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https://www.aish.com/jw/s/20-More-Jewish-Celebrities.html?
20 More Jewish Celebrities
Nov 13, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
20 More Jewish Celebrities
Well-known figures you may not know are Jews.

My article, “Did You Know They’re Jewish?” which described some celebrities who are Jewish, garnered a lot of comments. Many people, including some I hadn’t heard from in ages, got in touch just to let me know about people I left off the list. The truth is there are many well-known people whose Jewishness is little known.

Here are 20 more celebrities you might not have realized are members of the tribe.

BILLY JOEL
Both of Billy Joel’s parents, Howard Joel and Rosyland Nyman, were Jewish, and they raised their son with virtually no knowledge of his Jewish heritage. Though he experimented with Christianity in the past, the famous singer has recently embraced his Jewish identity. In 2017, to protest rising antisemitism and draw attention to his Jewishness, he donned a yellow star while performing in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

TAIKA WAITITI
The Thor and Jojo Rabbit director is a Jew: Taika’s mother is Russian Jew while his father is from the Maori tribe. After his parents separated when he was five, Taika was raised by his mom. “My mother and her family’s story... is fascinating to me, because they escaped the pogroms in Russia, and then they ended up in England and eventually...in New Zealand,” he’s described. https://www.thejc.com/culture/interviews/taika-waititi-mum-inspired-my-nazi-comedy-1.494736

GEDDY LEE

The Rush singer, bass player and song writer’s real name is Gary Lee Weinrib. His parents are Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors who reunited after World War II and moved to Toronty. (The nickname Geddy came from his mother’s pronunciation of “Gary” with her thick Polish accent.) Rush’s hit song Red Sector A was inspired by Lee’s parents’ horrific experiences in Auschwitz.

MAGGIE AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL
When Maggie Gyllenhaal appeared on the PBS show Finding Your Roots, host Henry Louis Gates told her she is “as Jewish as Jewish can be”. Descended from a long line of Ashkenazi women, Maggie - and her brother Jake - grew up with their Jewish mother, the screenwriter Naomi Fox and their non-Jewish father, director Stephen Gyllenhaal.

HANK AZARIA
Born in Queens, New York, to parents who were Sephardi Jewish immigrants from the Greek city of Salonika, Hank grew up hearing Ladino, the Jewish Sephardi language, in his home. “I understood it and still do, and there was a time in my teenage years I was pretty fluent,” he’s explained.

LIL DICKIE
The rapper (real name: David Burd) grew up in a middle class home in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and attended the same high school that former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended when his family was living in the US. Lil Dickie was first discovered by a hip hop group when he was performing at his Jewish summer camp. He spent his bar mitzvah money to produce his first music video.

NEIL GAIMAN
The darkly original fantasy author Neil Gaiman was born into a middle-class Jewish family in the British city of Portsmouth. Though his Jewish parents became ardent Scientologists, Gaiman has left the sect and has spoken about visiting his Jewish relatives in Jewish neighborhoods in North London, and about attending “ultra-Orthodox” bar mitzvah lessons as a child.

JASON ISAACS
Yes, Lucius Malfoy - or at least the actor who played him in the Harry Potter films, Jason Isaacs - is a Jew. Isaacs attended Jewish school as a child, going to King David Primary School in Liverpool before his family moved to London. In addition to his Jewish primary school, Isaacs attended after school Hebrew school twice a week. Isaacs’ wife Emma Hewitt isn’t Jewish, and Isaacs has said he’s worried that they won’t understand their Jewish heritage without the strong Jewish home life and education he grew up with: “Without that stuff, I don’t know that there is a foundation (for my children).

MILA KUNIS
Mila Kunis has described how she and her Jewish family experienced antisemitism in their native town of Chernivtsi in Ukraine. Years later, when she was working on a film in Hungary, she was seized with a desire to visit her childhood home. Her parents flew to Budapest to meet her, and together they visited the house where they’d once lived. The new owner refused to let them in.

RALPH LAUREN
Born Ralph Lifshitz in 1939, Ralph Lauren’s parents were penniless Jewish immigrants from Belarus who moved to New York. Lauren was always fascinated by clothes. When he was a child, he copied the preppy look of wealthier kids in his neighborhood. That aesthetic is still visible in the Ralph Lauren company’s clothes today.

ELENA FERRENTE
For years the Italian novelist Elena Ferrente has been a national treasure. With the publication of My Brilliant Friend in 2011 and its three sequels, Ferrente was catapulted to global fame. Her four “Neapolitan novels” have sold over 15 million copies and been translated into 45 languages. The HBO series based on My Brilliant Friend has garnered praise and critical acclaim. In 2016, Ferrente was unmasked as the pen name of Anita Raja, a Jewish translator working in Rome. Raja’s mother, Golda Frieda Petzenbaum, fled to Italy in 1937 to escape the Nazis in her native Germany.

JONAH HILL AND BEANIE FELDSTEIN
Jonah Hill, the popular actor, comedian, and producer was born Johan Hill Feldstein and grew up near Los Angeles. He’s called himself a “nice Jewish boy” and described his bar mitzvah as “magical”. When he used to hang out at a popular Los Angeles skate shop as a teen, he called himself “Jonah the Jew”. Jonah Hill's sister, Jewish actress Beanie Feldstein is starring in the upcoming Broadway revival of Funny Girl. "I think we're a very culturally Jewish family, and... there is a beautiful sense of community in Judaism," Feldstein has said. "I love that."

BOB DYLAN
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, Bob Dylan grew up in a Jewish family in the small, tight-knit Jewish community in the town of Hibbing, Minnesota. Though he experimented with Christianity in the 1970s, the famous singer and Nobel-prize winner returned to Jewish life, occasionally attending a Chabad synagogue. “I’m a Jew,” he’s declared: “It touches my poetry, my life, in ways I can’t describe.” His daughter is an observant Jew married to singer Pete Himmelman.

KHALEED “KHLEO” LEON THOMAS
One of the stars of the movie Holes (based on the bestselling children’s novel Holes by Louis Sacher, another Jew), actor Khleo Thomas is Jewish. His Jewish mother immigrated to the United States from Morocco; she met Khleo’s father in Alaska, where he was stationed in the army.

KATE HUDSON AND MOM GOLDIE HAWN
Comic actress Goldie Hawn was born in Silver Spring, Maryland in 1945. Her mother Laura (Stienhoff) Hawn was Jewish. That makes Hawn’s daughter, actress Kate Hudson, a Jew as well. Even though the actress embraces few elements of a traditional Jewish lifestyle, her identity as a Jew is clear: “First of all, I’m Jewish,” Hudson has declared.

IDINA MENZEL
Born Idina Kim Mentzel in New York, both of Idina Menzel’s parents, Stuart and Helene Mentzel, were Jewish. When she was fifteen, Menzel began singing in synagogues and at bar and bat mitzvah parties and at weddings. “I feel very connected to the Jewish people,” she’s explained.

LISA KUDROW
Born into a middle-class family near Los Angeles, actress Lisa Kudrow’s Jewish family wasn’t particularly observant. But Kudrow, most famous for her role in the sit-com Friends, insisted that she celebrate her bat mitzvah as a child “because I just felt like I needed to be counted in. I’m Jewish, and that’s important to me,” she’s explained.


https://www.aish.com/sp/so/Jews-Non-Jews-and-My-Anti-Semitic-Girlfriend.html?
Me and My Antisemitic Girlfriend
Jan 2, 2016  |  by Elliot Newmanprint article
Me and My Antisemitic Girlfriend
We were hurtling toward marriage despite my closeted interest in Judaism. One drunken night changed everything.

I had been dating Jennifer for a year and a half. Things were getting serious. My friends were all starting to get engaged or settling down into single life for the long haul. I felt the pressure building to commit to my relationship in a real way, namely having her move in.

Every time we had a few drinks Jen would ask me what I thought about living together. I would fumble with my words, trying to buy myself a few more months. I would lamely explain how I really liked my roommates and how tough real estate was in NYC. When the boozy haze cleared, there was no sign the next day that these conversations ever took place.

Soon, my excuses began to dwindle. By the end of June, both of my roommates got engaged and began making arrangements to move out by the end of July. I was left with a big empty apartment and nobody to share the rent. It seemed like now was the time for the “trial run” with Jen. We had agreed that she would move in at the beginning of August.

My mind raced ahead. “Trial run” sounded innocuous enough, but I had enough friends go through these scenarios that I knew how this would inevitably play out. We would spend a year living together, then pressure would mount to buy a ring and propose, then we would be engaged for another year, and then we would be married. Forever.

So this was it. It was the decision to last forever, yet it seemed like just a bunch of ‘I-guess-so’s piled up in a heap. I had something else on my mind as well, a secret looming larger by the day.


I had started becoming interested in my Judaism. And Jennifer wasn’t Jewish.

I had explored all sorts of spiritual pathways and Judaism was last on my list.
I had begun to a search for deeper meaning in life. I was always interested in philosophy and spirituality, but it the most general terms. That past winter I had started reading about Jewish philosophy. I had explored all sorts of spiritual pathways and Judaism was last on my list. It hadn’t registered as an option until one of my best friends sent me a lecture to listen to by Rabbi Akiva Tatz.

I began devouring them. Soon I had listened to almost every one of the lectures except the most relevant and onerous of them all: “Jew, Non-Jew and Intermarriage.” It leered at me each day as my mouse cursor brushed over it.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Jennifer was great, at least on paper. We had the same interests, liked the same foods, never fought. Yet, there was something missing. As my passion for spirituality grew, I noticed something in our conversations. I would begin talking about a deeper topic and she would follow along up until a certain point. Then, like hitting a cement wall, her face would go blank and she would change the topic. “Want to see a movie tonight?” or “What do you want for dinner?”

After a few months of learning more about Judaism, I started dabbling in keeping Kosher. I subtly cut pork and shellfish from my diet.

“Want to go for oysters?”

“No, I don’t think I’m in the mood.”

My inner world was beginning to diverge from the image I was portraying. I was living a lie.

I finally worked up the courage to share my journey with Jen. I took her out to a fancy dinner and told her that I needed to ask her something.

“If we were to have kids together, eventually, someday…I really want to raise them Jewish. Could you live with that?”

She fell silent and looked down at her plate, idly turning vegetables with her fork. She told me that she would have to get back to me.

There were so many Catholics in the world and so few Jews, why not root for the underdog?
The next week she told me that she could do that. She asked her mom what she thought, and her mom had agreed that it made sense. There were so many Catholics in the world and so few Jews, why not root for the underdog? And besides, neither of us was really religious. We could do Christmas and Hanukkah. No problem.

This made me feel much better. But I soon realized that I had just applied a band-aid when I needed to do brain surgery. What did it mean “raise the kids Jewish” if we were going to have Christmas in the house also? I became even more confused than I was before.

Those Jews
Fast forward to the 4th of July. Jen and I had decided to spend the long weekend at her parents’ house in a New York City suburb where she grew up. Her father, Jack, had finally warmed up to me, inviting me to the yearly golf outing that I had heard so much about but had not yet qualified for.

Jack took us out to see the fireworks. We watched them on the water where he knew a bar owner and his friend was playing guitar that night. After a beautiful fireworks display and many rounds of celebratory beers, we decided to head back to their house.

We were driving down the highway back towards Jack’s house and the conversation opened up, with a good deal of liquor lubricating it. After some banter about which band and beer we liked best, Jack brought up a new topic.

“Hey, Elliot. Do you remember my friend Steve? His son, Rob, nice Catholic kid. He ended up marrying this Jewish girl last year. Crazy wedding, I have to tell you. The girl’s father stood up in the middle of the ceremony and tried to stop the wedding. He started quoting scripture, said she was a lamb that strayed from the flock. It was awful. The families don’t speak anymore. Now she’s pregnant and her father refuses to see her. Can you believe that?”

I stammered that I indeed could not believe it, not quite knowing what to say. Jack went on to describe how Rob’s Jewish wife was now completely disconnected from her family. By his tone, Jack didn’t mean anything directly hostile towards me, but they seemed frighteningly applicable to Jen and me.

There was a new topic in the car: Jews and their separateness. Jen was raised in a New York City suburb next to a very large Jewish community. Jack and Jen began talking about the traits of their Jewish neighbors while I sat as still as a statue in the passenger seat, my secret Jewish identity writhing in pain inside of me.

“These Jews cover the streets in trash. They are just so disgusting, with their long black coats and fur hats, clogging the intersections on Saturday mornings. We have to drive by with you tomorrow, Elliot, just to see the filth of it all.”

What hurt me more than Jack’s anti-Semitic diatribe was Jen agreeing with him.
What hurt me more than Jack’s antisemitic diatribe was Jen agreeing with him. She quickly became the ringleader of the conversation. She was going to be my wife? He was going to be the grandfather of my children? In their eyes, I wasn’t one of those Jews. Waves of nausea pounded my throat as they talked over the silent Jew in the passenger seat.

They continued describing their repulsive Jewish neighbors who were ruining the town. It felt as if I was all alone in the car, watching Jack and Jen laugh and mock from a telescope a million miles away. I had to make a choice: Would I cling to the image I portrayed outside that felt so artificial, or would I decide to redefine myself as the person who I felt I was on the inside?

We finally arrived at the house, Jen and Jack laughing and hugging over a fun night while my mind reeled. We went inside to go to sleep. I tossed and turned all night, mulling over my future and contemplating the difficult choices laid out in front of me.

The next morning I woke up with a cold resolve as to what I must do. I quietly ate breakfast with the family and we headed back to the city. I went back to my apartment and made a plan of what I would say. How I would explain who I was and why I couldn’t reconcile that with the thoughts that had been made clear to me on that car ride.

I showed up at her apartment and asked to speak with her in her room, away from her roommate. I broke the news that she couldn’t move in. That repressed inner personality burst forth like a river through a crack in a dam. I told her about my secret Jewish studies and the fierce connection I felt to the generations of Jews who had suffered so much to carry Judaism forward throughout the years.

It was not easy. Our breakup lasted a month. She told me that she was interested in taking conversion classes. I went to see a therapist who specialized in interfaith couples to see what to do.

During my first session with the therapist, I decided to embrace the real me that wanted to explore my Judaism, to fully realize the person who was being built from within over the past half year. Staying with Jen as she went through a forced conversion borne of antisemitism and a broken relationship sounded like a half measure that would leave me in limbo. I had to commit.

I didn’t reconcile with her. Now I was free to take classes, to check out what Shabbat actually meant. I had time to explore and embark on the journey whose final destination I did not know.

For the first time in my life, I have looked inside and asked myself that most difficult question: “Who am I?” I still don’t fully know the answer but I’m trying very hard to find out. At least my interior matches my exterior.

Why everything you've been told about the name changes at Ellis Island is a big, fat lie.
https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Jews-Changing-Their-Surname-at-Ellis-Island.html?
When I meet people, they inevitably ask if I am related to any other Landises they know. John Landis, the Hollywood director? Nope, no relation. Baseball’s first commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis? Nope. Sketchy pro-cyclist Floyd Landis? Also no. Our family has no distant cousins or long-lost relatives named Landis because it isn’t our original name.

Sometime after 1945, my grandfather’s youngest brother, William, petitioned to have his surname changed from Lefkowitz, a clearly identifiable Jewish name, to the more American-sounding Landis. The request was granted and the rest of his family followed suit. My grandparents were married as Paul and Rhona Lefkowitz, and changed their name to Landis before my father and uncles entered the picture.
Paul Lefkowitz and Rhona Koplin before they were married
It wasn’t unusual for Eastern European Jewish immigrants to use anglicized or truncated versions of their Jewish surnames. Chances are you're familiar with the stories of relatives or friends who arrived at the gates of Ellis Island with surnames that were too difficult for the impatient immigration officer to pronounce. The timid immigrants could not protest when their Jewish names weren't recorded accurately because they did not speak or read English.
This cultural phenomenon was so prevalent that it spawned an entire genre of self-deprecating Jewish jokes.
My grandparents, Paul and Rhona Lefkowitz, getting married
My favorite is the one about the Jew who went by the name of Sam Ferguson. Fresh off the boat from Europe, he knew that his real name, Yerachmiel Yakobavitch, would be a mouthful for the immigration officers at Ellis Island. So instead of waiting for them to butcher his Jewish name, he figured he would just introduce himself as Jerry Jacobs. He repeated his new moniker over and over while he waited in line to be processed at the port. When his turn finally came, he was so intimidated by the immigration officer that when asked for his name, he completely drew a blank and blurted out in Yiddish, “Oy! Shem fargessen!” (I forgot the name!). So the worker dutifully wrote down what he heard, and Yerachmiel Yakobovitch became Sam Ferguson.

This portrayal of confused and clueless Jewish immigrants being forced to take on random American names by immigration workers is even part of the official narrative told today by tour guides at the Ellis Island museum.

My father’s family has been proud All-Americans since the late 1800s and my children are fifth-generation American Jews. They were not new immigrants who changed their names under duress. So, I always thought that the fact that my grandfather’s entire family voluntarily chose to change their name made them outliers. That is, until I read the new book, People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn's fascinating critical analysis of the subtleties of modern-day antisemitism, and discovered that everything I’d been told about the name changes at Ellis Island was a big, fat lie!

