בס”ד Postcard from Israel Mark Twain famously observed the striking dissonance between the enormity of Israel’s sheer metaphysical significance, and the minuteness of its physical scope, by saying: “Israel has more history than geography.” Being in Israel this week, I was struck once more by the astute nature of this brilliant observation. Ehud Barak […]

בס”ד   Broken Glass The Jewish world commemorates tonight the 80th anniversary of what came to be known historically as “Kristallnacht,” the night of the broken glass, in which the most widespread and lethal pogrom of Nazi Germany against its Jews took place in 1938. When Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish thinker, wrote about the Holocaust, […]

בס”ד The Veracity of Torah Philosopher Immanuel Kant famously spoke of the “crooked timber of humankind.”  By this, Kant meant to say that we mortals are akin to a warped piece of wood, or a trunk of a tree, that could never be completely and fully straightened out, and rendered perfectly and utterly symmetrical and […]

בס”ד Holiness: A Sublime Lifetime Endeavor For Israeli theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz, nothing was more spiritually heinous, vulgar and repugnant than Korach’s grotesque and preposterous theological assertion in the commencement of our parsha that “Kol ha’eda kedoshim,” namely that we are all intrinsically and inherently holy, simply because of our sheer biological facticity — because we […]

בס”ד True Humility Our book and parashah start out with the Hebrew word “Vayikra” (which means “And He called upon”). G-d calls Moses. But something is strange and unusual, about the way this word, “Vayikra”, is written in a Torah scroll. The concluding letter of the word “Vayikra,” is written with an unusually small Aleph. […]

בס”ד The Price of Hate Three times in our history we went into exile. The first time we went into exile was after the selling of Joseph, about which we read in this Shabbat’s parshah. The second time was after the death of King Solomon. King Solomon had two sons who just couldn’t get along. […]

בס”ד Conscience: A Jewish Invention Hitler once said that the conscience is a Jewish invention. He was right. It was Judaism which brought to the world the notion that we all possess universal and inherent dignity on account of our divine image, and it is the Torah which commands us to heed our responsibility to […]

בס”ד The Jewish Condition & the Human Condition Abraham is a living legend in his own lifetime. He is revered by his contemporaries, who address him as a “Prince of G-d in our midst.” Abraham, with true spiritual humility, describes himself to the local people as “A stranger and a resident amongst you.” This statement […]

בס”ד Remember Your Humble Beginnings My grandfather was a holocaust refugee. He miraculously slipped through the Germans’ fingers. When he first came to Israel, he slept on a bench. Others slept in broken huts, and others still – in fragile tents which constantly leaked during rainy days, and shuddered during the wintry winds and the […]

בס”ד Two Kinds of Enemies  We read this Shabbat a text which also appears in the Passover Haggadah. This text includes the following three words: “Arami Oved Avi” (ארמי אובד אבי).There are two ways to understand these words. According to Rashi and the midrash in Sifre, it means that there was an Arami (a person […]