The Prophet Powered Life
“I (G-d) will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto you (Moses); and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (Deut. 18: 18)
Through using methods such as meditation and music, the prophets of ancient Israel were able to induce altered states of consciousness in which they experienced a direct revelation from G-d. Sometimes they received a message for the entire world.
When such messages had eternal significance, they were recorded and later incorporated into the Hebrew Bible. Only fifteen prophets’ revelations are included, with another dozen or so prophets mentioned by name in the various Biblical books. The Talmud, however, tells us that there were as many prophets in ancient Israel as Israelites who came out of Egypt during the Exodus, in other words, approximately three million.
The Talmud also tells us that after the Temple was destroyed, the period of...
Is it possible to be truly impartial in life? I once heard a story from Rabbi Abraham Twerski, told to him as a boy by his father. (Published in Rabbi Twerski’s Generation to Generation.)
The great Rebbe of Berditchev, Rav Levi Yitzchak, was once siting in a Din Torah (a Rabbinical Court case) as one of the Judges hearing the case. After several days of hearing the litigants, he suddenly stood up and announced he was recusing himself. He gave no reason for his abrupt decision, which obviously meant the litigants would have to find a new Rabbinic Court (Beit Din).
A few days later, after Shabbat, the Rebbe of Berditchev called the other Rabbis who had been hearing the case with him together to explain.
“At a certain point during the proceedings, I found myself inextricably leaning towards one of the litigants and became aware that I was losing my objectivity. I could not understand why this was so, but try as...
A Short-Cut to a Life of Blessings
You get what you give
“Thou shalt not harden thy heart, nor shut thy hand from your needy brother; surely open thy hand to him.”
— Deut. 15:7-8
Is there a short-cut to the spiritual wealth of life? One of the most powerful and immediate ways to connect the circuit of life, and let the blessings flow is Tzedaka, that is charity.
The Talmud teaches: "Tzedaka saves from death." When we need an incredible influx of life force — because we are facing impending physical death or impending spiritual death, the act of giving to charity can be one of the most powerful antidotes.
As proof for the statement, the Talmud tells the incredible story of the daughter of the famous Rabbi Akiva, who lived some 2,000 years ago. A star-gazer told Rabbi Akiva that his daughter would die on the day of her wedding. Rabbi Akiva replied that just because it is written in the stars...
Thousands of feet up in free fall, travelling over 100 miles an hour, Yosef Goodman had only seconds to make a decision. His parachute had become tangled in his commander’s chute above him, preventing both of their parachutes from opening. They were probably twenty second away from certain death, and none of the backup measures were working. On a training jump in the IDF’s elite Maglan paratrooper unit, they were testing a new form of gliding parachute, but something had gone terribly wrong. With such a short time frame, and no other possible solution, Yosef, over the protesting screams of his commander, calmly pulled out his army knife and sliced through the parachute chords connecting their chutes, saving the life of his Commander but dooming himself to certain death as he hurtled towards the ground at close to 130 miles per hour.
A subsequent investigation determined that his decision was the correct one, and the only way to allow at least...
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 —...
(from 2014)
Silence; total and absolute silence; no one moves; eight soldiers in the middle of the night, actively listening, straining for the slightest sound that might signify something out of the ordinary; a velcro patch; a clink of metal, the sound of a body moving on earth, an AK-47 machine gun slowly being cocked or, worst of all, the pin of a grenade being pulled ….
That was how ambushes always began; Israeli soldiers are trained to work, especially at night, in silence, learning to pick up the sounds one often might take for granted; sounds which, if heard, can make all the difference between life and death.
How many thousands of soldiers, in how many trenches back alleys and abandoned houses in Aza had to stop to listen these past weeks?
And in this war civilians too were on the front lines, ever listening for the wail of a siren signaling incoming rockets, giving them scant seconds to make it to shelter…
This...
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....
I can close my eyes and I’m there: one of the most intense moments of my entire life; a moment straight out of Shakespeare: full of sound and fury, but signifying … everything.
Bullets flying everywhere, smoke grenades making it difficult to see; M-203 grenade launcher and Mag heavy machine gun doing their merciless work tearing up the top of the hill we were running towards; not sure what is really waiting for us on top of that hill, wanting so much to get there and yet, not wanting to get there, in the worst way….
Leading men, but to what? Does everyone walk down off this hill at the end of the day? Did we; did I, do everything I was supposed to do? Had I made any mistakes we would realize later were the reason for catastrophe? Would there be a catastrophe? Would I even be there to ‘realize later’?
And then, in the middle of it all, my gun...
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...
Visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, and wander off to the paths behind the plaza dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and you will come across an actual cattle car, one of the many used by the Nazis to transport hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the infamous concentration and death camps across Poland.
Engraved on the bannister opposite the box car is a powerful poem, (by Dan Pagis) found written in pencil in a railway-car:
Here in this carload
I am Eve
With Abel my son
If you see my other son
Cain son of man
Tell him I…
Whenever I see this poem, in that place, I am always moved by the abrupt ending of Eve’s (mother of humanity) words: what would she say if she were able to finish her sentence? Why does she not finish her thought? What goes through the mind of Eve along with her son Abel (as in Cain and Abel) on...