65% of the petitions to change a surname filed in New York were Jewish-sounding names
First off, the intake personnel at Ellis Island were not incompetent blowhards, jotting down whatever they heard, (or thought they heard). They were highly skilled immigration officials who were required to be fluent in at least three languages. Additionally, translators circulated the floor to provide extra linguistic support. At any given time, there would have been someone on duty who spoke German, Polish, or Russian, any possible language spoken by Eastern European Jews.

Next, don’t assume that new arrivals to American shores merely paid a toll, had their passports stamped, and then quickly shuffled through a turnstile. The immigration process was prolonged and thorough, with documents carefully checked and certified, and the interviews lasting at least 20 minutes to ensure that the new immigrants would not potentially be a burden on American society.

Paul Lefkowitz draft card.

Finally, during these interviews no names were recorded, accurately or otherwise, because no one asked the immigrants for their names! The immigration officials worked off of the ship manifests that came from the port of origin in Europe and these manifests were based on passports and government documents. Since anyone who was improperly documented on the manifest was shipped back to Europe at the company’s expense, the records were meticulously compiled; they knew that any mistakes would cost the transport company money and sometimes the workers their jobs.

Yet, there are thousands of early 20th-century New York City court records that show Jews requesting name changes (including that of Lefkowitz/Landis). Horn cites the book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America by Kirsten Fermaglich, which documents many of these court cases. In fact, by 1932, ten years after Ellis Island officially closed its doors, 65% of the petitions to change a surname filed in New York were Jewish-sounding names, and almost always filed on behalf of entire families. Strangely, very few of these records mention antisemitism as the basis for these petitions.

They do, however, mention the petitioners changing their name because they couldn’t find a job, or because their children were being picked on in school. The official reason given was that they had foreign-sounding names, with no mention of their Jewish heritage. In other words, the predominant mentality of Jews at that time was to hide their Jewishness, cowering under the heavy boot of discrimination. Instead of being proud of their Jewish identities and standing up against the antisemitism they were experiencing, they chose to hide their heritage, discarding their Jewish names.

Instead of being proud of their Jewish identities and standing up against the antisemitism they were experiencing, they chose to hide their heritage, discarding their Jewish names.
Horn does not offer a theory as to who first created this immigration fairytale or how it spread like wildfire throughout American Jewry. Yet, the reasoning and motivation behind this tall tale are clear. After thousands of years of exile and expulsion from countless countries, these new immigrants hoped that America would finally be a safe haven for their families, that the pogroms of the past were behind them, and that this stop in the Jewish journey towards redemption would be different.

Yet the sobering reality was that Jews were not welcome in early 20th century America; the insidious horrors of antisemitism also lined the gold paved streets. The fear and despair they felt at the prospect of history repeating itself was something they desperately wanted to shield their children from. Determined to give their children a better life than they left behind in Europe, they collectively told this folk tale of a silly mistake made by an incompetent worker at the borders of a country that welcomed them with open arms.

Contrary to what I thought, my family’s story is not unique; Jewish families seeking to successfully assimilate into American culture by willingly adopting less Jewish-sounding names were very much the norm, not the exception. The one thing that seems to be exceptional in our story is that my grandfather was upfront about the circumstances that led to our family abandoning the Lefkowitz name for Landis. I don’t know why he didn't feel the need to hide it from his children as so many others did, and now I cannot ask him. My hunch is that by the time he told my father, the oldest of his three sons, he had already built a successful business and his family was fully integrated into American life, without their Jewishness being a liability. So my grandfather did what he always taught us to do; he simply told the truth.

But as of those who jumped on the Ellis Island canard bandwagon, what do we make of them? They so wanted the American Jewish experience to be better than its prosectors in Europe. Horn defends this as something in the collective psyche of the early 20th century American Jew said that if we can just stop the multigenerational transference of psychological baggage and trauma that comes along with centuries of oppression and give America time to get used to us, our kids will have a fighting chance. In many cases, these people were not running away from the Jewish community. Those who changed their names often still joined synagogues, gave to the Federation, and strived to raise their children as good American Jews. That was the case with my family.

With the hindsight of close to a century, was the decision to hide the truth from their children a good one? In many ways, Jewry has thrived in America. Never before in our 2,000 years of exile has there been a safer, more affluent home than Jews have in the USA. The freedoms and equality have led to unparalleled success as a community. The American Jew is basically accepted into normal American life.

But this has all come with tremendous cost. Along with affluence has come mass assimilation, and in many cases, those who consciously changed their names while hiding the circumstances from their children do not have a Jewish descendant left.

What would have happened if the collective early twentieth century Jew hunkered down and told the truth to their children as my grandfather did, in so doing expressing the difficulties of being a Jew in America at that time? I don’t know, but one thing I can say is that my grandfather can look down from heaven and see a family three generations later where everyone is still proudly Jewish.

https://www.aish.com/jw/id/Secrets-of-the-Cave-of-the-Patriarchs.html?
Secrets of the Cave of the Patriarchs
Nov 7, 2021
by Nadav Shragai, Israel Hayomprint article
Secrets of the Cave of the Patriarchs
Noam Arnon's comprehensive doctoral dissertation on the Cave of the Patriarchs proves there is much more to the ancient site than meets the eye.

On August 25, 1859, the Italian archaeologist and engineer Ermette Pierotti, tried to sneak into the sanctuary at the Cave of the Patriarchs with the assistance of some Muslim friends. But before they had even made it down five steps, they were caught by the guards who dragged them back out. "The beatings I received and the curses I was subjected to in no way diminished the satisfaction that I felt," Pierotti wrote in his diary, "I can say that I managed to see something of the cave – ossuaries of white stone... a wall of rock separating the lower and upper caves. When the day comes that someone is able to enter this dark place, they will see that my description was accurate."

The Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron
Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, an officer under the command of General Allenby, made a somewhat more successful visit when the British captured Hebron in November 1917. He entered the subterranean caverns through an opening on the southwestern side of the famous above-ground structure to make sure there were no enemy forces hiding out there.

Next to Abraham's tombstone, Meinertzhagen found a door opening up into a narrow passageway that led to an "underground hiding place where there was a large rock surrounded by four flat-topped pillars with winding grooves."

Pierotti and Meinertzhagen, who visited the underground caverns below the above ground (Herodian) structure – Muslims today prevent any access to them – are not the only ones to have succeeded in peeking into the depths of the earth to try and unlock the site's secrets. All of them sought to confirm whether it is indeed the biblical Cave of the Patriarchs in the field that Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite.

Noam Arnon (Saria Diamant)

A 600-page doctoral thesis composed over the past eight years by Dr. Noam Arnon, reveals and explores the details of these visits, and much more. Arnon's research covers a period of 2,500 years in the history of the site, and, like his previous works on the Cave of the Patriarchs, deals with a broad complex of geographical, geological, archaeological, and Jewish and historical sources, that were not all available to those researching the cave in the past.

Up to the seventh step
Over the generations, the cave of the Patriarchs had a place of honor in heritage, tradition, and legend, but it was in religious faith and mysticism where it stood out. Arnon's work (completed at the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar Ilan University) now compiles for the first time a scientific database about the cave and its secrets. Its advantage lies in Arnon's intimate knowledge of the site, which he has lived, breathed, and researched for almost five decades.

Over the course of 700 years, ever since the conquest of the Land of Israel by the Mamluks in 1267, access to the site has been denied to Jews and other non-Muslims.
Reminder: Over the course of 700 years, ever since the conquest of the Land of Israel by the Mamluks in 1267, access to the site has been denied to Jews and other non-Muslims. Jews were only allowed as far as the "Seventh Step" on the stairway leading down to the structure, and this became synonymous with the discrimination against Jews at the site. Researchers exploring the site such as the British archaeologist Ernest Mckay, the French scholar, Father Louis-Hugues Vincent, or the British delegation led by Claude Reignier Conder in 1882 dealt in detail with the famous 2,000-year-old above-ground structure, but had great difficulty in gaining access – if at all – to the underground caverns below it.

Arnon, a resident of Beit Hadassah in Hebron, who is better known to the wider public as the spokesman of the Hebron Jewish Community touches on this issue as well. A fascinating part of his research deals with the secret visits made by him and others to the caves underneath the main building, as well as visits that took place openly with permission.

One of the earliest visits to the cave of the Patriarchs (in the second century CE) is documented in the Talmud, which tells of Rabbi Bana'ah who would mark out burial caves so that people would not suffer ritual contamination. A thousand years later in the 12th century, these caverns were entered by monks from the canonical order who located in the depths of the earth several rooms of different shapes and sizes that contained urns full of bones. The site was also visited in the 12th century by Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, Rabbi Petachiah of Regensburg, and Rabbi Yaakov ben Netanel HaCohen.

Pierotti and Meinertzhagen reached the depth of the Cave only centuries later and the next documented visit was that of a young British Jew, Jack Seklan, in 1933.

A secret kept for 80 years
Seklan's daughter Yehudit, who lives in Ofra, told Arnon about her father after he decided it was time to reveal the secret he had been keeping for almost 80 years. They met in 2012 when Seklan was already 97, but still sound of mind and with a fantastic memory. He described in detail to Arnon how, accompanied by the British officer in charge of the site, he descended three flights of stairs into the subterranean hall deep underground where they found another door.

The opening to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. (Video screenshot)

"From that door," recalls Arnon, "they descended another few steps and reached a barred window overlooking an underground hall. Seklan told me that the hall was quite large and built out of natural rock or stone. In the dim light, he managed to make out tombstones similar to those on the upper floor that is now open to the public. But unlike the upper tombstones that are covered with a magnificent parochet, the tombstones below ground were bare. The Muslim guide explained to them that these were the graves of the forefathers themselves and Seklan prayed kadish."

I was glad at least that on the eve of his death he had revealed his secret.
Arnon recalls how he was stunned by what he was hearing from Seklan. "We arranged to meet again the following Sunday so that I could show him drawings and photos and try to locate with him the caverns that he had described. On the Saturday night before our second meeting, I received a phone call from his daughter informing me that Seklan had been run over and killed by a jeep as he left Shabbat prayers at the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem. I just held my head in my hands. I was sorry for the man, who was truly a man of deeds, and also for the missed opportunity. I was glad at least that on the eve of his death he had revealed his secret."

Arnon received a similar account from Arieh Ariel, the grandfather of Tamar Ariel, Israel's first religious female pilot, who was killed in an avalanche in Nepal in 2014. Arnon met Ariel eight years ago at his home on Moshav Massuot Yitzhak near Ashkelon. He told Arnon how as a nine-year-old he accompanied his father on one of his visits to Hebron after the 1929 massacre. Together they joined British archaeologists who were visiting the caverns underneath the above-ground structure. "We went down the stairs and I remember that they said: 'these are the graves of the forefathers,'" Ariel told him.

About a month after the Six-Day War, Arieh Golan, a sergeant in the Paratrooper Corps reconnaissance unit, Sayeret Tzanchanim, entered the caves at the head of a force searching for terrorists and weapons. He too provided Arnon with a detailed description. The most famous incident in which Jews entered the caves occurred a few months after the Six-Day War. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was worried that the fact that Jews had set up a synagogue at the Cave of the Patriarchs could lead to inter-racial violence between Muslims and Jews. Dayan turned to Yehuda Arbel, the head of the Jerusalem District of the Shin Bet, and asked him to try and find a solution to separate the sides.

Burial Cave of Sarah (Wikipedia, Bet Shearim)

Dayan, who knew a thing or two about archaeology, noted that the Cave of the Patriarchs itself was located below the floor of the mosque at a lower level. "If we find an exterior entrance to the caves," Dayan told Arbel, "then we will have solved the problem – the Muslims will pray above and the Jews below."

Arbel waited for the right opportunity, which arrived just 10 days later when a grenade was thrown at Jewish visitors, resulting in the town being placed under curfew and the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs being closed. Arbel lost no time; he lowered his 13-year-old daughter Michal down via rope through the "candle shaft" on the floor of the Hall of Isaac so that she could document the underground passages. First of all, however, Arbel spent weeks training Michal how to draw and document built spaces.

Jacob's Tomb in the Cave of the Patriarchs (Saria Diamant)

Michal, who today is Dr. Michal Arbel, a lecturer in Hebrew literature, was lowered down via an opening just 28 centimeters wide on October 10 of that year. She was equipped with matches and candles in order to make sure there was enough oxygen to breathe, and, in addition, with a camera, paper, and pencils. The operation lasted for three-and-a-half hours. Michal identified three tombstones on the western wall, two of them smooth and one bearing an inscription. She also found an opening on the eastern side that led into a passageway. Michal drew every detail she managed to see, and her father passed the drawings on to Defense Minister Dayan. The young girl was lowered into the structure another two times, once on October 18 of that year, and again in November. However, she never reached the double chamber itself.

First Temple era pottery
Another secret operation at the site was carried out by the army in February 1973. Titled "Operation Adar" it was initiated for research purposes by the head of the IDF central command, Rehavam Zeevi. Lieutenant Avner Tzadok was chosen for the mission due to his small frame. Wearing just swimming trunks, his body was covered in grease to help him squeeze through the narrow opening. The photographs taken by Tzadok along with other items discovered during the operation remain, to Arnon's disappointment, classified to this day.

The cave itself was exposed only in 1981, during an operation organized one night during slichot - the prayers for forgiveness during the High Holidays. The chants of the worshippers, who sang the prayers with great fervor and particularly loudly, provided cover for Arnon and a team of volunteers to chisel their way through the stone on the floor of the Hall of Isaac. Cloaked in excitement they found themselves descending a steep stairway at the end of which was a long, dark and narrow tunnel that they crawled through until they reached a large underground hall.

"We started looking for an entrance to the original cave, the one we knew from historical descriptions," recalls Arnon. "We found various stones in the corners and on the walls. Some of them had Latin and Arabic inscriptions. Suddenly we felt a gust of wind coming up from the floor at the entrance to the room. With great effort, we lifted the stones from the floor, and in front of our eyes we saw the entrance to a cave carved out of the stone."

We were indeed in the Cave of the Patriarchs which consists of two caves, one in front of the other.
Arnon and his friends went deep into the cave. "It transpired that we were indeed in the Cave of the Patriarchs which consists of two caves, one in front of the other, in the style of the shaft tombs that were characteristic of the period of the forefathers. The first cave was larger and full of earth, almost up to its ceiling, but a passageway from that cave led to a second, much smaller cave. On the floor of the smaller cave, also full of earth, between fragments of ancient pottery, we found ourselves crawling among remains of human skeletons."

The double cave was dated back to the middle bronze age, the time of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The group removed four earthenware pieces from the cave which were examined by the chief archaeology officer for Judea and Samaria, Dr. Zeev Yavin, who found them to be from the First Temple period. It was only recently, some 40 years after that adventure, that a scientific analysis was conducted by Prof. David Ben Shlomo, head of the Land of Israel Studies and Archeology Department at Ariel University, and Prof. Hans Mommsen of the University of Bonn, a leading expert on identifying pottery through compositional analysis.

The analysis found that the items of pottery that were brought to the cave from various sites around Israel – the Hebron Hills, Jerusalem, and the Shfela (Judean Foothills) – by people who lived in these areas and had gone to the cave. This shows us that most likely the cave was a pilgrimage site during First Temple times.

Yavin, together with Doron Chen (a lecturer in archaeology) entered the cave a few months later with a delegation led by the then commander of the region, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. The two conducted an independent review and a few years later published a scientific study. Yavin too reached the conclusion that the caves were a bronze age burial site from the time of the forefathers. The bones in the cave were left there and were not analyzed. Yavin summarized his findings, writing: "An ancient tradition saw one of these caves [there are others in the area] as the burial site of the forefathers and therefore the monument was built above it." He also found a clear affiliation between the upper tombstone chamber and the caves below it.

Pottery found at the site (Yitzhak Fisch)

'Abraham is buried here'
But that wasn't enough for Arnon, and in 2014 the Midreshet Hebron college ordered a ground-penetrating radar analysis from the Geotech company. Interpretation of the results found that just as in the southern part of the Temple Mount (in the area around Solomon's Stables) vaults had been built at the Cave of the Patriarchs and the floor of the upper structure was built on top of them.

Q: Who really built the upper structure?
"Herod. The walls of the cave are double walls, and between them, there is a layer of concrete and stones. We climbed up there and removed some material. We found charcoal grains there and sent samples to the Weizmann Institute, which dated them back to the first century BCE It could be Hasmonean or Herodian era. But to me, given the historical circumstances, the style of building, and comparison with other buildings, it is clear that it was Herodian."

The Cave of the Patriarch, notes Arnon "is the only Herodian structure in Israel that has survived in its entirety and it is much smaller than the Temple Mount; just one 77th the size of the Mount, two dunams versus 144 dunams." He raises the hypothesis that "Herod's workers conducted a trial run in Hebron for the construction on the Mount" explaining that the upper structure of the Cave of the Patriarchs was built without any foundations on top of the native rock, which in certain parts of the building, under the southern and eastern walls of the structure, can still be seen. "It is probably the "edge of the field" that Abraham purchased from Ephron the Hittite, which is mentioned in the Book of Genesis," he says.

Q: And it is under that structure that the patriarchs and matriarchs are buried?

"We didn't find a grave on which it was written 'Abraham is buried here,' but when you weigh all the historical and archaeological data, the writings of travelers, biblical sources, topography; all of that together shows us that this is indeed the case."

