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In the IDF, when an officer is due to receive his second bar, making him a full lieutenant, (usually after a year of combat service as an officer in the field), he has to pass a test on the military judicial code. Basically, once he attains this rank he may be asked to preside over a military court-martial in the field, and as such must know the military judicial procedures that are involved.  One of the sections of the military code dealt with the issue of when an officer was required to recuse him or herself from a case and it was fascinating to me to note that the Torah is much stricter with regards to such rules. I recall there was a soldier who fell asleep on guard duty while we were in Lebanon. It was not an uncommon occurrence, given the extreme conditions we were in, and how exhausted we all were, and one might expect leniency and...

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...

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 —...

Some years ago, I received this fascinating story* via e- mail: At the turn of the twentieth century, two of the wealthiest and most famous men in America was a pair of Jewish brothers named Nathan and Isidor Straus. Owners of R.H. Macy's Department Store and founders of the A&S (Abraham & Straus) chain, the brothers were multimillionaires, renowned for their philanthropy and social activism. In 1912, the brothers and their wives were touring Europe, when Nathan, the more ardent Zionist of the two, impulsively said one day, "Hey, why don't we hop over to Palestine?" Israel wasn't the tourist hotspot then that it is today. Its population was ravaged by disease, famine, and poverty; but the two had a strong sense of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren, and they also wanted to see the health and welfare centers they had endowed with their millions. However, after a week spent touring, Isidor Straus had had enough. "How many camels, hovels, and yeshivas...

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....

Lebanon was a most unlikely place for a halachic discourse (a dialogue involving a complex legal question of Jewish tradition), but that had never stopped Dani before, and this was no exception. Anyone who ever served in Lebanon, particularly in the springtime, would be familiar with the beautiful cherry orchards that dotted the countryside, and this was equally true for the area that Dani's unit was patrolling. Ripe on the trees, no fruit ever tasted as sweet to me as the cherries you could pick and savor from the trees that dotted the area of Lebanese no-man's land the IDF patrolled in the spring of 1984. During the long hours of patrol, the fruit offered a brief respite from the grueling duties Israeli soldiers had to shoulder day by day. But to Dani, the readily available fruit presented an entirely different image, or rather, a challenge. Whose fruit were these? Where were the Arab owners who had planted and maintained...

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 their way to the slaughter?...