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 […]

בס”ד The Ultimate Battle Lamentably, when wars break out, all too often soldiers give free reign to their lower and animalistic drives. In the absence of law enforcement, in the mayhem of the battlefields, terrible crimes are committed against helpless victims, including defenseless women. The opening mitzvah of our parashah commands a Jew who captured […]

בס”ד Solipsism and Its Discontents   We are reading a very exciting parashah this Shabbat. Every parashah is exciting, but Parashat Va’etchanan is particularly replete with some of the most pivotal and foundational tenets of Jewish spirituality. Our parashah includes, amongst other things, the verse of Shma Yisrael, the first paragraph of the Shma, and […]

בס”ד Murder in the name of G-d / The Problem of Religious Fanaticism Our Torah portion last Shabbat presented us with the quint-essential zealot, a man called Pinchas, who took the law into his own hands, and murdered a fellow-Jew who was steeped in idolatrous practices and immorality. The Torah is very wary of anarchy, […]

בס”ד The Gift of Failure  Every book of the Torah deals with a central issue of the human condition. Genesis is about “family and its discontents.” From Isaac and Ishmael to Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers, sibling rivalry in particular, and familial disputations in general, constitute a chief leitmotif in the opening […]

בס”ד Personal Growth: The Purpose of Human Existence Our parashah contains the tragic story of the twelve spies whom Moses sent out from the desert, in order to check out and survey the Promised Land. Ten of the twelve spies came back to the people with a defeatist attitude. They stated that because the cities […]

  בס”ד Judaism and the Lust for Life Irving stone called his biography of Vincent van Gogh “The lust for life.” The same title can be used to describe Judaism. Many religions shy away from, and categorically prohibit, some of life’s chief sensuous pleasures as sinful and unworthy. For example, in Islam alcohol is strictly […]