Identity Crisis is a Gift:
Awakening to the Role and Goal of Your Soul
Kirk Douglas, the actor, once told me that when people compliment him on a performance, they often tell him how great he was at losing himself in the part. "You just became Vincent Van Gogh! You were so wonderful." And he answers, "No, you lost yourself in the part. I can't afford to lose myself in the part. I have to pay attention to the director, to the cues. I have to hit the mark just right so the action is in the camera frame. I must stay aware that I am an actor playing a role."
A good actor plays his part, but he doesn't get lost in his part. He can't even begin to think he is the character he is playing. On the other hand, he still embraces that role with a tremendous amount of love and gives everything he's got to play his...
Zvika had just been given two weeks leave; Having been accepted to the prestigious Company Commanders course, he had been given two weeks leave and was at home on his Kibbutz Lochamei Hageta’ot near Haifa when, at exactly 2pm on the afternoon of October 6th, 1973, the Yom Kippur War began. Nearly two thousand Syrian tanks poured across the border in the Golan Heights while hundreds of thousands of Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal in the Sinai, and Israeli troops, suffering unspeakable losses, scrambled to try and hold back the onslaught.
Twenty-one year old Captain Zvika Greengold, a tank officer, sensed how bad things were and frantically started making his way across the country to the Golan Heights where he understood the situation was dire; Syrian tanks were just a few hours away from Tel Aviv and there was not much standing in their way.
Arriving at the IDF Command center in Nafach on the Golan, a couple of...
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...
There are few things as painful as the desire to give birth when faced with the inability to do so. Countless treatments, endless tears, hopes dashed and dreams unrealized; even with all that modern medicine has to offer, sometimes, for reasons we will never understand, a woman, no matter how hard she tries never succeeds in becoming pregnant… But I once met a woman who took all that to an entirely different level…
We were halfway through the afternoon Mincha service when one of our students came over to me and clearly wanted to ask me something. Normally I don’t speak until the service is over, having learned there are very few things in life that cannot wait five minutes. But something suggested this was an exception to the rule. As it turned out, there was a woman in the back of our Beit Midrash who had walked in and started wailing; literally. She was actually standing at the entrance to...
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...
The thundering sounds of artillery fire echoed through the valleys beneath the Golan Heights and across the Sea of Galilee. All across the Northern border with Syria, civilians were huddled in their bunkers and bomb shelters, wondering when this latest round of violence would abate.
On the face of it, this was nothing new; for nineteen years the Israeli citizens of the North had endured an almost daily barrage of shellfire from the Syrian guns perched in the Heights above. In fact, an average of one thousand shells a day fell on the Kibbutzim, towns, and villages within range of the Golan, when the Syrian army had control of the Heights.
But this time it was different. It was June of 1967, and Israel had finally decided enough was enough. Gambling that the Syrians would never expect a surprise attack on such strategically superior positions, the Israelis were climbing the Golan in an attempt to remove, once and for all, the Syrian...
Chanukah: The Light of Love
Most people who have read a little about Kabbalah probably know that this mystical tradition of Judaism talks a great deal about light – what it calls the Endless Light. The Kabbalah teaches that through our actions we draw and increase this Divine Light into the world or diminish its presence.
For a long time, I had difficulty in understanding this Kabbalistic metaphor until one day it all came together. As a way of explaining this difficult concept, let me ask you to imagine for a moment that you have walked into a magic store. And there, they are selling special flashlights equipped with magic lights of different kinds. For example, you can buy the light of science, and when you point that flashlight at your hand, you see not a hand, but cells and blood vessels and tendons and ligaments. Or you can buy the light of art, and you point that flashlight at your hand,...
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....
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...
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...