Q: People will surely ask themselves: If Arnon reached the conclusion that it isn't the biblical site of the Cave of the Patriarchs, would he write that?

"Yes, he would write that."

Q: You write in your thesis that there is no possibility of conducting 'open research' at the site. Was there covert research conducted at the site?

"I can't answer that."

Arnon's thesis also reveals some Greek and Hebrew names from the Byzantine period (the 4th and 5th-century BCE) that were photographed by the Waqf after it peeled off the plaster from the walls of the structure. The names were those of Jews who had engraved them on the walls, such as "Nachum, Tanchum, and Yaakov."

One of Arnon's most interesting findings regards the existence of a synagogue on the site for some 600 years on the northern side of the structure, alongside a church that operated on the southern side. This, he says, is an example of Jewish-Christian cooperation that has support from historical sources, and is also supported by other testimonies and findings from the Hebron area. "This reality," says Arnon, "softens somewhat the plentiful information about the long rivalry between the two religions across the span of history."

The findings on the ground regarding the synagogue, notes Arnon, correspond with sources from the Cairo Genizah, which revealed the existence of a Jewish community in Hebron at the time – a community that held prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs and was headed by Saadia of Hebron. Saadia had several titles, all of which were connected to his roles at the cave. The synagogue it appears was destroyed during the Crusader conquest of the Land of Israel.

In his research, Arnon deals with Flavius Josephus' descriptions of the Cave of the Patriarchs and finds similarities between the archaeological findings at the cave and those at Tel Rumeida. He has no doubts that the Cave of the Patriarchs as we know it today is the same cave of the Patriarchs that is described in the Book of Genesis, but he clarifies that when it comes to the story of the cave, there is still plenty to discover and the limitations placed by the Muslims on research at the site leave much to be done by future generations.

This article originally appeared on Israel HaYom.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Dreyfus-Affair-5-Important-Facts-for-Today.html?s=ac&
The Dreyfus Affair: 5 Important Facts for Today
Nov 7, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
The Dreyfus Affair: 5 Important Facts for Today
The world’s first museum devoted to Alfred Dreyfus’ trial just opened in Paris. Its lessons are needed today.
France’s newest museum is dedicated to preserving the memory of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish military officer who was falsely accused of espionage over a century ago. His trial ripped apart France, and the issues debated during Dreyfus’ court martial – including the role of Jews in France, antisemitism and the need for a Jewish homeland – continue to reverberate today.

“I say to the young: forget nothing of these fights,” French President Emmanuel Macron said when he formally opened the museum on October 26, 2021. “In the world in which we live, in our country, and in our Republic, they are not over.”

Here are five facts about the Dreyfus Affair, and why it’s crucial we continue to remember Captain Dreyfus today.

Falsely Accused of Espionage
In 1894, France was facing growing military strength and bellicose language from its newly unified neighbor Germany. Barely a generation before, France had lost the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1; Germany still occupied the Alsace region in the east of France and many French citizens were still living in exile from that region.

Alfred Dreyfus
One of the French families that had been forced out of Alsace was that of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, at the time the only senior Jewish officer in the French military. In 1894, Dreyfus was 36 years old and living with his wife and children in Paris. When a letter was discovered in 1894 that indicated someone in the upper reaches of the French military was selling sensitive secrets to Germany, French officials turned on Cpt. Dreyfus. Though they claimed to have damning evidence against him, there was nothing at all to indicate that Cpt. Dreyfus was the spy, including his handwriting which differed markedly from that of the real spy.

On October 15, 1894, Cpt. Dreyfus was summoned to military headquarters. Arrested, he was questioned repeatedly and kept in a cell for months. Dreyfus later described his treatment as amounting to torture. For Cpt. Dreyfus, being accused of betraying the country he loved was horrible, and he soon began to suffer a mental breakdown. “Since his last interrogation, undergone Thursday, he has fainting spells… He always protests his innocence and shrieks that he will become mad before it is recognized. He constantly asks for his wife and children,” recorded the governor of the prison where Dreyfuss was held. (Quoted in Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century by Ruth Harris. Metropolitan Books, New York: 2010.)

The real spy was Commandant Ferdinand Esterhazy, who’d been selling French military secrets to Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen, the military attaché at Germany’s embassy in Paris. Yet few officers probing the crime bothered to conduct a real investigation. Dreyfus’ trial was conducted against a backdrop of extreme antisemitism, with mobs of people and French newspapers openly calling for “death to Jews” and spreading vile antisemitic slurs. One of the most advanced newspapers in France at the time, the Catholic journal La Croix, “reached a huge audience during the Dreyfus era, and mixed lurid antisemitism with other themes of interest… According to La Croix the Jews had virtually taken over the Republic… Every incident was linked to the purported conspiracy of Jews to subvert Christianity and French society” (quoted in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth & Justice, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt. University of California Press, Berkeley: 1987).

A young Alfred Dreyfus
General Auguste Mercier, France’s Minister for War, insisted that Dreyfus be convicted, no matter what the evidence. Realizing that the army’s case against Dreyfus was weak, one of his men, Major Hubert Henry – who’d found the original letter and realized it had been written by a spy – fabricated damning evidence in handwriting that was similar to Dreyfus’. He then perjured himself in court saying that he’d been told by a secret source that Dreyfus was indeed guilty. (Ironically, Gen. Mercier’s son Charles would later go on to become the General Commissariat of Jewish Affairs during the pro-Nazi Vichy Regime in France during World War II, charged with drafting anti-Jewish laws.)

Insisting on Lies
Court-martialed, Dreyfus was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana in South America. There, he faced incredibly harsh treatment: guards were under orders never to speak to him, he received spoiled rations that made him sick, and he was manacled to his bed each night.

Evidence soon emerged that Maj. Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, was the true spy. When Esterhazy applied for a promotion, another French officer, Major Georges Picquart, noticed that Esterhazy’s handwriting matched that of the original spy’s letter. He realized that Esterhazy was in regular contact with the Germans and was likely the culprit. Yet even then, French authorities refused to act to free or retry Dreyfus. Esterhazy was court-martialed in 1898 but little evidence was presented against him and he was acquitted. Instead, Maj. Picquart was arrested and charged with forgery.



In 1898, Major Hubert Henry, the officer who’d forged the documents that framed Dreyfus, admitted his guilt. Sent to a military prison for more questioning, Maj. Henry took his own life. Yet it would be another year before Dreyfus would be retried (again, in a sham trial), and eight more long years before his name was finally cleared.

The Trial Split France
The “Dreyfus Affair” split France. By the fin de siecle period of the late 1890s, France was split into two bitterly opposing camps: the “Dreyfusards” who wanted the army to open a new trial and possibly exonerate Dreyfus, and the “Anti-Dreyfusards” who vociferously asserted Dreyfus’ guilt, often using harsh anti-Jewish imagery. In several cities, anti-Jewish mobs used the Dreyfus affair as justification for attacking Jews and property owned by Jews.

A January 18, 1898 New York Times article gives a sense of the scale of the violence. “A free anti-Dreyfus and antisemite meeting tonight at the Tivoli Vauxhall produced extraordinary scenes…. At 9 o’clock, on the opening of the meeting, the hall was a seething sea of humanity, crowding every part, gesticulating, shouting ‘A bas Zola!’ ‘Vive l’armee!’ and ‘Vive la revolution sociale!’ The members of the antisemite Committee displayed banners bearing the inscription, ‘Death to the Jews’....

Hundreds of people then left the hall and marched through the streets of Paris, shouting Anti-Dreyfusard slogans and "Death to Jews". Windows of Jewish shops and synagogues were smashed and broken.

The violence playing out on the streets was bitterly fought in the press and the salons of France. Some of the most vocal Dreyfusards and Anti-Dreyfusards read like a Who’s Who of Paris’ Belle Epoch. The painter Edgar Degas was an outspoken Anti-Dreyfusard. When one of his models once told the painter she thought Dreyfus was innocent, Degas screamed at her “You are Jewish!” and ordered her to leave. Other artists, including Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt, were ardent Dreyfusards.

The most famous Dreyfusard was the French writer Emile Zola, who wrote an open letter to the President of the French Republic, accusing the army of framing Dreyfus and then of covering up their lies. He named specific officers he accused of lying and leveled a charge of antisemitism at the French Government. The letter began J’accuse, “I accuse,” and sparked even more criticism and interest in Dreyfus’ case.


In the aftermath of his letter being published, Zola was convicted of libel and fled to England for nearly a year. Facing intense anti-Jewish and anti-Dreyfus sentiment, Zola refused to backdown. The new Dreyfus Museum in France is located adjacent to Emile Zola’s house.

The Dreyfus Trial Sparked Modern Zionism
One of the journalists covering Dreyfus’ trial was an Austrian named Theodore Herzl who worked for a Viennese newspaper called the Neue Freie Presse. He’d recently become the paper’s Paris correspondent, and he attended Dreyfus’ trial. What he saw shocked him.

Alfred Dreyfus during WWI
Herzl was an assimilated Jew who believed that Jewish assimilation was the key to ending years of antisemitism. Yet sitting in the courtroom, hearing chants of “A la mort les juifs” - Death to the Jews – created a turning point in Herzl's life. He began attending synagogue services, and began planning a novel which would envision the return of Jews to their homeland.

He published his novel Der Judenstaat, “The Jewish State”, in 1896 and became a tireless advocate for the establishment of a national Jewish home. In 1897, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, where he and other Jewish leaders called for the establishment of a Jewish country in the ancient Land of Israel. Elected president of the newly-founded Zionist Organization, Herzl founded a weekly Zionist newspaper and began seeking a charter for Jewish settlement in Israel.

Dreyfus is Still Being Called “Guilty” Today
In time, the incontrovertible evidence that the spy in French military ranks was Esterhazy, not Dreyfus, became impossible to ignore. In 1899, Dreyfus was brought back to France and court-martialed for a second time. The court found him guilty, but reduced his sentence. Embarrassed by this obviously unfair decision, French President Emile Loubet granted Dreyfus a pardon. He was only fully exonerated many years later, in 1906. Reinstated in the army at the rank of Major, Dreyfus went on to serve in World War I. He died in 1935 at the age of 76.

Even though the Dreyfus Affair was one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in French history, Dreyfus’ innocence has been questioned again. During World War II, the pro-Nazi Vichy regime that governed parts of France openly celebrated the Dreyfusards of a generation before, renaming some streets after prominent Dreyfusards and changing names of streets named after Anti-Dreyfusards.

Dreyfus’ innocence has been questioned even in recent months. In October 2021, the BBC announced a new Saturday night drama, Paris Police 1900. The series begins just before Dreyfus’ second trial: in promotional material for the show, the BBC described Dreyfus as the “notorious Jewish spy”. No mention was made of his obvious innocence.

The Dreyfus Museum in Paris, France

In France, far-right Jewish journalist and presidential hopeful Eric Zemmour has falsely claimed that the Dreyfus Affair is “murky” and that Dreyfus’ innocence is “not obvious”.

The new Dreyfus museum, called Maison Dreyfus, is believed to be the first museum in the world devoted to Alfred Dreyfus and his trial. Museum Director Lois Gautier has said he hopes the site “will show and tell about the affair but also pose questions on vital issues of tolerance, othering, human rights, women’s rights, the separation of church and state and the contract between the republic and its citizens.”

https://www.aish.com/ci/a/Dune-Judaism-and-Humanitys-Hope.html?s=ac&
Dune, Judaism and Humanity's Hope
Nov 1, 2021  |  by Rabbi Adam Jacobsprint article
Dune, Judaism and Humanity's Hope
Why does Frank Herbert's esoteric book continue to fascinate, generation after generation?

Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic “Dune” has resurfaced back in popular culture. The last time we saw a film attempt (unsuccessfully) to capture this complex and alluring story was during the Reagan administration. Why do people find this tale so captivating, and with the release of Denis Villeneuve's blockbuster version, why is a new generation being reintroduced to it right now?

Dune tells the story of two great houses who battle for control of the desert planet Arrakis with its invaluable natural resource of Melange – a “spice” that can induce higher states of consciousness, extend life and greatly enhance mental capacity. It also happens to be needed for interstellar travel.

Due to various palace intrigues, Paul Atreides, scion of House Atreides, the protagonist, flees to the desert and comes to learn that he has significant latent powers. He discovers the Fremen, the native people of Arrakis, meets his love interest and ultimately becomes their leader as they battle together to overthrow the Empire.



Like many enduring works of science fiction, Dune has an explicit spiritual component. Herbert drew deeply from the world’s faith traditions, calling the Dune universe a “spiritual melting pot” that took inspiration from Buddhism, Sufi mysticism and other Islamic belief systems, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism.


Among other concepts, Herbert borrows the Kabbalistic idea of “kefitzat haderech” – the “shortening of the way” experienced by some of the righteous when they travel where the earth shrinks and collapses, enabling one to travel great distances very quickly. He ascribes the power to Paul who is defined as "the one who can be many places at once." Paul, who gets renamed Muad'Dib (a name borrowed from the Arabic word for educator), essentially becomes the messianic figure long awaited by the most powerful spiritual group in the Dune world – the all-female order of the Bene Gesserit.

There is great power associated with his name and when properly pronounced can become a “killing word” – a force to be unleashed against evil when necessary – which is very similar to the Judaic idea of the power that is latent in the various names of God.

Perhaps the most well-known and compelling concept Herbert presents is the “Litany Against Fear” – a meditation used by the Bene Gesserit to calm and focus the mind in times of peril.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

There is a lot to consider here. How many great endeavors were avoided due to fear? How many relationships did fear cause to go unrealized or to remain unsatisfying or dysfunctional? How many poor decisions were undertaken in a moment of panic?

We are a generation uniquely bathed in fearfulness.
We are a generation uniquely bathed in fearfulness. Rates of juvenile anxiety are through the roof and climbing each year. In response, psychology treatments like Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy (ERP) have been developed that help people to directly tackle their fears. Popular apps like Headspace and Calm were launched to teach us how to breathe and how to relax. Despite these efforts and many others, many people live daily with a generalized sense that bad things are coming and coming fast.



I would argue that part of our issue is that our technological progress has far outstripped our self-knowledge. We have Space X, self-driving cars and MRI machines that can peer deep below our skins to examine and fix what is physically wrong but very little readily available “technology” to peer into our souls to see and fix what is emotionally wrong. Perhaps the use of physical techniques to analyze the physical brain can never lead us to properly apprehend the non-physical mind. It's like measuring distance in Fahrenheit; it just doesn’t work.

If we are purely physical beings in a wholly material reality it makes a good amount of sense to be afraid as there is nothing to hope for, no ultimate justice or meaning and no sense of security. For those who accept this vision of reality as the only rational one, the one that can be measured and numbered in accordance with the scientific method, the more our fear has grown.

But perhaps the fear is misplaced. Human consciousness goes through cycles of awareness and who knows if in the not too distant future the pendulum will start swinging back in the other direction. Perhaps science itself will help provide evidence for this hidden inner world.

Part of the reason that Dune has endured is that it provides us with a hope that the distant future is not some cold, chrome-covered and sterilized technocracy, but rather one in which the “technology” of the inner world kept pace with the material one. Many of Dune’s figures are enormously self-aware. The epidemic of depression, anxiety and fear in our culture is partly due to the lack of parity of these twin systems – the inner and outer worlds. Fear itself can prevent us from even undertaking inner work, but that same inner work will help us overcome our fear.

When we decide as a society to give equal weight to these two great endeavors we will indeed go to the stars – in peace and serenity.

Dave Chappelle and the Space Jews
Nov 1, 2021  |  by Benjamin Eltermanprint article
Dave Chappelle and the Space Jews
When a comedian offends minorities, they find themselves apologizing or facing career ending cancel-culture. Why do offensive Jewish jokes go under the radar?

You’ve probably heard about the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s new Netflix special The Closer. The stand-up act has come under fire for being transphobic, sparking outrage and a much-publicized walkout by Netflix’s own employees.

You may have also heard that within the 72-minute special there are two jokes about Jews, peppered in, seeming completely out of place. The first one:

In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from earth – that they're from an ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the earth thousands of years ago. Some other planet they go to, and things go terrible for them on the other planet, so they come back to earth, [and] decide that they want to claim the earth for their very own. It's a pretty good plotline, huh? I call it 'Space Jews.'

There’s plenty to be offended about. It’s not like the Jews left Israel looking for a more tropical climate or cheaper housing. We were conquered, ravaged, massacred, and the survivors exiled as a permanent minority for the next two thousand years. But hey. It’s just stand-up comedy, not a history lesson.

But then, about 30 minutes later into the routine, Chappelle lobs this one:

There was a black man in South Carolina, during slavery who somehow got granted his freedom by his so-called master. And when his master granted him the freedom he also gave him a plot of land. Now it turns out this brother was brilliant. He had a good eye, good knack for farming. And he farmed this plot of land very successfully and made a lot of money, and this is where the story gets crazy. When he got all that money this [guy] bought some slaves… Not only was he a slave owner, he became a slave breeder. And employed tactics that were so cruel even White slave owners were like, “Yo, my man.” He was a wild dude, but he did it just because that’s what successful people did at the time. He just wanted to be down, what a f**** tragedy. How can a person that went through slavery perpetuate the same evil on a person that looks just like him. It’s mind blowing. And shockingly, they’re making a movie about him. Ironically… It is called Space Jews.

