This week’s Torah portion speaks of the mysterious lesions that appeared on the skin of those who trafficked in gossip. Their punishment was at once severe and precise: they were cast into isolation for up to three weeks, until their affliction healed.
The Torah enumerates many forms of ritual impurity. Some …
Unpleasant
What is the difference between Torah truth and scientific truth? By science I mean every branch of human knowledge that isn’t Torah. One is pleasant the other is unpleasant.
The answer is best presented with a joke I’m sure you’ve heard. It’s about the Jew who was caught reading a Nazi …
Sunday: Its all in the Mind
There are two levels of prophecy. The higher level is divine revelation. The lower level is divine communication. Our sages taught that G-d does not reveal himself to prophets in the diaspora unless they first merited at least one revelation in the holy land. This …
A Custom Product
My earliest memories of the last day of Sukkot is of the market place set up in front of the large Synagogue of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Brooklyn, New York. All night long, the sidewalk at 770 Eastern Parkway was a teeming marketplace of willow sales.
“Five dollars a …
We usually talk about a leap of faith. Today, I want to discuss a much harder concept: a leap of trust.
The name of the Parshah we read this week is Chukat. There are three types of commandments: (A) Mishpatim, commandments that make sense to us. We would likely have drawn …
These past two days have been the most difficult for our people in the last fifty years. It was Simchat Torah, a time for rejoicing, yet it was a time of horror. Nearly a thousand members of our family were brutally murdered, more than a hundred were taken hostage, and …
