I write these words from somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, as I return home to New Jersey from a week-long trip to Israel. But am I really returning home? On the one hand the answer is a resounding yes. I long to reunite with my wonderful family back in NJ, can’t wait to get back …
“Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it” (Koheles 11:1). In this week’s Torah portion, we find the Jewish people, in their fortieth year of wandering through the desert, arriving at an area called Kadesh and realizing that there is no water to be found. They are (understandably) not …
From the sea they didn’t want to leave, from the mountain they couldn’t get away fast enough. The Torah tells us that after the miraculous splitting of the sea, all the Egyptian gold and jewelry was washed ashore, and the Jewish people were hesitant to lose the opportunity to gather it in — Moshe had …
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” Rarely is a slogan so well known, yet so profoundly untrue. As recent tragic cases of bullying and cyber-bullying have shown, words, taunts, and names can not only hurt, they can literally kill. In the words of contemporary R&B artist Dave Barnes: …
What is the most difficult mitzvah in the Torah? Fasting on Yom Kippur? No Oreos for eight days on Passover? No texting for 25 hours on Shabbos? Surprisingly, some commentaries say that the most difficult is the one, found in this week’s Torah portion, commanding us to rejoice on the festivals. Because happiness is serious business, with …
Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz recently penned an open “letter to Hashem (G-d)”, asking why we pray for a third Temple that will include animal sacrifice. I will be bold enough to assume that he has not yet received what the Kabbalists refer to as a piska min shimaya – a miraculous letter from Heaven – in response. But that’s …
“What should a person do to live? He should kill himself! And what should a person do to die? He should enliven himself!” This enigmatic Talmudic passage begs for interpretation. Life is death and death is life? Were the Rabbis giving suicide advice or encouraging a morbid or nihilistic outlook on life, G-d forbid? Of …
What makes YOU special? What are YOUR talents? What makes YOU unique? Do you dance? Sing? Read Morse Code? Play the ukulele? Ride a unicycle? Are you athletic? A tech genius? Gorgeous? Fabulously wealthy? The truth of the matter is that despite what we try to portray (or more accurately, fake) on our social media accounts, …
Where in the Torah is Haman, the wicked villain of the Purim story, mentioned? How about Esther, the heroine of the story? Although the Purim story took place many hundreds of years after the Torah was completed, Jewish tradition takes it as axiomatic that everything, past and present, and future, minor and major, has some …
It is a fundamental principle of the Jewish faith that G-d’s constant presence fills all of existence. Whether one prefers the terminology of the Kabbalists that there is “no space void of Him,” of the philosophers who say that G-d is the “First Cause” and “Ongoing Sustainer,” or of the popular children’s song that declares, “Hashem …