Chappelle makes the insinuation that after surviving the Holocaust, quite possibly the most horrific evil the world has seen in the modern era, the Jews have turned around and done that same evil to the Palestinian people to an even worse degree. It's not a new accusation. I just wish if Chappelle was going to perpetuate the modern blood libel, he would have found a funnier way to do it. Honestly, the joke is pretty forced.

I just wish if Chappelle was going to perpetuate the modern blood libel, he would have found a funnier way to do it.
Is this worth getting angry over? I don’t know. Most of the routine is dominated by Chappelle’s reaction to accusations of transphobia pertaining to his previous Netflix special. In that reaction, Chappelle weaves nuance, humanity, and a deeper level of understanding of cancel-culture within his comedy. I believe he genuinely wants to further the discussion, opposed to attacking or condemning the trans community.

But that nuance is completely absent from his Space Jews jokes.

The second, and perhaps far more troubling, point speaks to a bigger problem concerning antisemitism in our culture as a whole. Though there have been criticisms of the antisemitic jokes, they rarely come from non-Jewish sources. And this isn’t the only time comedians get a pass on antisemitic humor. During the roll out of the Coronavirus vaccine, Israel took unprecedented efforts, vaccinating over half the population in record time. Soon after, Michael Che made his infamous, “I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half” joke on SNL’s weekend update. During the conflict between Israel and Hamas in May of 2021, both The Daily Show’s Trever Noah and Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver, unfairly slammed Israel while ignoring facts, context, and oversimplifying the conflict. None of the above-mentioned comedians have since apologized.

So why is it when a comedian offends minorities, they find themselves apologizing or facing career ending cancel-culture, while a Jewish joke here or there goes under the radar?

Punching Down, Punching Up
I believe the answer comes soon after the second Space Jews joke. It is there that Chappelle shares his experience about the first time he was accused of being transphobic.

...every time that I talked with anybody from the community since they always repeat the talking points from that article. My least favorite of which being, I hate this phrase, they say, “I was punching down on them.”

Punching down is a term that refers to someone in power criticizing someone less advantaged, while punching up means making fun of someone who is more powerful. The idea is that in comedy, if you’re making fun of the less fortunate or disadvantaged, you’re coming off as a bully. That’s what Chappelle was being accused of with these transphobic jokes. But when you make fun of Jews, it seems to be regarded as punching up.

Why?

Jews have consistently been minorities for the last two thousand years. In America, we are only 2.6% of the population, but according to a 2019 FBI crime statistic, Jews are the victims of over 60% of US hate crimes. Maybe it is because Jews are rich? But according to two major national studies,* between 16 and 20 percent of Jewish households earn less than $30,000 a year, and around seven percent of Jewish households earn less than $15,000. Compare that to the national poverty rate reported in the 2020 census, listing 11.4 % of the US population suffering from poverty.

Perhaps it is that Jews are considered disproportionately in positions of power. Presidential aides such as Henry Kissinger, Jared Kushner, Antony Blinken, Janet Yellen, and Merrick Garland comprise only a small list of past and present influential Jews in America. Clearly that must be proof that being a Jews means you can take some slings and arrows from late night and stand-up comedians. But does the success of a minority of a minority leave the rest of that minority vulnerable to unfounded criticism, ire hidden behind a punchline, and the perpetuation of lies? I don’t think so.

Should Jews band together to try to cancel these comedians the way they would for a transphobic or racist joke? Historically, I don’t think much good ever comes from silencing speech.
Should we launch a social media hashtag campaign to spread awareness that Jews really are on the punching-down side of the comedy aisle? No, Jews have always strived to overcome obstacles opposed to identifying as victims. Should Jews band together to try to cancel these comedians the way they would for a transphobic or racist joke? Historically, I don’t think much good ever comes from silencing speech.

Should we insist that comedy no longer punches up or punches down? That’s just unrealistic, besides, how many “why did the chicken cross the road, '' jokes can we come up with? So what’s the answer?

There are three levels of quality in discourse. The lowest level is talking about people. Jewish law prohibits speaking derogatorily about people and that's what fills the trashiest tabloids and gossip magazines, which focus exclusively on people.

The next level is talking about events or things. Sports, movies, cars. This isn’t particularly elevating, but you’re usually not tearing someone down (unless you’re focusing on the actors or the players, then you’re back to the lowest level.)

Finally, there are the loftiest topics, ideas. Religion, movements, education, politics (when you’re talking about policy and not politicians themselves). When we focus on ideas, we elevate our speech, our awareness, and our understanding of life.

When we use comedy to punch people, whether it is up or down, it can create stigmas, bolster prejudices, and concretize generalizations.
When comedy focuses on the absurdities of ideas, we get Abbott and Costello's “Who's On First”, a sketch celebrating misunderstandings. The iconic Dead Parrot routine from Monty Python, about a man desperate to convince a pet shop owner that his bird is indeed deceased rings true to anyone who has ever tried to cancel a phone plan or get their money back from any cable company customer service agent. Even racially motivated comedy from Chris Rock, Key & Peele, and much of the work of Dave Chappelle lampoons the deeper nature of race relations more so than just the stereotypes themselves.

When we use comedy to punch people, whether it is up or down, it can create stigmas, bolster prejudices, and concretize generalizations. Though comedians may not be hate-filled themselves, their words can give tacit permission to an audience member to stoke their hateful feelings.

But when comedy punches ideas, that can transcend barriers, engaging all minds without making anyone a target for ridicule. Dave Chappelle has reached this level many times in his career. I just wish he was willing to do it for the Jews rather than taking the cheap shot.

So Dave, please stop punching (whether it's up or down) on my people.

*See the Pew 2013 study and the AJC 2017 Annual Survey on American Jewish Opinion

Ridley Road: The Real Story of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Group in 1960s London
https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Ridley-Road-The-Real-Story-of-the-Jewish-Anti-Fascist-Group-in-1960s-London.html?s=ac&
Oct 24, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Ridley Road: The Real Story of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Group in 1960s London
The history of this remarkable movement is even stranger and more incredible than depicted in the hit series Ridley Road.

The BBC television series Ridley Road, which is also airing on PBS in the United States, presents a fictionalized version of real events in 1960s London. As PBS puts it, “Ridley Road tells the story of Vivien Epstein, a young Jewish woman who after falling in love with a member of the ‘62 Group’, rejects her comfortable middle-class life in Manchester and joins the fight against fascism in London."

The ‘62 Group was a real-life Jewish anti-fascist outfit. The popular series is based on the 2014 novel by the same name by Jo Bloom. Ridley Road refers to a street in northeast London in a neighborhood that used to be heavily Jewish (and still is home to an Orthodox Jewish community today). In the series, Vivien goes undercover in Britain’s fascist movement, the National Socialist Movement (NSM). In real life, the ‘62 Group comprised dozens of incredibly brave British Jews. The history of this remarkable movement is even stranger and more incredible than fiction.

Jewish Soldiers Coming Home After World War II
Many thousands of British Jewish servicemen and women contributed to the fight against fascism during World War II. After the war’s end in 1945, as these ex-soldiers returned home – many to the East End of London, which had a sizeable Jewish community – they were in for a rude shock. As journalist Marcus Barnett has described, “Within months of the war’s end, fourteen fascist groups and at least three (fascist) bookshops operated openly across the city (London). Newspapers with names like Britain Awake and The Patriot were readily available on street corners. Most alarmingly of all, fascists began staging outdoor rallies in the densely-Jewish East End once again”.

Sir Oswald Mosley at a far right rally
Each Sunday evening Oswald Mosley, a British aristocrat and former Member of Parliament who became an ardent fascist, held rallies at the popular Ridley Road Market. Sometimes dubbed “Yidley Road” because so many Jewish shopkeepers ran stalls there, Ridley Road Market was a vibrant outdoor street market. (It still remains today, in a much smaller form.) Fascists had long targeted the vibrant thoroughfare and market because it was seen as a Jewish center within London. British fascists shouted “Heil Mosley” in the market and loudly sang the Nazi German national anthem.

Morris Beckman, who died in 2015, was a WWII veteran who described the sickening way he and other Jewish ex-servicemen witnessed enthusiastic support for fascism after the war. “We would see newsreels in the cinemas of piles of Jewish men, women and children being bulldozed into lime pits in the concentration camps – and then pass an outdoor fascist meeting, or see swastikas painted in the street and antisemitic posters in Jewish areas such as Hackney, Edgeware or Stamford Hill.”

Morris Beckman, a founding member of the British anti-fascist 43 Group (Photo credit: Janette Beckman)

Jules Konopinski was another British Jew who had lost nine uncles and aunts in Nazi death camps. He later recalled, “Openly in the streets you had public meetings shouting out the same antagonism and the same filth as before the war… and now even worse – they were saying the gas chambers weren't enough.”

By April of 1946 – less than a year after Hitler’s defeat – these Jews and others had had enough. They arranged a meeting in Maccabi House, a Jewish sports club in the Hampstead neighborhood of north London, to decide how to fight back. Thirty-eight men who’d fought in the war showed up for the meeting, and five women attended. Almost all of the people present were Jews, though the son of one left-wing Labour MP also turned up to pledge his support.

The Jews of London needed a fighting force that would stand up to Nazi thugs.
The meeting was led by Alec Black, a British Jew who’d fought in the Normandy invasion in France. The Jews of London needed a fighting force that would stand up to Nazi thugs. The men and women assembled in Maccabi House would have two goals: opposing Nazis – with force, if need be – and pressuring British lawmakers to pass laws making racial incitement illegal. Anyone joining this group would face danger and the potential for arrest and long jail sentences, Black explained. Anyone who wanted to leave was welcome to do so. The crowd remained utterly still. Nobody walked out.

The group adopted a name, the 43 Group, after the number of people attending that first meeting. Soon their ranks swelled; 300 people joined within days. They began to fight back when Nazis attacked them. When a fascist ran through the Jewish neighborhood of Stamford Hill slashing people with a razor blade, two members of the 43 Group beat him unconscious. 43 Group members would infiltrate Nazi rallies, heckling speakers and fighting Nazi thugs.

43 Groupers (l to r) Leonard Sherman, Alex Carson, Morris Beckman and Gerry Flamberg at a 50th anniversary reunion in 1996

Within a year, the 43 Group had swelled to over a thousand members and the group had attracted the public support of some left-wing Labour MPs.

The First Battle of Ridley Road
On June 1, 1947, the British Union of Fascists announced a major rally in Ridley Road. The 43 Group decided to counterattack, dubbing their plans the “Battle for Ridley Road”, and preparing to break up the rally with battle-plan precision. As they approached the rally, the 43 members were shocked: the crowd was huge, and police were guarding the fascists. Nevertheless, the 43 Group sprang into action, infiltrating the crowd and beginning to heckle.

The fascists started shouting out particularly offensive and antisemitic taunts, then fighting broke out. Morris Beckman described the commotion in his memoir: “A young fascist about 18 years of age appeared in front of me and called me a “(obscenity) Jew (obscenity),” catching my left thigh with a nearly well-aimed kick. I hit his nose square on and it spurted blood… I kicked his backside as hard as I could and he staggered off. A hard blow landed smack on my right ear and completely unbalanced me…

Police break up clashes between followers of Sir Oswald Mosley and protestors in Ridley Road on 20 March 1949. Photograph: PA

“For a moment, I was dazed, disorientated. My assailant was about to close and finish me off when Sam grabbed him around the neck and pulled him to the ground. Then Sam jumped on him. The genial, good-humored Sam said, ‘I’m just breaking the bastard’s ribs so he won’t attend any more meetings.”

One member was Vidal Sassoon, who would go on to fame later in life as a world-famous hairdresser and businessman.
One member was Vidal Sassoon, who would go on to fame later in life as a world-famous hairdresser and businessman. In 1946 he was a 17-year-old London Jew and a 43 Group member. The 43 Group fighters “did not intend to allow the fascists ever again to rule the streets of London,” he later explained. “And so it began. We had turned the other cheek for the last time and, as a 17-year-old recruit, I was proud to be involved.”

Soon, the 43 Group was breaking up about fifteen fascist meetings each week. In 1947, members fought against fascists in Manchester, Liverpool, and other cities as well as London. By the late 1940s, however, Oswald Mosley was losing his grip on the movement. Public sentiment was turning, as well. Increasingly, print-makers were refusing to print fascist material for rallies. In 1950, the 43 Group disbanded.

 

In background standing atop his broadcast van, Sir Oswald Mosley, fascist leader, speaks during a May Day rally in London’s East End, May 1, 1948. (AP Photo)

Resurgence of British Fascism
In the early 1960s, British fascism raced a resurgence. In the words of Gerald Ronson, a founder and Chairman of Britain’s Community Security Trust (CST) – and an early member of the 62 Group – British Jews in the 1960s wanted to form an organization similar to the 43 Group to fight back.

“Very aggressive, extreme right-wing antisemitic gangs had been a problem in the UK for a long time,” Ronson explained. “To combat them, a bunch of Jewish soldiers coming home from the war formed the 43 Group and used to go around at night painting anti-fascist slogans. As those men got older, and young men my own age took up the cause, a new group was formed, called the 62 Group.”

Fascist Rally in Trafalgar Square
The turning point was a huge fascist rally held in 1962 in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London. The leader was Colin Jordan, a leader in Britain’s fascist movement (and the husband of Francoise Dior, niece of fashion designer Christian Dior). After founding a “Nationalist Club” in college, he eventually changed the name to National Socialist Movement (NSM) on April 20, 1962, Hitler’s birthday.

Flyer for neo-Nazi rally in 1962
On July 1, 1962, the NSM’s rally began. Jordan mounted a stage wearing a brown shirt, boots and an armband featuring a pagan sun wheel. Banners behind him proclaimed “Free Britain from Jewish Control'' and “Britain Awake”. Jewish and Communist groups were present to protest, and the rally degenerated into a melee. However, Oswald Mosley stepped in and announced an even larger fascist rally would take place in London three weeks later. Britain’s Jews knew they had to act.

Forming the 62 Group
Meeting in the Ephra Road Synagogue in southeast London, a group of local Jews decided that they needed to stand up and fight British Nazis. The 43 Group was their direct inspiration. They dubbed themselves the “62 Committee” (later changed to 62 Group) and got to work, infiltrating the NSM to gather intelligence about their activities.

An irate spectator attacks a drummer of British fascist leader sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the extremist right-wing British union movement, during a march through Manchester, England on July 29, 1962.

One early member was Gerry Gable, who later edited the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. He recalled that the 62 Group differed in some key ways from the 43 Group. By the 1960s, British fascists were also targeting West Indians and Blacks, and the anti-fascist fight addressed these issues as well. He described one 62 Group operation:

“When Mosley announced a march...it was decided to head him off by seizing his HQ in Victoria (an area of central London). The plan was to gain entry to the building by means of two attack groups. The first consisted of a couple of our toughest infiltrators… They were blonde, blue eyed and had documentation and party badges that got them inside. Then, while one of them engaged the security guards, the other opened the front door and let in another six or seven tough guys, who locked the door behind them.”

The operation went according to plan and the 62 Group members destroyed much of the fascist organization’s material. While some 62 Group members engaged in fierce fighting with the fascists, others headed down to the basement where documents and other items were stored. “The idea was not to steal anything, as via our infiltrators we already had copies of their membership files and other important documents. The task was to destroy everything that made their HQ work. It was very bloody.” The 62 Group won the fight, leaving the fascists tied up and their headquarters largely wrecked.

Infiltrating British Fascists
As Britain’s Community Security Trust, an organization that was founded by 62 Group member Gerald Ronson, explains, the 62 Group filled a vital need at the time.

“Police intelligence on the far right in the 1960s was virtually non-existent, but 62 Group information gathering was so good that it led...to the apprehension and conviction of a (fascist who set fire to a London yeshiva), and the arrests of several others who had perpetrated hate crimes. It was particularly efficient at unmasking the violent plans of Jordan’s National Socialist Movement, who aspired to develop a neo-Nazi international, and its paramilitary...offshoot.”

The End of the 62 Group
Gerald Ronson became the chief fundraiser for the 62 Group. By the 1970s, the British Jewish community’s priorities were changing. Middle Eastern terrorism was a growing threat, and it required different strategies and resources to those used for fighting fascists. “I was beginning to think that being hooligans to fight hooligans wasn’t the smartest way we could fight the enemy,” he later recalled.

Gerald Ronson

“I was thinking that we needed to beat the enemy by being more sophisticated than them. That meant setting up a new organization. It had to be more than 200 well-meaning tough boys behaving in an undisciplined fashion. It had to look for long-term solutions and I felt that the greater Jewish community in Britain should fund it.”

"Britain needs to take a long look into its brushes, and obsession, with fascism."
In the 1970s, the 62 Group ceased functioning and a host of British Jewish communal organizations sprung up in its place, including the Community Security Organization of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Community Security Trust, which works closely with the police to provide safety, security, and advice to the Jewish community in the UK.

Remembering the Past
The current television show Ridley Road is ensuring that the current generation remembers the bravery of the 62 Group members today. Executive producer Nicola Shindler explains that working on Ridley Road has been “incredibly uncomfortable as a Jewish woman. I wasn’t aware of how prevalent these views were in the 1960s and I did find it really shocking.”

