Articles in Elul
Is Your Love for G-d Actionable?
Minutes of formal meetings always end with a list of actionable items. Committees love to talk and to hear themselves talk, but if the discussions don’t produce actionable items, they are not useful.
The same is true about love. Loving someone in theory or loving the idea of someone is not …
Tomorrow Is Too Late
A good friend recently lost his father. I meant to call him as soon as I heard, but he was sitting Shivah in Mexico. So, I told myself I would call him after Shivah. A week passed, and I was going to call him that day, but I developed a …
Improve Your Eye Sight
Every year, on the last Shabbat before Elul—the final month of the year, we read a Torah portion that begins with the word reeh—see. The passage reads, “See, I set before you a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you fulfill the commandments of G-d your G-d that …
It Is Time for Your Spiritual ECG
After several bouts of dizziness and lightheadedness, I was booked for an ECG and given a Holter Monitor to wear for 72 hours. This was my first experience with an ultrasound of my heart, and I had all kinds of questions. I hope I wasn’t a nuisance that morning, but …
A Tale of Two Desires
Life is a tale of two desires. Sometimes, I think I know what I want, and I think that if I only had that, I would be happy. Then the darndest thing happens. I get what I thought would make me happy, and I am still not happy. What does …
With G-d’s Help
The Torah tells us to appoint judges and guardians at the gates of our cities. The city’s gathering place was usually at the gates, making it the fitting place for the courthouse and police station. However, Jewish scholarship has long maintained that there is a parallel teaching here. We are …
A Month of Refuge
Refuge is discussed often in the Torah. When a Jew killed another inadvertently, he was required to flee to a city of refuge, where he was given asylum from the victim’s relatives. These cities were established throughout the land of Israel to ensure that inadvertent killers had sufficient and easy …
Re’e: The Pivot
In the course of life, there are always moments of pivot. A moment when we recognize that we have strayed from the proper path, and we pivot—reverse course and head in the opposite direction. The moment of pivot is, at the risk of sounding cliché, pivotal. It isn’t merely a …
