On Friday, May 16, Jews around the world will celebrate Lag Ba’omer. Lag Ba’omer is a joyous day. In Israel, thousands flock to Miron, the burial site of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the second-century Talmudic sage who passed away on this day.
Rabbi Shimon was the first to publicize and record …
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 …
Not A Simple Pain
In discussing the subject of “Tzoraas: Biblical leprosy,” our sages explained that it was not a physical ailment but a manifestation of a spiritual malaise. The Jewish body is intimately linked with the soul and when the soul is ailing the body responds accordingly.
The spiritual ailment of …
Silver Coins
This essay is about silver coins because we will reference it twice in this week’s Torah reading.
The first reference is in the ordinary Torah reading where an accounting is given for the contributions made to the tabernacle. The Torah informs us precisely how much silver was raised and what …
We are in a time of year called the three weeks. During this time, Jerusalem was sacked twice, once by the Babylonians circa 420 BCE and again by the Romans in 69 CE. Each time, our enemies struck directly at the Jewish heart by destroying the Temple. The Babylonians destroyed …
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 …