British Jewish actress Tracy-Ann Oberman appears in the show as Nancy Malinovsky, the wife of a 62 Group leader. “At a time when we are reappraising British history through the eyes of minorities (related to) colonialism and slavery, Britain also needs to take a long look into its brushes, and obsession, with fascism,” she’s explained. “Ridley Road is a reminder that this resurgence of Jew-hate happened again in 1962, and we have forgotten that fascists held mass marches against Jews, set fire to synagogues and attacked Jewish people… And today, our community needs to know how vulnerable we were.”

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Beacon-of-Faith-A-Conversation-with-Rabbi-Jonathan-Sacks.html?s=ac
Oct 27, 2021  |  by Rabbi Efrem Goldbergprint article
Beacon of Faith: A Conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Rabbi Sacks on faith in God, making prayer meaningful, Jewish music and more.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to interview Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks who was visiting our community in Boca Raton. To commemorate his first yahrtzeit, here is a condensed and edited transcript of that conversation.

You are a beacon of faith - you promote faith, you teach faith, and you inspire faith, not only among the Jewish community and Jewish people but around the world. Do you ever struggle with faith? Do you ever feel that you confront doubt? And in those moments of uncertainty, what do you do to overcome it?

Let me be very blunt with you. I have had many crises of faith. But I have never had a crisis of faith in God. I have had many crises of faith in man. One crisis began as soon as I began to understand the Holocaust and to understand that this took place in the heart of civilized Europe, not some third world country in some medieval century.

I have never had a crisis of faith in God. I have had many crises of faith in man.
The biggest question of faith I had was: knowing all this was going to happen, how come God had faith in us? But I never lacked faith in God because I never expected the impossible from Him. I know perfectly well that He placed each of us here for a purpose and we are supposed to discern that and to walk ahead.

For me, the critical moment that defined my faith was achieved when I learned the Torah portion of Chayei Sarah. It begins with the death of Sarah. There is Abraham, having lost his life companion at the age of 137. At that point, he has received from God three promises: Number one – I will give you the land. He promised that to him seven times. Number two – I will give you children – He promised that to Abraham four times. I will make you a great nation, they will be as many as the stars in the sky, as the sand on the seashore. And finally, I will make you not one nation but many nations.


But he has only one son.

Where was the father of many nations? Where was the infinite number of descendants? What did Abraham do at that moment when he should have had a crisis of faith?

He understood that God said “Walk on ahead of me.” So, he bought the first plot of land. He then made sure his son got married so he would have Jewish grandchildren. Later, in a strange episode, he takes an additional wife named Keturah and has six more children, who become the fathers of many nations.

In other words, instead of expecting God to do it for him, Abraham realized that God was expecting him to do the hard work for Him. Once I understood that I never ever had a crisis of faith.

What do you do when you run into a rough patch when you’re having trouble connecting with praying, when you feel distant, when it’s not flowing, and you don’t feel as much the presence of the Almighty?

There are several things one can do: Number one I try to listen as I’m praying and be surprised by one phrase or one sentence in the prayer book, and that will be my meditation for the day. I’ll focus on that. It may stay with me for a week.

Rabbi Sacks obm, with Rabbi Efrem Goldberg

For example, we say every day "God creates the cosmos and knows the name of every star." That’s God the Creator. Then it says "God builds Jerusalem and ingathers the exiles." That’s God as the shaper of history. But in between those two verses is a middle verse: "Who heals the broken heart, administers to their wounds." There is King David, the author, telling us that sometimes healing one person’s broken heart is as important as creating a universe or shaping history. You can live off that one sentence for a year.

Concentrate on one little thing at a time.
Concentrate on one little thing at a time. The second point is that prayer has to be sung. I’ve said many times that when language seeks to break free of the gravitational pull of earth, it modulates from speech to song. I’ve spent a lot of time in my chief rabbinate encouraging chazzanim to write new liturgical music, to use songs to make the service more participative, and to encourage shul choirs. I’m not an expert in music but I made that a key element. We used a lot of musical creativity I think that music frees the spirit and if you are ever short of meditative intent, you need to have the song to pray with.

Thirdly, something might just catch you if you create the silence in your soul to listen. When I’m at a critical point in my life, which is pretty much every day, I just listen: God, what are You telling me? Somehow prayer orients you. I call prayer “Jewish cognitive behavioral therapy.” It changes the way you look at the world; it changes the way you feel about the world.

We are always promoting more Torah learning and kindness opportunities. Some are involved in social action and social justice. What do you think that the Jewish community can be spending more productive time promoting that is being overlooked? Are there initiatives and emphases we should be focusing on that we are neglecting?

I think all that goes with the affective dimension of Judaism, the emotional life, is being neglected. There’s some nice Jewish music here, but some of the most popular music is actually non-Jewish pop music set to Jewish words or acapella, which is great. I love it. The Maccabeats - I’m their biggest fan. But I like to see music coming from the Jewish soul. I think we haven’t done enough with the affective dimension, and music is probably the most important.

We write everyone else’s music. Irving Berlin wrote “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,”, Mahler’s eighth symphony, Catholic mass. Where do we write our music? I think we are missing the aesthetics of it and music is the most obvious example.

When it comes to a spiritual possession, the more you share the more you have.
Cinema, too, isn’t used enough in this regard. I think we haven’t done enough with that to tell people what the life of faith does for you. I have so many stories that I think ought to be made into film. Stories of ordinary people I know who have done extraordinary things.

I also believe we need to be doing more outreach. The difference between material possessions and spiritual possessions is that the more you share material possessions the less you have. But when it comes to a spiritual possession, the more you share the more you have. When you don’t give, something in your spirit dies.

A personal question: When we look at your life and productivity, whether the trajectory of ascending to the chief rabbinate, publishing 30 books, 17 honorary degrees, being named a Lord, etc., it just seems that you have had success after success, triumph after triumph. Have you ever experienced failure? Have you ever had any challenges that you couldn’t overcome and what gave you the tenacity to persevere?

Ha! Have I ever experienced failure?! My goodness me! Oooh! [Laughter.]

I nearly failed my first year in university. I nearly failed my second year in university. I was turned down for virtually every job that I applied for. Since I was a kid, I wanted to write a book. I started when I was 20 and I gave it every minute of spare time that I had. Even when Elaine and I went to a concert I would be writing notes during intervals or between movements during a symphony. Yet, I failed for 20 years! From 20 to 40 I had a whole huge file cabinet of books I started and never finished.

What changed is I happened to be reading the preface to “Plays Unpleasant” by George Bernard Shaw. It opens by saying that if you’re going to write a book, write it by the time you’re 40 or forget it. I thought it was a sign from God. Someone is telling me something because I had no idea why I happened to read that passage by that writer at that time. I thought to myself that it was my last chance. So, I wrote my first book at 40 and then I wrote a book a year ever since.

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill put it beautifully: success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. The secret was marrying someone who believes in you and then to just keep going. Never stop! Keep on going, day after day.

It is absolutely necessary to key into your mental satellite navigation system, your destination. Because if you don’t know where you’re trying to get to, you’ll never get there. I knew I wanted to write a book. It took 20 years of failure until I finally succeeded in the twenty-first year.

Are there specific moments that you felt God's guiding Hand in your life, that things could have gone in different directions, and those moments specifically stand out that it guided you to where you are now?

I feel that way most of the time! I nearly drowned on my honeymoon. I couldn’t swim and I had just gone under for the fifth time. We were in Italy and there was no one near me. I remember thinking just before I was about to die – what a way to begin a honeymoon. And, what’s the Italian word for help?

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/My-Mothers-Trauma-of-the-Kindertransport.html?s=ac&
My Mother's Trauma of the Kindertransport
Oct 24, 2021  |  by Ann Goldbergprint article
My Mother's Trauma of the Kindertransport
Just before WWII, Britain rescued 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany, Austria and Poland, including my mother and her two sisters.

Operation Kindertransport was borne out of the notorious pogrom known as Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) which took place on Nov 9th 1938 across Germany. Synagogues and Jewish owned shops, businesses and schools were attacked and burned to the ground. Thousands of Jews were assaulted leaving many dead and injured. In the days that followed many Jews were arrested and taken to concentration camps.

As news filtered through to the world, most countries didn’t react. Although Britain wouldn’t allow more than the usual small quota of Jewish refugees to enter Palestine where they still held the mandate, the government decided do something to help the children who were now at risk in Europe.

After a debate in the House of Commons, the British government decided to allow an unspecified number of refugee children under the age of 17 into Britain and save them from the Nazi slaughterhouses. The final number of children that were admitted was 10,000.

Jewish organizations immediately started to draw up lists of eligible children, starting with those who were most at risk – those whose parents were already in concentration camps.

My grandfather, Rabbi Paul (Pinchas) Holzer was the rabbi of the Neue Dammtorsynagogue in Hamburg. During Kristallnacht his shul was only slightly damaged, as it was set back from the main road, and was still usable. Despite being warned to keep away, my grandfather arrived the following morning, as usual, for morning services. He was immediately arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.


That put his children, my mother and her two sisters, in the most eligible category and they were given places on the first kindertransport which left Germany the following month in December 1938.

My mother on the left, and her two sisters

Pain of Separation
Whenever I used to think of the kindertransport (‘kinder’ is German for children) it was with gratitude to the organizers in Europe and Britain. I never gave much thought to the trauma the children and their parents must have gone through. I never stopped to imagine how my mother and her sisters felt having to leave their mother knowing that their father had already been arrested by the Nazis. Or how parents must have felt entrusting their toddlers to total strangers since it was their children’s best chance for survival, while they themselves probably had little chance at all.

How did they part? Did they put on a brave face smiling and kissing them light heartedly saying that with God’s help they would see them again in a few weeks? Did they cry helplessly having to be dragged away from their beloved children knowing they would probably never see them again?

How strong and courageous my grandmother must have been. I discovered that she went down to the Gestapo headquarters to try and secure the release of her husband while at the same time trying desperately to arrange for her children to stay with Jewish families in England.

It was only much later in her life that the trauma my mother experienced started to show through.
Growing up I always knew that my mother, who was 13 years old at the time, had been one of those saved when she came to England together with her two sisters. They were among the very few fortunate children who were reunited with their parents shortly afterwards, when they too managed to escape the Nazi clutches.

It was only much later in her life that the trauma my mother experienced started to show through.

Austrian Jewish refugee children, members of one of the Children’s Transports (Kindertransport), arrive at a London train station. Great Britain, February 2, 1939. Photo: USHMM

While we were young children, growing up in a small industrial town in the center of England, the war and the Holocaust was never mentioned. We knew little about it ourselves so we never thought to ask questions. I was named Ann after the princess, Queen Elizabeth II’s only daughter, who was born shortly before me. This was a show of gratitude to the British people who had saved my mother and so many other Jewish children.

On their arrival in England the three sisters were assigned to three different families. I remember my aunt telling me, “We were lost, unhappy and scared and had no idea if we’d see our parents again. First we were separated from our parents and then when we got to England the three of us were separated from each other. We were completely alone in a strange country and no one understood us. We couldn’t talk English and our foster parents didn’t speak German.

The trauma of her first Hanukkah in England just after their arrival as refugees from Germany never really left her – it had just been supressed.
“Soon after we arrived it was Hanukkah. A time to be at home with family. It was awful. I guess we all cried bitterly during that time – I know I did.”

This helped me understand why later in life my mother started having a negative attitude towards the holiday, becoming somewhat despondent and distant from the joy of the festivities. The trauma of her first Hanukkah in England just after their arrival as refugees from Germany never really left her – it had just been supressed.

Throughout our childhood, Hanukkah was filled with the usual candle lighting, dreidel games, gift giving and latkes and she never told us of her first Hanukkah in the country. It was only when she was older and her thoughts returned to the more distant past, as they do with elderly people, that the terrible memories returned.

Separated Again
A few weeks after their arrival, their parents managed to escape to England and for a short time they were reunited. But the family, whose home my grandparents were assigned to, didn’t like children and the young girls had to be sent away once again to other families.

My mother attended the Jewish Secondary School, an orthodox school run by the legendary Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld who was instrumental in helping many thousands of children reach safety in Britain. But when Britain joined the war against Germany, in September 1939, it became apparent that Germany would inevitably bomb London and the British government decided to evacuate all the children in London to the countryside. On September 1st in an operation known as Operation Pied Piper, busload after busload of children left the capital for unknown destinations in the British countryside.

Evacuation – that meant yet another separation from their parents.

As the years went by and we, her four daughters, grew older, Mum would occasionally read to us from her war time diaries. She had kept a diary ever since she had arrived in England, including the time she was evacuated to the countryside town of Shefford during the London blitz.

Her entire school spent that time together under the tutelage of their headmistress Dr Judith Grunfeld. Once again each child was allotted a foster family, most of whom had never seen a Jew in their entire life.

One of the kindertransport children arrives in England, 5 May 1939

There were many humorous incidents while these good-hearted non-Jewish families tried to understand the orthodox, kosher-eating children who were housed with them. Why did they refuse food even when it was obvious they were hungry? Why did they go to sleep with the light on on Friday night?

For most of the children this was the last of their carefree childhood. After the war the majority discovered they were orphans. Many went from Shefford to farms in England to prepare for their future setting up kibbutzim in Israel, while others settled and made their home in England.

My mother and her sisters were among the extremely fortunate few who knew their parents were alive and waiting for them in London. Nevertheless, the separation traumas they had experienced during those harrowing years were still there, buried in their subconscious waiting to surface later on.

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https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Jews-and-Yogurt-5-Little-Known-Facts-.html?
Jews and Yogurt: 5 Little-Known Facts
Oct 19, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Jews and Yogurt: 5 Little-Known Facts 
Plus two amazing Jewish yogurt recipes.

People have been eating yogurt for millennia, and Jews have played a major role in spreading its appeal. Here are five little-known Jewish facts about this dairy treat – plus some unusual and delicious Jewish yogurt recipes.

1 Ancient Israeli Staple
The Torah describes ancient Israel as “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8). Food historians believe that the “honey” the Torah describes was date honey, a delicious thick, sweet syrup made from dates that is still popular in the land of Israel and throughout the Middle East today.

The milk that the Torah describes as being abundant in the Land of Israel was likely eaten in large quantities as yogurt.

Dr. Mark Thomas of University College London has studied the diets of ancient people and believes that yogurt was first created thousands of years ago, in the Neolithic Period, in the Middle East. Middle Eastern farmers began domesticating sheep, cows and goats, and found that their milk was a key source of nutrition. Without refrigeration, the milk invariably began to ferment, forming yogurt. : “If you milked a cow in the morning...in the Near East by lunchtime it would have started to ferment into yogurt,” Dr. Thomas said.


A depiction of meal with cheese from Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval handbook on health and well-being based on the Taqwim al‑sihha, an 11th-century Arab medical treatise.

Fermenting milk allowed it to keep longer. It also helped break down some of the lactose in milk, making it easier to digest. Ancient yogurt was likely discovered by shepherds who stored milk in skins made from sacks fashioned out of goat stomachs. In the warm climate, the milk reacted with enzymes from the goat stomach sacks and fermented into yogurt. According to writer Ronit Treatman, ancient Jewish shepherds prepared their yogurt a differently. Since the laws of kashrut prohibit mixing milk and meat, Jewish cooks prepared yogurt by “heating the milk over a fire and stirring it with a fig tree branch. The sap of the fig tree curdled the milk…” The result was a soft cheese, which was sometimes eaten with honey.

Turkish Favorite
Yogurt became popular across the Middle East in ancient times. In Arabic it was called laban, which can also mean “milk”. Many popular yogurt varieties in Israel are called laban today, probably stemming from the Hebrew word lavan which means white. According to food historian Gil Marks notes that yogurt was most famously embraced by the Ottoman Turks, who made it a central element of their cuisine and spread it throughout the Ottoman Empire. In fact, yogurt became such a staple in Turkish and Arab kitchens that a popular Muslim myth sprang up that the patriarch Abraham was the first human to make yogurt, and that he was taught the recipe by an angel.

Jewish Doctor Bringing Yogurt to France
King Francis I ruled France from 1494 to 1547; he is famous for instituting the Franco-Ottoman Alliance, forming a pact with Ottoman Emperor Suleiman I. (Suleiman is well known in Israel today for ordering the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s city walls in 1537. These magnificent walls still stand, lending grandeur to central Jerusalem’s beautiful skyline.)

King Francis I
It seems that King Francis I experienced some stomach upset and his new ally Suleiman I apparently wanted to curry favor with the French monarch by helping cure him. Suleiman I dispatched a Jewish doctor from Turkey to France to bring some yogurt as a cure for the king's stomach ailment.

Suleiman I was onto something: eating yogurt has long been considered a cure for some stomach problems, and recent research has borne this out. Consuming yogurt has been shown to reduce some stomach upset in laboratory conditions.

American Jewish food writer June Hersh notes that the Jewish doctor who was sent to France walked that considerable distance on foot since he wouldn't ride on the Sabbath. He brought along his own flock of sheep with him on the long journey, and he personally used their milk to prepare royal yogurt for the king. The Jewish doctor’s cure worked: yogurt helped King Francis I feel better, and the Jewish doctor made his long way home back to Turkey.

