You Get Back What You Put In
The Joys of a Commandment-Driven Life
The Zohar, which is a Jewish mystical classic, written two thousand years ago, states that there will come a time when people will be performing tradition and rituals like cows eating grass.
Essentially, the cow chews its food, stores it and then chews its cud, thereby re-chewing the food, over and over again. The Zohar is using this metaphor as a symbol for something that is done mindlessly without intention or taste. In Jewish tradition, there is a concept called taamei mitzvos, which can be described as the "reason for the commandments." But taamei mitzvos can also mean the "taste of the commandments." In Hebrew, taam means both "taste" and "reason" — and there is definitely a connection between the two. Without understanding the reason behind the life of commandment it can become mindless and tasteless.
Imagine a man who observes Sabbath, but it has no meaning to him —...
(reprinted from 2005)
Theirs was a moment that captured the Nation. After over a year of speeches, talk shows, political debates, rallies, letters to politicians, bumper stickers and banners, it all came down to a small farming village a few Kilometers from the Gaza strip called Kfar Maimon.
On a hot summer’s day, beneath the blistering desert sun, fifty thousand protesters, desperate to stop, or at least delay what they view as a national tragedy, the abandonment of twenty-one towns and villages along the sea in the Gaza strip, squared off against no less than twenty thousand Israeli soldiers and policemen.
The Israeli government had cast the die, and the stakes were enormous. They could not afford to let tens of thousands of protesters enter the towns and villages of Gush Katif en masse, and the protesters knew it.
Whether they were right or wrong we will never know, but the assumption was that if fifty thousand Jews could swamp the...
What Do We Know?
Humble Words to Console
When we try to understand G-d, we face an inherent obstacle with the very process of knowing. When I attempt to know anything, I am the subject and the thing that I seek to know is the object. In addition, there must be some degree of distance and separation between the subject and the object. Your eye can see almost everything, but it cannot see itself. “Knowing” implies two separate entities: the knower and the known.
However, you cannot know G-d in this normative way, because G-d is the source of all knowing. G-d is the source of all consciousness. Your very ability to think comes from G-d, who is the source of all thinking. How can you think about the source of all thinking? How can your mind hope to comprehend the source and ground of all minds? Yet if you want to know G-d, then you must seek the source of all knowing....
Is there any comfort? It’s been fifteen years and many of us have moved on, since that terrible summer of 2006 and the Second Lebanon War. But for the families whose loved ones never returned, it is like yesterday, and the heroes whose larger-than-life stories fill our hearts, still occupy empty chairs and shattered dreams, as if they had only just walked out the door.
Such a hero was and is Michael Levin. Absolutely refusing to take no for an answer and determined to enlist in the IDF and fulfill his dream of becoming a paratrooper, he actually climbed in to the draft center through a second floor window to get his papers. (The enlistment officer told him he was sometimes responsible for ensuring draftees did not illegally get out of the army, but had never seen a recruit avoid the guards in order to get in to the army!)
When the second Lebanon War broke out Michael was actually on...
We Are Never Alone
Walking and Talking with the Divine
And in the wilderness where you have seen how that the LORD your G-d carried you as a man does bear his son in all the way that you went until you came into this place ----- Deuteronomy 1:31
Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you, G-d, are with me. ----Psalms 23
Really!!-- The Zohar Vol. 2 pg. 57
In the world at large, if your boss sends you on a mission, he generally stays at the office, while you go off to accomplish the assigned task. But that's not the case when G-d sends you on a mission. G-d comes along.
This is the meaning of the verse in Psalm 127: “If G-d doesn't build your house, your labor is for nothing.”
Now you might think that if G-d is going to build your house, why do you have to labor at all? The...
How did it come to this?
How could it be that a Former Israeli Chief Rabbi had been indicted for taking millions in bribes, and faces trial for numerous counts of bribery fraud and money laundering?
I am not commenting on the case itself, nor am I offering any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the former Chief Rabbi, as my information comes only from the media[1] which is not a court of law. But if a Chief Rabbi can be put on trial for bribery and fraud, something is obviously dreadfully wrong. If a Chief Rabbi can become corrupted, how can we avoid the same pitfalls? Is there a recipe for remaining true to one’s ethical principles?
This Shabbat we begin reading the fifth and final book of the Five Books of Moses, Sefer Devarim
(Deuteronomy). In this book Moshe gives his farewell soliloquy to the Jewish people as the first verse suggests:
“These are the words that Moshe spoke to the...
Making G-d's Will Ours
"Behold you have sinned against G-d. And you your sin will find you." ~~ Numbers 32:23
THE PROCESS OF 'I'-DENTIFYING
If G-d were the sun each of us would be a ray of His divine light. The goal of the spiritual disciplines of daily Torah (Bible) life - study, prayer, meditation, and the performance of mitzvas (religious duties; plural for mitzvah), is to serve G-d and, thereby, become one with our true essence. Through these practices we experience our self an aspect and individualized expression of the Timeless Universal Self - G-d.
The 20th century Kabbalist Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan explains in his book Inner Space that in order to feel this powerful truth, we must learn to disengage our inner self from its outer trappings. In other words, we have to get in touch with our soul as distinct from our persona, thoughts and feelings.
The goal of disengaging the self from the outer trappings is to realize...
The second of this week’s portions, Massei, begins by describing the many journeys of the Jewish people in the desert, on their way to entering the land of Israel. Describing each stop along the way, the Torah delineates no less than forty-two separate places the Jewish people passed through on their way to Israel.
From Ramses, the Egyptian suburb built by Jewish slaves, all the way to the plains of Moab on the banks of the Jordan River, the Torah takes the time to list each and every part of the Jewish journey from slavery to freedom, leaving us to wonder why so much space is devoted to a delineation of geographic progression. Why not just express that over forty years the Jews made it up from Egypt to the staging ground along the Jordan, from whence the entry to Israel would begin.
Why the need for so many ‘pit-stops’? In fact, the desert is all about space, and much less about...
Can You Forgive G-d?
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. ~~ Anne Frank
This imperfect world is the perfect place for a dynamic life filled with challenge, growth and love. That’s the way G-d planned it.
Here is what the Torah tells us: “In the beginning G- d created heaven and earth. And the earth was chaos and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep....And G-d said: ‘Let there be light’: and there was light....G-d divided the light from the darkness. G-d called the light ‘Day’ and the darkness He called ‘Night’...Let there be firmament in the midst of the water...Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear...G-d called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called Seas, etc.’ (Genesis 1:2-10)
G-d intentionally created the world in a state of chaos, void, and darkness. This...
I can still remember the exact moment and his words, thirty years later. Rav Aharon Lichtenstein z”tzl, our Rosh yeshiva ( head of Yeshivat Har Etzion where I was studying) was giving his advanced Talmud lecture to a group of about sixty students and as he was wont to do, looked up from his books scanning the students, and you could feel the tension in the air.
Most students, myself included, were terrified of this moment. The word genius does not do justice to who Rav Lichtenstein was; beyond being one of the greatest rabbinic leaders and Talmudic minds of our generation, he was uncompromising in his pursuit of truth and his determination to arrive at a full and accurate understanding of every topic and every question we studied. Often, he would call on a student to read which would usually result in a series of questions that tested the students’ knowledge of the topic at hand and put him...
