Articles in Free Choice
Balak: Stolen Waters
King Solomon famously wrote, “Stolen waters are sweeter.”[1] By this, he meant that the moment something is forbidden to us, we lust after it. Not because we like it or enjoy it, but because we can’t have it. It is a quirk of human nature to be titillated by the …
Vayigash: Stuck in Lockdown?
Lockdown is a word with which we have sadly become all too familiar. Many countries around the world have experienced a second wave of COVID and implemented various forms of lockdown. Ontario in Canada just announced its own lockdown and as I write I am looking at 28 long days …
Mishpatim: We Matter
When you read the Torah portion that we chant in the synagogue this week, you wonder why G-d even cares. Does the Creator of heaven and earth have nothing better to do with His time than devise laws about the differences between liabilities carried by paid and unpaid custodians? Does …
Vayigash: Debt of Kindness
Kindness is something that is usually given out of generosity. We don’t usually think of kindness as a debt. Yet, sometimes it is a debt. For example, if someone treats you kindly, they deserve to be treated kindly in return; you owe them a debt of kindness. If you owe …
Vayetze: Find Your Well
Find your well is a mission to live by. Once we figure how to find it, it can be the answer to life’s moral challenges.
You see, there are three kinds of places, the city, the field, and the desert. The city is where people live. Wild animals are not usually …
Vayera: The Moral Sense
The moral sense is the innate human conviction that kindness and fairness are good, and cruelty is bad. We can’t explain why this is so, but if anyone would claim that cruelty is good and challenge us to explain why it is bad, we would throw up our hands in …
Lech L’cha: True Faith
True faith is not easy to come by. Abraham possessed true faith, but most people in his generation were incapable of true faith until a particular event occurred that made it possible to achieve true faith.
Let me tell you two stories about Abraham:[1]
The first story: At the age of three, …
Bereshit: Human Centric
For millennia it was believed that the world is human centric, but science has slowly chipped away at this assumption.
From the day the first astronomer focused his gaze on the distant stars, humans postulated that our planet sits at the center of the universe and serves as the focal point …