Yogurt in Sephardi Cuisine
Yogurt has long had an outsize role in Jewish cuisine, particularly from Sephardi regions. “Yogurt is to the Sephardim what sour cream is to the Ashkenazim,” notes Jewish cookbook writer Claudia Roden (cited in The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden, Alfred A. Knopf: 1996). “It was always part of the meatless meals (and) was used like a sauce – poured over hot rice or cracked wheat or lentils and spread on slices of fried eggplants, or served as a bed for poached eggs or as an accompaniment to vegetable omelets.”

In Iraqi Jewish homes, yogurt was typically sweetened with date honey. In some Sephardi communities, yogurt was made with buffalo milk, which was said to result in the thickest, creamiest yogurt. Sometimes yogurt is strained to result in a thicker cheese called labne, which is eaten as an accompaniment to vegetables or salad.

Jewish Doctor Inventing Dannon Yogurt
In the late 1800s, one of Europe’s leading scientific voices belonged to Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), the son of a Jewish woman in Ukraine. Dr. Metchnikoff worked at the Louis Pasteur Clinic in Paris and spent his later years advocating lactic-acid producing bacteria (found in yogurt and yogurt-like drinks) as a powerful way to extend lifespans. His groundbreaking research helped spark a global “milk craze” of drinking sour milk concoctions including buttermilk, carbonated milk, and yogurt drinks.

Dr. Isaac Carasso
One young Jewish doctor in Barcelona in Spain encouraged this craze. Dr. Isaac Carasso was born in Salonika in Greece in 1874, and moved to Spain to practice medicine. (His surname is sometimes variously spelled as Karasu and Carusso.) He began importing yogurt from the Balkans to Barcelona, where he encouraged his patients to eat this healthy food as a cure for various stomach ailments.

In time, Dr. Carasso decided to open his own yogurt factory in Barcelona. He named it after his son Daniel – whose nickname in the local Catalan dialect was “Danone”. Dr. Carasso experimented with manufacturing Danone yogurt in small individual glass jars, making it easy for consumers to enjoy his delicious yogurt.

Daniel Carasso studied in France, and in 1929 he expanded his father’s Danone yogurt business into Paris. Eventually Daniel became head of the business, but trouble soon followed. After World War II broke out, Daniel fled Europe to the United States, traveling with a friend, Joseph Metzger, a Swiss-born Jew. The two businessmen settled in New York in 1942 and opened an American branch of Danone, called Dannon, in the Bronx. There, they manufactured flavored yogurts in one-cup sizes, packaging their yogurts in plastic containers.

Daniel Carasso

They were moderately successful at first. Most of their customers were Greeks and Turks living in New York and longing for a taste of home. Daniel and Joseph began experimenting with new tastes to appeal to American palettes. First, they placed some strawberry preserves at the bottom of their plain yogurt so consumers could mix the jam into the yogurt. This proved a hit, and soon the businessmen added lemon curd, blueberry jam and raspberries to their yogurts. Sales soared as Americans discovered yogurt snacks for the first time.

Daniel reclaimed the French part of his company after World War II, and in 1951 he sold it to the Beatrice Corporation. Today, Dannon is the largest yogurt manufacturer in North America, controlling over a third of the $10.1 billion market in America alone.

Creative Israeli Yogurt Recipes
Yogurt is a popular ingredient in Israeli and Jewish kitchens today. “For Israeli cooks, yogurt is far more than a healthy snack,” observe Israeli cookbook writers Einat Admony and Janna Gur: “It’s an essential cooking ingredient used for sauces, dressings, and sweet and savory baking and adds a fresh creamy element to countless dishes.”

Here is a delicious savory sauce recipe they suggest. It goes well with any fried food, such as fish, and is also delicious with vegetables and salad.

https://www.aish.com/jw/me/Bibi--the-Bible.html?
Bibi & the Bible
Oct 21, 2012
by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldsteinprint article
Bibi & the Bible
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speeches reveal the meaning and mission of Israel and Jewish destiny.

When leaders make speeches, people listen not only to the specific policies and positions but also to the vocabulary of ideas, which impacts public discourse and has the power to create a new way of thinking. An analysis of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speeches reveals an important philosophy of the meaning and mission of Israel and of Jewish destiny.

The prime minister often invokes Judaism and the millennia sweep of Jewish history rooted in the Bible as the context for the ideas and policies he presents to the world.

His most recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27 is a classic example of this:

“Three thousand years ago, King David reigned over the Jewish state in our eternal capital, Jerusalem. I say that to all those that proclaim that the Jewish state has no roots in our region and it will soon disappear – We say in Hebrew, ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’ and the Jewish state will live forever.”

In his speeches, Netanyahu integrates Jewish history and destiny with Torah values, as he did on that occasion before the nations of the world: “Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Every year for over three millennia we have come together on this day of reflection and atonement. We take stock of our past. We pray for our future.

“But at the end of Yom Kippur, we celebrate. We celebrate the rebirth of Israel. We celebrate the heroism of our young men and women who have defended our people with the indomitable courage of Joshua, David and the Maccabees of old. We celebrate the marvel of the flourishing modern Jewish state.”

Modern Israel, as the third great Jewish commonwealth in 3,300, is presented here as the spiritual heir of its illustrious predecessors, sharing the values and moral vision of generations of Jews throughout the ages.

Providing a full historic context is crucial to understanding Israel today.
This speech is an example of others that the prime minister has given in recent years, framing the context of Israel as a Jewish state within the values of Judaism and Jewish history. In his 2011 speech to the UN General Assembly, the prime minister referred specifically to Jewish history as rooted in the Bible:

“In my office in Jerusalem there’s an ancient seal. It’s a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. This seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there’s a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu.

“That’s my last name. My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin – Benyamin, the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Samaria 4,000 years ago, and there’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.”

These biblical references made by the prime minister are very significant. Providing the full historic and value-based context is crucial to understanding Israel and the Jewish people today. It is of vital moral and strategic importance that Zionism and the modern State of Israel be recognized not to have originated just over 100 years ago in Basel, Switzerland, but, in fact, as being rooted in almost 4,000 years of Jewish history, beginning with G-d’s promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

This is important from a moral point of view because it establishes our right and connection to the Land of Israel.

If Zionism is perceived to be a modern phenomenon, then the accusation that Israel is a colonialist power is indeed tenable. On the other hand, if it is understood that the Land of Israel has been the Jewish people’s biblical and historic homeland of thousands of years, then the dialogue in the global arena is dramatically transformed; as the prime minister said in his 2011 speech to the United States Congress:

“We’re not the British in India. We’re not the Belgians in Congo. This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw his vision of eternal peace. No distortion of history could deny the 4,000-year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land.”

Such assertions do not preclude the possibility of territorial compromises to establish a Palestinian state on the biblical land of Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, as the prime minister said in the very next paragraph of the same speech:

“But there is another truth. The Palestinians share this small land with us. We seek a peace in which they’ll be neither Israel’s subjects nor its citizens. They should enjoy a national life of dignity as a free, viable and independent people living in their own state – They should enjoy a prosperous economy, where their creativity and initiative can flourish.”

But even with territorial compromise, the historical context is crucial. If Israel concedes that the land of the West Bank – Judea and Samaria – is not Jewish land but illegally occupied Palestinian land, the framework of the international debate shifts. Israel can demand that its security needs be taken into account, but the world will counter that ending the illegal occupation is the overriding priority.

These roots  give Israel the sense of pride, destiny and divine mission to go forward with confidence.
On the other hand, by asserting that all of Israel, including the West Bank, has for thousands of years been Jewish land, the State of Israel stands before the world with moral authority and from a position of strength, ready to negotiate and even give away land for the establishment of a Palestinian state, but doing so with the integrity of being the rightful owners of the land and not colonial robbers.

In his concluding words at the UN this year Prime Minister Netanyahu said:

“The traditions of the Jewish people go back thousands of years. They are the source of our collective values and the foundation of our national strength. Throughout history, we have been at the forefront of efforts to expand liberty, promote equality and advance human rights. We champion these principles not despite of our traditions but because of them. We heed the words of the Jewish prophets Isaiah, Amos and Jeremiah to treat all with dignity and compassion, to pursue justice and cherish life and to pray and strive for peace. These are the timeless values of my people and these are the Jewish peoples’ greatest gift to mankind. Let us commit ourselves today to defend these values so that we can defend our freedom and protect our common civilization.”

By framing Israel’s vision from a moral perspective the prime minister creates the opportunity of establishing an alliance of values bringing together most nations of the world. The struggle that is taking place between radical Islam on the one hand, and Israel on the other, is a struggle of values, and a powerful international alliance that can be galvanized around the values of human dignity, freedom and the sanctity of human life.

Furthermore, this approach of a broad moral vision is not only about convincing the outside world – it is also about creating an inspiring calling for Jews, in terms of which Israel is a meaningful and sacred part of almost 4,000 years of Jewish history and destiny, and a crucial part of the fulfillment of our divine and eternal values. If the modern State of Israel is cut off from its roots in Jewish history, Torah values and divine destiny, it cannot, in the long-term, survive the military and political forces which seek its destruction.

It is these deep roots that give Israel its moral justification and determined motivation to withstand the passing storms of the day, as the Jewish people have done for millennia. It is these roots that give Israel the sense of pride, historic destiny and divine mission to go forward into the future with confidence and faith.

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

https://www.aish.com/sp/ph/Why-Believing-in-God-Should-Make-You-More-Kind.html?s=ac&
Oct 20, 2021
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
Why Believing in God Should Make You More Kind
The most concrete way we can connect to God is treating each other with kindness. The rest is commentary. Go learn.

Our forefather Abraham is famous for two seemingly disparate things: bringing monotheism to the world, and his unceasing acts of kindness, as demonstrated in this week's Torah portion when Abraham welcomes three desert nomads and serves them a meal.

Monotheism and kindness actually go hand in hand because the belief in One God leads to kindness.

Why?

Here are two ways they are connected.

Once Abraham recognized the existence of God, an Infinite being Who has no limitations or needs, his next challenge would be: How does one come close to this Transcendent Being? He realized that he could create an affinity with God by emulating Him. The more he resembled God, the closer he would become to Him.


As the Talmud says, (Shabbos 133b) "Just as He is compassionate and merciful, so should you be."

So Abraham thought: There is nothing a perfect, Infinite Being can derive from creation; it must be all for us. We have done nothing to deserve to be born. All of life is a gargantuan, undeserved gift of pure kindness.

In addition to spreading the idea of monotheism to the world, Abraham strove to be like God by being a giver.
The trait of kindness, therefore, is the bedrock of existence. So in addition to spreading the idea of monotheism to the world, Abraham went further and strove to be like God by being a giver.

It's a blow-away experience to commune with God, as Abraham is seen doing at the beginning of this week's Torah portion (Genesis, 18:1). God appears to him and he receives some form of prophecy. But then Abraham actually leaves God's presence to go make dinner for three total strangers! How could he walk away from what must be an intense, transcendental experience to perform such a mundane, pedestrian activity?

Not at all. Abraham did the greater spiritual act. Instead of just talking to God, he became like God through his acts of kindness. With this, he teaches us: "Greater is welcoming guests than receiving the Divine Presence" (Shabbat 127a).

We All Have the Same Father
There is another reason why monotheism is the foundation for giving. Let's look at the flip side. If God did not exist, and the only reality is the material world, would I have a moral obligation to extend myself and give to those who are weaker and in need? For those who prefer it, life is one massive Squid Game, it's the strong who survive. Welcome to the law of the jungle.

Every person is created equally in the image of God, no matter the color of skin, religion, cognitive ability, or sexual orientation.
Putting God into the equation changes everything. An Infinite Being is the Source for everything and we all share the same Father. That means that all human beings are part the family of mankind; we are all brothers and sisters. Every person is created equally in the image of God, invested with a Divine soul, no matter the color of skin, religion, cognitive ability, or sexual orientation.

A father loves all of his children and wants his children to look after each other. We have a moral duty to extend ourselves and to give, especially to those who are the weakest members of society who need our help the most.

Judaism's Most Important Principle
The great Talmudic sage, Rabbi Akiva, famously said, "'Love your neighbor as yourself' (Lev. 19:18) This is the most important rule in the Torah" (Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 30b).

This statement echoes Hillel's reply to the would-be convert who asked him to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel said, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn” (Shabbos 31a).

I can understand that loving your neighbor is important, but how can all of Judaism be reduced to interpersonal relationships? Where is God in the picture?

Understanding the connection between monotheism and kindness answers this question. When you love your neighbor, you are doing so much more than giving. You are first recognizing the Godliness that is inherent in that person. And you are becoming like God. "Love your neighbor" encompasses both relationships – man to man, and man to God. That's why it's the pillar of Judaism.

Jewish spirituality isn't only in the synagogue; it's in our homes, our workplace, our streets, because the most concrete way we can connect to God is treating each other with kindness and compassion.

https://www.aish.com/sp/ph/Heaven-and-Hell-Explained.html?
Heaven and Hell Explained
Oct 17, 2021 | by Tzvi Gluckinprint article
Heaven and Hell Explained
The afterlife is the place where the person you chose to be encounters the person you had the potential to be. That shouldn’t make you nervous.

For whatever reason – and it comes up more often than you’d think – many people have told me that Jews don’t believe in heaven or hell.

Which is sort of true.

The Jewish concepts of heaven and hell are radically different from how they are portrayed in popular culture, but Judaism does believe in an afterlife, which was the point of two of our recent social media posts.

If you read those posts carefully – because, obviously, that’s how people consume content online – you’ll notice they both end the same way: the afterlife is the place where the person you chose to be encounters the person you had the potential to be. Depending on the life you lived, that prospect is either exhilarating or terrifying. (Me? I am in no hurry to find out.)


Our source is the great medieval thinker and philosopher, Maimonides (from his Laws of Repentance, 8:2), where he explains this statement about the afterlife from the Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 17A)1. “In the world to come, there is no eating, or drinking, or sex … rather, the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads, and bask in the glow of God’s presence.”


But that statement isn’t so straightforward. Once you know there’s no eating or drinking, you know the Talmud must be describing a reality that’s different from the physical world. It’s a place lacking physicality, physical bodies, and possibly even time. Since that’s the assumption, how can the Talmud then say the righteous – who, for our purposes, I’ll define as people who have fulfilled their spiritual potential – are sitting? You can’t sit if you don’t have a body. And how can they have crowns on their heads? Again, if you don’t have a physical body, by definition, you also don’t have a head.

As Maimonides explains, the Talmud isn’t being literal, it’s being conceptual. “Not sitting” is an expression of passivity, which means an experience without labor or effort. The “crown” refers to knowledge, or an understanding of reality that was acquired while alive. That awareness, ultimately, is your life in the afterlife.

To put that another way, life is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to choose and become. It’s an opportunity to acquire spiritual awareness, and in the process, to actualize your potential.

Death, on the other hand, is a passive experience of the person you chose to be. Except there’s a catch: your post-death experience is tempered with clarity. You’re no longer blinded by ego, justifications, or rationalizations; and your perspective is broader than the constraints of a three-dimensional, time-bound, physical world.

In other words, you get a glimpse of the real you. Hopefully, you like what you see.

That idea is consistent with a different Talmudic statement we paraphrased in another post (from Ethics of the Fathers, 4:22). “One moment of growth and doing the right thing in this world is better than the entire next world. But one moment of spiritual bliss in the next world is better than all the pleasures of this one.”

One moment of freedom – of free choice and self-actualization – is better than an eternity of spiritual bliss. It’s what the Torah means when it says that man is “created in the image of God.” The image of God has nothing to do with your physical appearance – God doesn’t have a physical appearance – it has to do with independence. God is independent and creates worlds. You are as well. You are independent to create your own world.

In that sense, the afterlife is a drag: no more opportunity or choice. But the opposite is also true. One moment of spiritual bliss in the next world is better than all the pleasures of this one, which is what the Talmud calls, “basking in the glow of God’s presence,” or an elevated experience that’s impossible while confined to a limited, physical world. Life is an amazing opportunity, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The challenges never seem to end, and then you die. But at least once you’re dead, the work is over, and, hopefully, that’s when the fun begins. The Talmud is saying that nothing comes without effort, but the effort is worth it.

One of our readers asked:

What if your “potential” doesn’t come to fruition because of illness? In my case it’s genetic, not something I got from making poor choices.

And another responded:

Is it possible your “greatest potential self” is different than what you imagine it to be? That what you are meant to achieve is not what you currently define as success? I.e. it might be emotional greatness, or a greatness in bringing others closer to God, or a greatness of insight, etc.

Which, I think, hits the nail on the head. Your potential isn’t an objective goal like winning a race or making a lot of money. It’s subjective and relative to you. It’s the spiritual journey you embark on in this physical world, and in that sense, we’re all in the same boat. Who doesn’t have challenges and seemingly insurmountable problems? No one gets a free ride. How you deal with them – with both the major struggles as well as the minor annoyances – and what you make of yourself in the process, is the point.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to say. The afterlife is an enormous topic, and a lot of it is shrouded in mystery, or as another reader noted:

Jewish concepts around death are numerous and tend to be intentionally vague for good reasons. You get a basic framework, let it go and focus on your work here and now.

And isn’t that the point? Don’t get hung up on what happens after you die. Worry about making good choices. Make your life incredible now. You’ll have plenty of time to worry about the afterlife after you’re dead.

https://www.aish.com/sp/ph/Why-God-Matters-What-Gives-Life-Meaning.html?
Why God Matters: What Gives Life Meaning?
Oct 13, 2021
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
Why God Matters: What Gives Life Meaning?
Whether you believe in God or not, we all need to wrestle with the question: Is there meaning in life?

