In a small village in Lithuania, a young boy named Berel received a bicycle as a gift. Berel loved his bike and drove it every day, including Shabbat. The Rabbi heard about this and announced that Berel should henceforth be referred to as Berel the goy—the non-Jew. Berel heard about …
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Moses appointed twelve emissaries to scout out the Holy Land and return with a report. The representative for the tribe of Ephraim was Moses’ primary disciple, Joshua. Until this time, the lad’s name was Oshua. But Moses added a letter to his name and called him Joshua.
Rashi, the famed eleventh …
Unhappy Giving
I have a confession. I can’t stand being thanked for giving charity. I just hate it when the person to whom I gave a dollar smiles and heaps lifelong blessings upon me. I usually make a dismissive gesture, wait till they walk away, heave a small sigh of relief …
The Million Dollar Question
Everyone wonders about this. Why do we rejoice with the Torah at the end of the High Holiday season if the Torah was given in the late spring, on Shavuot? Should we not dance and rejoice over the Torah on the day it was given?
The obvious answer …
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 …
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 …
