It was late in the day, and dark had fallen; people were headed home after a long work day, and Theodore was headed back to his hotel room with a few hours work ahead of him on the portable typewriter he had brought with him from Vienna to cover the events of the trial. There was much to write about, and the events of the day had made him extremely uncomfortable, though he could not quite put his finger on it. He was covering the espionage trial of a young Captain in the French army’s staff headquarters accused of passing top secret information to the Germans.
The winds of war were blowing once again in Europe in December 1894, and tensions were high. All eyes were on the trial, which Theodore Herzl’s paper had dispatched him to cover. The French had suspected for some time that there was a high placed leak in the French army staff and recent events...
To Pray the Jewish Way
At first glance prayer seems to be about whining and begging G-d, "Please heal this person ... please bring me my soul-mate ... please help my business, etc." One could mistakenly think that G-d is holding out on us and gets pleasure watching us grovel.
When we are faced with some very serious problems, it is customary to ask others to join together in our prayers. What is that all about? It seems as if we hope to move G-d through force: "G-d, if you don't respond to my prayers, then I will recruit through the e-mail thousands of others to pray."
Do we think these strategies really work? What are we actually doing here? If G-d is all knowing then why am I telling Him my problems? He already knows them. If G-d is good, then why am I asking for Him to change my situation? Obviously, whatever happens to me is for my best and I...
It was finally the day; after over a year of training I was finally about to get my bars and join the very special family of IDF Officers. My parents had flown in from the US for the occasion along with my younger brother and were on their way down for the ceremony, which was a couple of hours away, deep in the desert on the Shizaphon Armored Corps base.
We were being inspected by the base sergeant-major an hour before the ceremony when we would be receiving our officer’s bars at long last. The Army Chief of Staff (Moshe Levy) would be attending so everything had to be perfect. He stopped in front of me and, looking down, saw my Tzitzit (religious fringes) hanging down to my knees and snapped an order: “tuck those in immediately! I had better not see those hanging out during the ceremony!”
To be honest, I don’t normally wear my tzitzit out; they have been wrapped...
What You See Is What You Get
"Daddy, where is G-d?"
"Son, wherever you let Him in."
— Attributed to Rebbe Pinchas of Koretz
How do we open our souls' eyes to let G-d in?
The Kabbalah says, "There is no king without a nation." This point requires deep exploration. It may make sense that, in the human world, a king is dependent on having subjects who acknowledge his sovereignty. The last Emperor of China ceased to be emperor when there were no longer people who bowed when he entered the room. Even after the Communist government had exiled him, as long as people recognized him and acknowledged him as their sovereign, he was, in a very real sense, still a king, albeit without the power to rule. But G-d is reality, so how can G-d be dependent on human acknowledgment.
The world that you and I live in is a product of our perception of reality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant probed this concept. He...
It should have been one of the most powerful and exciting days of my life; I can still see all the guys, in their dress uniforms, preparing for the final ceremony; instead, it was one of the most depressing. After eight of the longest, most grueling months I had ever experienced, I was three days away from receiving my officer’s bars. A month-long test (navigation, desert survival, weapons proficiency etc.) to enter infantry officer training, followed by nearly four months of infantry officer’s training in the desert, best described as hell on earth, and then the most difficult four months I have ever experienced; tank officer’s course. Averaging three hours sleep a day for 18 weeks, under intense pressure; this was where tank commanders were trained by the IDF to become platoon leaders.
And then, three days before I was meant to receive my bars, I was told by the battalion commander that for me, there wasn’t going to be...
Funny. You Don't Look Religious
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
I once was hired to organize educational programs for a large Jewish youth group in the United States. To overcome any possible stigmas associated with the word "rabbi" and to encourage the kids to relate to me without preconceived notions, I asked the executives to introduce me as just David Aaron, not as Rabbi David Aaron. They respected my request, but I was dismayed to read in their newsletter the following announcement: "We want to welcome a new member to our staff: David Aaron, our Judaism specialist."
This sounded even worse! It made Judaism sound like a rare disease. Don't we go to specialists when we have a problem our general practitioner cannot treat? What do you do with a Judaism specialist? Do you come to him and say, "I've got this problem with Jewish guilt. Do you have a cure, Judaism specialist?" I was in trouble before I even started. I didn't want...
Many years ago, a fellow walked into a class I was giving (in a co-ed Jewish outreach program) with his girlfriend, and something about him immediately caught my attention. The class was on the Holocaust and the challenge of our relationship with G-d in a post Holocaust world; halfway through the class he raised his hand and when he spoke, I realized what it was that had caught my attention: he was German, with a strong German accent.
He was not Jewish, though he had a Jewish girlfriend who had joined him, and they ended up signing on for a three-week program we were running in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Eventually, I found out his story: He was from Munich and was in Israel on a summer volunteering program. A year earlier he had been going through a box in his grandparents’ home and accidentally found his grandfather’s Nazi membership card. This led him to an eventual confrontation with his grandfather. And the...
Why is Life So Difficult?
Making peace with our battle
In this week's portion, Jacob asks for peace and relaxation, but G-d had another plan.
“Jacob settled (down) in the land of his father's dwellings, in the Land of Caanan.”
- Genesis 37:2
The foremost commentator, Rashi, explains: Jacob wanted to settle down in tranquility but then the ordeal of his son Joseph (sale into slavery) fell upon him. The righteous seek to dwell in tranquility but G-d says 'Is it not enough for the righteous what has been prepared for them (reward) in the World to Come that they need to seek tranquility also in this world!'"
Some people turn to G-d and religion, hoping to find refuge from all the turbulence of life, from doubt, from inner conflicts and mental turmoil. They want instant inner peace, spiritual contentment, and tranquility for their troubled souls.
According to Kabbalah, that is not the purpose of life on earth. In fact, it is just the opposite. We have...
The vision of what it would mean to command men, was evaporating before my eyes. Two weeks after completing IDF Officer’s course, I had been looking forward to the challenges of mission control, decisions under extreme stress, and leading by example, but these two young conscripts, one of whom had only recently completed his eight months of basic infantry and tank crew training, presented me with nothing of the sort.
They were arguing over an ammo cartridge, each claiming it to be his, and with a gear inspection coming up in the morning, this somehow became significant as neither wanted to fail the inspection.
I had made the mistake of telling my squad, on the first day I met them, that they should feel free to share with me any problem they had, no matter how small, and I was fast regretting the decision. It wasn’t even a case of one claiming the other stole it, rather, the cartridge had...
Real Love Means Embracing Conflict
The Secret of Jacob
The Torah (Bible) teaches us that Jacob went to the house Laban, his uncle, and dwelt there for many years. He married Rachel and Leah, Laban's daughters, and had eleven sons there. After years of struggling with Laban constantly deceiving him he finally left to return home and face Esau who hated him. In the middle of the night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two handmaids and his eleven sons, and sent them across the Jabbok River shallows. After he had taken them and sent them across, he also sent across his possessions. Jacob alone remained on the other side of the river. It was there that the famous "stranger" appeared and wrestled with him until just before daybreak:
When the stranger saw that he could not defeat him, he touched the upper joint of Jacob's thigh. Jacob's hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him.
"Let me leave!" said...