Why is it so hard to write about God? You'd think with monotheism being the pillar of Judaism, this topic would be a shoo-in, but it's a real challenge to talk about an abstract Infinite Being in a way that resonates with Jews from all backgrounds. God isn't a trending topic. The fact that we are stuck in a finite world means we can't fully wrap our heads around the nature of the Infinite, so the conversation can get frustrating.

Nevertheless, I'm going to try. After all, monotheism was the revolutionary discovery Abraham brought to the world that paved the way for the covenantal relationship between God and his progeny.

Knowing that God exists is the first of the Ten Commandments. As Maimonides writes in the opening chapter of the Mishneh Torah, his codification of Jewish law, "The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of all wisdom is to know that there is a Primary Being who brought into being all existence. All the beings of the heavens, the earth, and what is between them came into existence only from the truth of His being... The knowledge of this concept is a positive commandment, as (implied by Exodus 20:2): 'I am the Lord, your God, Who took you out of the land of Egypt, the house of slavery..."

What actual difference does God make to my life?
What is the significance of God's existence? What actual difference does it make to my life?

A comprehensive answer to this question would require a book. This article is going to present one consequence, and it's the one that compelled me to leave my non-religious upbringing in Toronto and go to Israel to explore the issue of God's existence.


Everyone needs meaning in life. Meaning is what enables us to get out of bed and face the challenges of the day. As Nietzsche succinctly said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

This was one of the major conclusions of Viktor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning and founder of Logotherapy. As an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp, he witnessed that those who survived clung to some type of purpose to carry on living. Whether it was to bear testimony, to publish a manuscript, to be reunited with family – their drive for meaning enabled them to survive. Those who lost all hope and meaning were more likely to perish.

If life has no meaning, there are only so many parties, distractions and escapes a person can use to numb the existential pain and suffering before he decides it's just not worth the bother and chooses to opt out altogether. After all, if life indeed has absolutely no meaning, what difference does it ultimately make being dead or alive?

But is there meaning in life? How does one satisfy this primal need?

This is a question all human beings, whether you believe in God or not, need to wrestle with. The need for purpose is so great, it demands to be quieted, either through genuine satiation or escape and stupor.

If there is no God, what creates meaning?

According to this worldview, life is a random accident. There is no purpose for existence. The formation of life from atoms and electrons hurtling through space for millennia was without design and intent.

So what quells man's drive for meaning? In a nutshell, existential thought says we create our meaning. As Jean Paul Sartre said, "Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is… Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism."

We create our meaning.

Finding meaning in something that doesn’t objectively exist does not make it meaningful. It's called delusion.
But there is a fundamental problem with this solution. Finding meaning in something that doesn’t objectively exist does not make it meaningful. It's called delusion.

For example, someone calls his mother and she sounds different, more passionate and alive. "Mom, you sound different today."

"Oh I am, honey! I woke up today and I'm Angelina Jolie! I'm rich, famous and beautiful! Life has never been this good!"

If this were to happen to you, how would you respond? Would you be happy for your mother who has never sounded this happy, or would her delusions and hallucinations be a devastating blow?

Delusion, the belief in a meaning that doesn't exist, works as an escape, circumventing the existentialist's conundrum of suicide, but don't confuse it for real meaning. The stark reality in a world where there is no God is that all of life is a meaningless accident.

The existence of God resolves the issue of meaning. Life was created, by design, with purpose and intent. Meaning is not make-believe; it's real.

A profound consequence of the existence of God is that the meaning and purpose we seek from life are indeed real.
The one thing I knew when I was young man searching for meaning before I became an observant Jew was that the moments of meaning I had experienced and yearned for with all my being were not delusions. Quite the opposite: they were the times I felt most connected to what is truly real.

I believe most people intuit this. Do you think the meaning you get from your marriage, being a parent, from your work and acts of kindness are mere illusions that we use to delude ourselves, or something deep and real?

A profound consequence of the existence of God is that the meaning and purpose we seek from life are indeed real. We don't need to resort to fake substitutes to bide our time before slipping into oblivion. Meaning is real, and we have a limited time in this world to attain it.

Explore more of these issues in Rabbi Coopersmith's course, Who Is God and Why Should I Care? Click here for more information.
https://academy.aish.com/course/adventures-jewish-philosophy

https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Its-Not-All-or-Nothing.html
It's Not All or Nothing
Oct 11, 2021  |  by Emuna Bravermanprint article
It's Not All or Nothing
We all make mistakes. Don't let one slip derail you.

I’ve been making some poor choices lately – not robbing a bank or gambling away our life’s savings kind of poor choices – but poor choices none the less. I haven’t been the person I wanted to be. I had such lofty aspirations during the High Holidays – exciting and uplifting visions of the new me to come. But in my eagerness to return to “normal” life after a (wonderful) month of holidays (and a lot of eating!), I rushed forward too hastily. I was too caught up in the pleasure of routine to remember my goals, to stop and really focus.

I let myself down. The good news is that all is not lost. In fact, not even close. Although Yom Kippur is a special and unique time for repentance and return, this gift from the Almighty is not for a limited time only. We can change whenever and wherever we like. We don’t have to wait; in fact, we shouldn’t.

I have a tendency to catastrophize. Back in the olden days when my kids were young and we took family trips, if one thing went wrong (including some fighting in the back seat which was inevitable) I would say “this trip is ruined”. My husband taught me to adjust that thinking. The whole trip isn’t ruined because of one (or two or three or…) moment of fighting, because of one wrong turn, because of a delayed start. Life is full of wonderful moments and plenty of challenges and we can’t judge our experiences or expectations based on the challenges alone or how we meet them.

Some people may be inspired anew to read the Torah portion every week. What if the first portion, Genesis, came and went and you already missed that opportunity? Or, what if you’re like me and you got part-way through and distracted, and the next thing you knew…it was the following week! Is the whole project to read the weekly Torah portion now a disaster? Should we just give up? That’s probably the first thought that comes to mind, but the more rational – and Jewish – approach is to just say, “Okay, I’ll start now.”

This damaging philosophy often happens in more mundane areas as well. Let’s imagine that we recognize that certain lifestyle changes might help promote our spiritual growth. For example, we make a commitment to go off sugar. At first we're holding strong, and then someone offers us a homemade cookie or we meet a friend for coffee at a really good bakery or…whatever the reason, we indulge. Our initial counterproductive response is to immediately tell ourselves that we’ve blown our diet (or any lifestyle change) and continue to indulge for the rest of the day.


The more productive reaction, the one more consistent with the it's-not-all-or-nothing Jewish approach is to try to avoid sugar for the rest of the day. And then the next day. And so on. One mistake does not ruin it all.

Even if we make a mistake, we can get back on track and keep moving forward.
So, whatever our goals, spiritual or physical or some combination, the important realization is that even if we make a mistake, we can get back on track. Don't let one slip derail the whole project. We're all works in progress. We go forward at times and then slide back. The important thing is to pick ourselves up and to keep moving forward. To never give up.

And remember to ask the Almighty for help – to give us the strength, determination, focus and energy. He’s rooting for us and wants to help us move forward. We only have to ask.

https://www.aish.com/ci/a/James-Bond-5-Jewish-
James Bond: 5 Jewish Facts
Oct 9, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
James Bond: 5 Jewish Facts
Ian Fleming's antisemitism and other ways Jews loomed large in the world of 007.

1. Bond’s creator was a known racist and antisemite.
Ian Fleming wrote the 12 spy novels featuring James Bond, the British secret agent which formed the basis for the successful film franchise. Fleming was a fascinating and complex character. Born in 1908 into an upper-class British family (his father was a Member of Parliament), Fleming was educated in England, German and Switzerland. Before the Second World War, Fleming worked in Moscow as a journalist, then in Britain as a banker. During World War II, Fleming served as a high-ranking intelligence officer in Britain’s Royal Navy.

One of Flemings’s greatest contribution to the Allied victory was his role in planning Operation Goldeneye, a top-secret spy operation aimed at ensuring that Nazi Germany did not invade Spain and Portugal and could not develop capabilities to spy on Britain’s territory in Gibraltar. After retiring from the Royal Navy, Fleming worked for the London Sunday Times, then moved for much of the year to an estate in Jamaica – named Goldeneye – where he wrote many of the Bond novels. He died in 1964.

Ian Fleming

To modern eyes, the original James Bond novels are relics of a crueler and less politically correct past, replete with shockingly offensive descriptions of women, Black people and other ethnic groups. Fleming’s biographer Matthew Parker observes that “Fleming – and Bond – looked down on pretty much everyone who was not British and perceived people of all colours in terms of negative stereotypes of race and nationality” (quoted in Goldeneye – Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica by Matthew Parker: 2015).

Mordechai Richler, the Canadian Jewish writer, believed that Bond’s nemeses evoked anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that Jews are somehow driven by a superhuman lust for power or greed. Thus, Bond villain Auric Goldfinger says that “The day when we shall have made ourselves the sole possessors of all the gold in the world, the real power will be in our hands.” Sir Hugo Drax, the villain in Fleming’s book Moonraker, says “The surest means of attaining (power) is to have supreme control over all industrial, financial, and commercial operations.” Both these statements – and many others scattered throughout the James Bond novels – seem like the untrue slurs that have for countless generations been baselessly hurled against Jews.


“My boys are crazy about the James Bond movies,” Richler noted. “They identify with 007, as yet unaware that they (as Jews) have been cast as the villains of the dramas.”

2. The Bond villain Goldfinger was named after Ian Fleming’s famous Jewish neighbor.
The chilling villain of Fleming’s 1958 novel Goldfinger is Auric Goldfinger. Auric is Latin for Gold and, as his name implies, the character of Goldfinger is obsessed with gold – along with the power that unlimited wealth could bring. Much of the novel describes James Bond thwarting Goldfinger’s plan to steal the gold reserves from Fort Knox in the United States.

Fleming named this odious character – whose obsession with gold and wealth and power echoes anti-Jewish conspiracy tropes – on his real-life Jewish neighbor in the leafy neighborhood of Hampstead in North London. This real-life Goldfinger was Erno Goldfinger, a noted Hungarian Jewish architect who moved to London in 1934. Ian Fleming seemingly loathed Erno Goldfinger, who threatened to sue Fleming after the book Goldfinger came out.

3. Jewish producers – including a war hero – helped bring James Bond to the screen.
After reading the book Goldfinger, the Canadian-born Jewish film and theater producer Harry Saltzman optioned the rights to make films of the James Bond books. He turned to his friend Wolf Mankowitz, a British Jew who grew up in the old Yiddish-speaking East End of London, for writing help. Mankowitz wrote much of the screenplay for the very first James Bond film, Dr. No.

Wolf Mankowitz

He was aided by the American Jewish playwright Richard Maibaum. Maibaum was already well known for his Broadway plays, including the early anti-Nazi play Birthright, produced in 1933. Maibaum helped in writing Dr. No, and then continued to help write nearly a dozen other Bond films.

Journalist Seth Rogovoy explains that “More than anyone, perhaps even Fleming, Maibaum can be said to have created and sustained the mythical icon of Bond.” Jewish actor Joseph Wiseman played the ghoulish Dr. No, setting the stage for James Bond villains to be cartoonishly cruel and larger than life.

Perhaps nobody was as instrumental in creating the mystique of James Bond in the movies than a real-life war hero, Sir Ken Adams (born Klaus Hugo Adam in 1921). Adams was fascinated with art and design from a young age. His Jewish family fled Germany in 1934 after Hitler rose to power. When World War II broke out, 18-year-old Ken Adams was still a German citizen and thus not eligible to join the British army – yet he was determined to fight.

Ken Adam in the pyramid control centee he designed for the 007 film Moonraker (1979).

Adams joined the Pioneer Corps, the only branch of Britain’s service in which German-born men could enlist. He asked to fight for the Royal Air Force and became a RAF fighter pilot – only one of two German citizens to be allowed to. He was under particular danger: if he’d been shot down and was discovered to by the Nazis to be a Jew from Germany, Adams would have faced certain torture or death.

After the war, Adams became an art director in cinema. He joined the James Bond project in 1962 with Dr. No. It was Adams who invented James Bond’s bulletproof Aston Martin car with its array of gadgets, including “Browning heavy machine guns, rams, tyre shredders, revolving number plates, smokescreen and oil slick projectors, a homing tractor, and an ejector seat,” accroding to Adams' obituary in The Guardian.
 


One of Adams’ most memorable design features was the simplest: the tarantula that is dispatched to kill James Bond in Dr. No. “I think it is one of my favorite sets, because it is so simple and theatrical,” Adams explained. “I think I had 450 pounds left in the budget. So I really had to come up with something very quickly that was very easy to construct and at the same time create a very important effect.”

4. Goldfinger was temporarily banned in Israel.
The movie Goldfinger was a hit around the world when it first came out in 1964, and Israel was no exception. Over a quarter of a million Israelis watched the film in its first six weeks in the cinemas. The film’s popularity was despite the fact that the German actor who played the movie’s arch enemy Auric Goldfinger, a beefy man named Gert Frobe, didn’t speak English. An English actor dubbed most of Frobe’s lines.

Gert Frobe, Goldfinger

Soon after the movie came out, the British Daily Mail newspaper ran a story titled “Of course I was a Nazi!” An Israeli journalist had asked Frobe what he’d done during World War II, and Frobe admitted that he’d joined the Nazi party in 1929 at the age of 16 because he was attracted to their policies. In 1956, Israel had passed a law banning any films that included wartime Nazis. Goldfinger stopped being played in Israel’s cinemas.

Over the next weeks, more of the story came out. Even though he was a member of the Nazi party, Frobe had saved the life of a Jewish woman and her family during the Holocaust. He explained that he and the woman were both assigned to work in a hospital in Vienna in 1941. Realizing that she was in danger, he hid both her and her family in his apartment for the duration of the war. “The fact that I helped them was proved after the war before I was allowed to start work again,” he told The New York Times in December 1965.

Soon, a man named Mario Blumenau went to the Israeli embassy in Vienna that his life and his mother’s life had likely been saved by Mr. Frobe. Within months, Israel allowed Goldfinger to resume being shown in Israel. It was a case of truth being much more dramatic than the capers of the fictional spy thriller on the screen.

5. James Bond might have been modelled on a real-life Jewish spy.
James Bond might have been modelled on a real British Jewish spy, Sidney Reilly, who bore some uncanny similarities to Ian Fleming’s creation. (As a former high-level intelligence official, Ian Fleming surely would have known about Sidney Reilly, who is sometimes called the most successful British spy of all time.)

Born Shlomo (some say Sigmund) Rosenblum in 1873 in Ukraine, Sidney Reilly was recruited by the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), the forerunner of Britain’s famed MI6 intelligence service, and given the number ST1 – much as James Bond is known by his handlers as 007.

Sidney Reilly

A mysterious figure who spoke seven languages, Reilly was recruited to help Britain battle Bolsheviks in the early 1900s. Known as the “Ace of Spies,” Reilly’s heroic actions seems like something out of a James Bond film. One notable adventure came in 1905, after an Australian miner named William D’Arcy discovered huge oil fields in the Persian Basin. D’Arcy needed a huge investment to exploit the oil field and arranged a meeting with members of the French Rothschilds family to discuss financing the project.

As D’Arcy and the Rothchilds conferred on the yacht, a priest suddenly barged in, asking for money for Catholic charity. In the course of the discussion, this “priest” managed to convince D’Arcy that the British could give him a better deal in exploiting the oil field. The priest was none other than Sidney Reilly, acting on orders from the SIS, and the eventual company that D’Arcy and the UK Government formed eventually became British Petroleum.

During World War I, Reilly continued working for the British, infiltrating German lines on several occasions. He told people that he even attended a General Staff meeting during the war at which Kaiser William II was present. Like James Bond, Reilly was an inveterate gambler, womanizer and collector of high-end antiques. He married several times and went under an array of pseudonyms. He was finally captured in Russia in 1925 where he’d likely been sent by the British government to further their anti-Communist activities there, and was executed near Moscow.

The Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram Outage and the Flood
Oct 7, 2021  |  by Rabbi Efrem Goldbergprint article

How are we using the gift of increased time?

Most of us have become accustomed to using WhatsApp to communicate and in some cases manage our family, social, and professional lives. More than 100 billion messages a day are sent through Whatsapp (most of those are just in the group my wife and I have with our children).

The pandemic has forced us to socially distance, quarantine, and lockdown physically. And this past week WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were down for a number of hours. Both were terribly unpleasant, uncomfortable, and even painful. But they also presented opportunities to reflect, reset and recalibrate, the former on our connection with people and the latter on the role and dependence on technology in our lives.

The generation of Noah also struggled navigating an unprecedented technological breakthrough.
We're not the first generation to struggle with navigating an unprecedented technological breakthrough, how it should impact how we spend time, and what our ultimate goals should be.

The Torah tells the story of Noah and the flood, when God performed a “hard reset”, undoing all that He had created and restarting the world anew. God took such a drastic measure because, the Torah tells us, the world had become filled with corruption and moral depravity.

