Category: Isralight Blog

I can still see the terrified look on his face, as we both realized, in the same moment, we had been set up.  We were in the midst of a month-long stint of IDF army reserve duty in Ramallah, during the first intifada, where daily stone throwing and Molotov cocktails had become the norm. We were into the second week of our tour, and the frustration had already begun to set in, particularly on this particular stretch of road alongside El Bireh; a ‘refugee camp’ on the outskirts of Ramallah. Every day while on jeep patrol we could get calls that rocks had been thrown by Arab youths, at Israeli cars driving along the road, but by the time we got there, all we would find was the rocks strewn on the road, often along with shattered glass, and the perpetrators long gone. Until this particular afternoon; We happened to be only a few hundred yards down the road when the...

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...

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 ten 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...

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...

Dedicated to the memory of Binyamin ben Daniel ve’Yehudit; Benji Hillman, h”yd, of blessed memory, a Company Commander in Golani’s elite Egoz unit who fell in battle in Lebanon ten years ago. It seems like yesterday…. Sleep; such a precious commodity, and so hard to come by those days; I remember it was a glorious day, that Shabbat morning, and truth be told, if I had been left to my own devices, I probably would have slept all day. But he, of the mischievous eyes and a shy smile, could not leave well enough alone. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his older sister Abigail, who could not have been more than six, and they were impatiently waiting for me to wake up so I could pad into the kitchen and reach high in the cupboard where their mother kept the Shabbos treats…. Even then, there was no stopping Benji when he was on a mission….  So many...