The Torah teaches that every mitzvah is vital, yet all of Judaism rests upon a single stem— faith in G-d and in the truth of the Torah. If that stem remains alive, everything else can grow from it.
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Wisdom is wasted on fools. If you give wisdom to a fool, declared our sages, he will sully it with his folly.[1] On the surface, this makes little sense: if fools don’t have wisdom, it can’t be wasted on them. But there is a deeper meaning here. Intellectual wisdom is …
Jewish Surprise
As the Jewish word recoiled from the murder of three Jewish teenagers in Israel, Jews the world over were shocked by news of a Palestinian youth’s murder in Jerusalem. But with the shock came deep disappointment at the response of World leaders, who condemned Jews for this murder even …
Four Schools of Thought
As our ancestors stood poised before the Red Sea, an argument broke out and in true Jewish fashion there was more then one school of thought. The Midrash describes the four different schools of thought that prevailed. (a) Fatalism – Let’s drown ourselves in the sea (b) …
Two Subjects
The instruction to keep Shabbat appears in the Torah[1] immediately before the story of the golden Calf. On the face of it the two subjects are unrelated, Shabbat is a celebration of G-d and worship of the Golden Calf was an act of apostasy. Yet their juxtaposition must be …
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 …
