who looks like any other boy, with spiked, blond punk-style hair, perhaps on his way to a night out with friends, walks in the middle...

(click here for print version) Wonder Bread (excerpt from Inviting G-d In) During the seven days of Passover we are required to eat only matza...

(click here for print version)...

(click here for print version) 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 ...

(click here for print version) 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...

There are some lessons you learn the hard way, and they are never forgotten. In Infantry Officer...