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 108a) makes a mysterious comment – “the generation of the flood became corrupt as a result of the great blessing that God had bestowed upon them.” Which blessings are the rabbis referring to and how did they corrupt humanity?


Rabbi Avraham Pam zt”l suggests that the key to understanding this can be found in Noah's very name. The Torah tells us that Lemech named his son Noah saying, “This one will bring us rest (nuach) from our work and from the toil of our hands from the ground which God had cursed.” Until that time, the world had continued to suffer from the curse that God gave Adam, “you will have to work with the sweat of your brow to draw bread from the ground.” Until Noah was born, man labored from morning to night and worked tirelessly with his bare hands just to have food to eat, leaving no recreational down time.

Lemech saw prophetically that Noah was destined to invent the plow and other agricultural tools that would make man much more efficient and would ease his burden. He therefore named him Noah from the root nuach, to rest, because his Noah would provide tremendous relief to an overworked population.

The inventions of the plow and other tools were the great blessing that the Talmud referenced. Yet, instead of becoming empowered, liberated, or enriched by these innovations, they became corrupt. These inventions increased productivity, improved efficiency, and yielded more free time. This time could have been used constructively, productively, and meaningfully. Instead, the generation used their newfound downtime for corrupt activity. The breakthrough and advancement could have brought spiritual ascent, instead they brought moral decline.

Is the gift of greater time leading to moral decline or moral development and progress?
We are blessed to live in the greatest era of technological breakthrough of all time. Simple tasks that used to eat up our time can now be accomplished in seconds, or through automation or even speech recognition, in no time at all. We long ago became accustomed to the washing machine, dishwasher, bread machine and microwave, but we now even take things like GPS navigation systems, or the ability to Facetime or WhatsApp video with multiple people in multiple destinations across the world, for granted.

Every single day, something is invented which is meant to make our lives more noach, easier. They are designed to free up precious time. Do we fill that time meaningfully and mindfully or is that time squandered on mindless behavior? Perhaps it is no coincidence that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were wiped out and then flooded with messages in the week we read the story of the Noah and the flood, as a reminder that a generation is defined by what it does with the blessing of progress it experiences and the free time it discovers.
Technology can either enslave or liberate, free up time or eat up our time, move us forward, or take us backwards. Moments like a worldwide outage provide opportunities to consider our own relationship with technology and time.

Shalom Elaine,
A Turkish man joined a search party for a missing person, not realizing that the person everyone was looking for was him!

In northwest Turkey, Beyhan Mutlu went drinking with a buddy in a forest. He didn't return home and his wife reported him missing. While Mutlu was sleeping in a house in the forest, military forces and rescue teams were called in to search for him.

Mutlu woke up in the morning, came across the search party and decided to help them find the missing person. Once he heard them calling out his name, it dawned on him that he was the focus of the search!

He spent more than half an hour looking high and low for himself.

I was struck by this true story that happened this week. Click here to read my take on what it can teach us about ourselves.
READ NOW https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/The-Man-who-Joined-the-Search-Party-Looking-for-Himself.html?s=ac

Muster the courage to examine the only place we can truly find who we are looking for – inside ourselves.

I didn't know if I should laugh or cry.

I read the news item about a Turkish man who joined a search party for a missing person, not realizing the person everyone was looking for was him!

In the town of Inegol, northwest Turkey, Beyhan Mutlu, 51, went drinking with a buddy in a forest. He didn't return home and his wife reported him missing. She heard he had walked away from his friend, drunk.

While Mutlu was sleeping in a house in the forest, military forces and rescue teams were called in to search for him.

Mutlu woke up in the morning and came across members of the search party. He decided to help them find the missing person. Once he heard them calling out his name, it dawned on him that he was the focus of the search.


Mutlu told Turkish news that he told them he was in fact Beyhan Mutlu, the man they were looking for, but they continued to search. "They didn’t believe me. The truth came out when my friend saw me."



He spent more than half an hour looking high and low for himself.

It's hard to resist turning a story like this into metaphor for life.

To find myself, I need to look within, not outside of myself.
So many people are out there in the forest, joining the party and searching for themselves, without stopping to realize: I'm right here. To find myself, I need to look within, not outside of myself.

We hunger and yearn for connection, meaning and self-understanding. Driven to fill the void, we join the throngs of people, co-travelers who are also searching, and set our focus externally, too afraid to closely examine the only place we can find who we are looking for – inside ourselves.

We are masters at distractions, attempting to fill that inner ache through an endless stream of ersatz meaning – approval and attention from wherever we can get it, a bevy of addictions (food, films, fun, fantasy, drugs), external power and success – while we move further away from person we're really looking for.

We need to hit the handbrake and stop (too bad that Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram outage we experienced this week wasn't longer than six hours). In order to find the person we're looking for, we need to stop roaming the forest and muster the courage to look inside ourselves.

In his 48 Ways to Wisdom series, Rabbi Noah Weinberg placed a huge emphasis on urging people to take the time to answer, with clarity and conviction, these questions: What am I living for? What are my priorities in life? What is my game plan to attain these goals? In order to answer these foundational questions, it's essential to spend time interviewing the most fascinating person you could ever meet in the world: yourself.

Rabbi Weinberg encouraged us to sit down with pen and paper, phones turned off, and take the time necessary to answer the following questions:

What are my primary goals in life?
Why did I choose this career? Am I satisfied with it?
For what do I want to be remembered?
How can I be happier and more fulfilled?
What are my secret dreams and ambitions? Why haven't I fulfilled them?
How can I be a better parent, spouse, friend?
Answering these questions play an important role in understanding who you are. Call off the search party. The person you're looking for is right there inside of you. Take the time, determination and focus to discover who you really are.

https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Heroism-and-the-Ghost-Army-of-WWII.html?
Heroism and the Ghost Army of WWII
Sep 19, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Heroism and the Ghost Army of WWII
Gilbert Seltzer, a veteran of a top secret Ghost Army troops, has died.

Lt. Gilbert Seltzer, a celebrated Jewish architect and decorated World War II veteran has passed away at the age of 106. He served in a top-secret military unit during the war whose secrets were closely guarded for 50 years after the end of fighting. He was the oldest living veteran of the “Ghost Army”, a group of 1,100 American soldiers who created elaborate illusion that there was a large American military battalion stationed where none existed.

The Ghost Army began in 1944, during the days leading up the the Normandy Invasion. A group of American soldiers with backgrounds in the arts were gathered together and offered a dangerous mission: create decoys to draw Nazi fire while actual American battalions operated elsewhere in the vicinity.

Gilbert Seltzer
It was the brainchild of Staff Sgt. Ralph Ingersoll. Before the outbreak of war, Ingersoll was a celebrated writer and the founder of a left-leaning New York magazine called PM, whose defining principal was being “against people who push other people around.” By 1944, Ingersoll was working in “Special Plans”, figuring out ways to deploy non-traditional forces. Inspired by Operation Bertram, in which British forces had used dummy guns and tanks in their victory over Nazi forces at El Alemain in Egypt in 1942, Sgt. Ingersoll thought of creating something similar within the US military as it raced across Europe in the aftermath of the Normandy Landings.

“My prescription was for a battalion that could imitate a whole corps of either armor or infantry,” Sgt. Ingersoll later recalled, “a super secret battalion of specialists in the art of manipulating our antagonists' decisions.” He thought it seemed far-fetched, but the military authorities believed it could work and started forming the top-secret unit alongside preparations for the Allied landings in Normandy.

Going to war against Nazi forces by creating ersatz military bases, dummy tanks and fake guns was incredibly risky. “We came to the conclusion that this was a suicide outfit,” Lt. Seltzer recalled. Despite the danger, he signed up for the unit, along with about 1,100 other soldiers.

They arrived in France with cargo trucks full of sound equipment, records, inflatable tanks, and other props. “We would move into the woods in the middle of the night, going through France, Belgium and Germany, and turn on the sound,” Sgt. Seltzer recalled, “so it sounded like tanks were moving on the roads. The natives would say to each other, ‘Did you see the tanks moving through town last night?’ They thought they were seeing them… Imagination is unbelievable.”

Ghost Army soldiers built replicas of airplanes, tanks and trucks and covered them with camouflage net, purposely doing a bad job so that Nazi reconnaissance units could spot the pretend equipment. They recorded records of real American troops and convoys and played them at top volume from special speakers to fool the Nazis and local villagers. Ghost Army soldiers also exposed themselves in broad daylight, frequenting local cafes and spreading rumors about there being a large American military presence in the area where they were creating their painstaking illusions.

In an image from the 2013 PBS documentary “Ghost Army,” a soldier stands next to an inflatable rubber Sherman tank. It took about 30 minutes to inflate a single tank.

The Ghost Army eventually took part in 20 major operations. One of the most daring came in March 1944. Allied forces had crossed France; the next target was entering into Germany, but the Rhine River formed a formidable barrier. Without crossing the Rhine, Allied forces couldn’t succeed in finally subduing Germany, yet the river’s bridges were fiercely guarded by Nazi troops. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops were called in to help.

They positioned themselves ten miles south of the location where the American Ninth Army Division was planning to cross the Rhine, and went about creating a major diversion. They inflated their tanks, and created realistic looking airplanes, cannons, trucks and guns. They blared the sound of American troops building pontoon boats and sent out radio messages indicating a large buildup of American troops in the area.

Their trickery worked: Nazi troops fired on the Ghost Army soldiers, while four American Army divisions crossed the Rhine in the largest amphibious operation since D-Day. “We are credited with saving as many as 30,000 men, which I think is an exaggeration,” in their Rhine operation, Sgt. Seltzer later recalled. “But if we saved one life it was all worthwhile.”

Gilbert Seltzer, 2010

After the war, Sgt. Seltzer, a native of Toronto, returned to New York, where he’d worked as an architect and resumed his career. Other notable veterans who served with Sgt. Seltzer in the Ghost Army included Bill Blass, the fashion designer, the artist Ellsworth Kelly and photographer Art Kane. Speaking of his time with the Ghost Army, Sgt. Seltzer recalled, “It was a very proud time in my life… I am very happy I went through it, but I wouldn’t do it again for anything.”

The Ghost Army deserves to be better remembered today, and Sukkot is an ideal time to recall and celebrate their heroism and incredible achievements. As we move out of our seemingly solid houses this Sukkot and spend this beautiful holiday in the flimsy sukkah, we can ask ourselves what is truly real and solid in our lives and what is illusion.

Outside, with nothing to shield us from nature, we’re aware of our dependence on the Divine in a visceral way. In the sukkah, it’s not our property or our wealth that truly define us; stripped of our material possessions, we’re free to ponder who we truly are at our cores. What do we want to accomplish? What do we value? What false truths and illusions are we operating under? What ghost armies do we unthinkingly believe in or follow in our own lives today?

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97-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor is a Viral Sensation on TikTok
Oct 2, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
97-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor is a Viral Sensation on TikTok
Videos by Holocaust Lily Ebert and her great grandson Dov are reaching millions of people, teaching them about the Holocaust.

For years, 97-year-old Lily Ebert has been speaking to groups about her experiences and educating the next generation about the horrors of the Holocaust. When the pandemic forced her to stop appearing in public at live events last year, Lily teamed up with her then16-year-old great grandson Dov Forman to find ways to tell her story during Britain’s lockdown. The result has been a series of videos that have gone viral on social media, and a book about Lily that has climbed to the top of the best-seller lists in Britain is about to be released around the world.

My relationship with my great grandma has always been very close,” Dov explained in an Aish.com exclusive interview. He grew up in Northwest London in the heart of a large, Orthodox Jewish family, and his Great Grandma Lily has always been a vital presence in his life.

Lily Ebert with her great grandson Dov Forman celebrating on TikTok

“She’s very much the queen of the family,” Dov describes. Lily’s husband died when his children were young and since then, Lily has been the “head of the family.” Today, at 97, she continues to live independently, spending Shabbat and Jewish holidays with her relatives. “She comes to us nearly every week for Shabbat,” Dov explains. “She’s got a really young personality.”

Dov is interested in history and has always been interested in learning about the Holocaust. Though Dov knew his great grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, he didn’t know all the details about her remarkable story until last year.


During the first lockdown in 2020, my great grandma had to adapt. She kept saying, ‘Let’s do something – how can I carry this story on, Dov?’” Dov came up with a plan for Lily to address his history class over Zoom. The event was a success. Lily spoke for nearly two hours, detailing her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. The experience was very emotional for Dov and he wrote about it for a local Jewish newspaper and tweeted about it to his small number of twitter followers. (Dov estimates that he had about ten.) They had no idea that they'd eventually reach millions of people.

Lily Ebert’s experiences in the Holocaust were horrific. When the Nazis took over her hometown of Bonyhad in Hungary in 1944, they forced Lily, along with her mother, her brother and her three sisters, into a cattle car which took them to Auschwitz. When they arrived at Auschwitz after their harrowing journey, “everyone was half-dead.”

In Auschwitz, Lily and her family were met by the notorious Dr. Mengele, dubbed the “Angel of Death” for his cruel and sadistic experiments on prisoners. At the train tracks in Auschwitz, Mengele waved his hand at each new prisoner: a wave to the right meant that prisoners would be kept alive as slave laborers; a wave to the left condemned them to death. Lily’s mother Nina, her brother Bela and her sister Berta were waved to the left to be killed. Lily, along with her sisters Renee and Piri, were given a life-saving wave to the right.



As she walked into Auschwitz, Lily noticed a roaring fire in a massive chimney, churning out a thick, foul-smelling smoke, and inquired what sort of factory fueled such a massive chimney. Lily’s fellow prisoners told her: the chimney was billowing smoke from the bodies of Lily’s mother and siblings and the other Jews who’d been ushered to the left. If Auschwitz was a factory, its primary product was large-scale death.

Lily survived the war, working as a slave laborer in a munition's factory. She was liberated in 1945 and eventually moved to England where she reared her family.

They dehumanized us,” she explained. Facing death all around her, starved and beaten, Lily made two promises: that she would look after her younger sisters and that she would never let the world forget what she’d seen. “I promised myself that if I survived by some miracle, I would tell the world what happened there… The next generations should know so that something like that should not be repeated to any human being ever.” https://www.bigissue.com/culture/holocaust-survivor-lily-ebert-uses-tiktok-to-make-sure-we-never-forget/

One recent Shabbat while she was visiting Dov’s family, Lily showed Dov a banknote that was given to her after liberation, which she’d saved all these years in a photo album. A few weeks after being liberated, she met an American soldier in the German town of Pfaffroda. He wanted to give her words of encouragement and write her a note, but the soldier didn’t have any paper with him. Instead, he pulled out a German banknote and wrote on it. Lily also had a picture taken with some of the GIs who’d freed her.

Lily always treasured this note and photo. “This soldier was the first human being who was kind to us after this terrible life and I knew that somebody wants to help.”

Dov tweeted about the banknote: “Yesterday my great Grandma (Lily Ebert – an Auschwitz survivor) showed me this bank note – given to her as a gift by a soldier who liberated her. Inscribed, it says ‘a start to a new life. Good luck and happiness’. Later on, she met up with those who freed her....” To his surprise, it immediately went viral, being viewed by over a million people within hours.


One of the people who read the message got in touch with Dov, suggesting that the GI might have been Pvt. Hyman Schulman, a Jewish American serviceman who worked as an aid to Rabbi Herschel Schacter, a leading American rabbi and the first Jewish chaplain to enter Buchenwald concentration camp.

Dov told Britain’s Sky News, “I joked with my great grandma that I’d be able to find the soldier in 24 hours. And lo and behold, with the help of Twitter, we managed to find him in 24 hours, which is just amazing.” Hyman Schulman is no longer alive, but Dov spoke with his relatives and helped arrange a Zoom call with Pvt. Shulman’s children in New York, bringing Lily and her family together with them virtually. “It was really special,” Dov recalled. “It felt like we were family.”

The meeting between Lily’s family and Hyman Shulman’s family sparked media interest around the world. Suddenly, more people wanted to hear Lily’s story. “We got onto international news,” recalls Dov. “We were on something like 50 channels in a week… So we decided to write a book.” With Dov’s help, Lily began to dictate her life history. Dov wrote down her Holocaust experiences, with the goal of publishing a book about it one day.



Then, in January of 2021, disaster struck. Lily became gravely ill with Covid-19. “She got really ill to the point where we weren't sure she ever would recover.” Yet even while she was sick, Lily was determined to finish the book. “She could barely get out of bed but she got up and said ‘Ok, we’ve got to finish.' That sums her up,” Dov explains.

On January 21, 2021, Dov sent out a tweet alerting his followers that Lily seemed to be on the mend at last. “My 97-Year-Old Great Grandma, Lily Ebert BEM – Auschwitz Survivor, has just recovered from Covid- 19. Today she went on her first walk in a month after a miraculous recovery. A fighter and survivor.” That Tweet was eventually viewed 40 million times in various forms. (Note: BEM is a British medal, given in recognition of meritorious service to the nation; Lily received it in 2015 for her work in Holocaust education.)

At the time I was seeing so much anti-Semitism on TikTok,” Dov recalls. Dov had an idea: why not make videos about the Holocaust with Lily and put them on TikTok, the popular social media channel for teens? “I wasn’t seeing anything about the Holocaust there and I thought if anybody can do it my great grandma and I can.”

Dov set up a TikTok account and he and Lily created their first Holocaust video. “Our first video got 400,000 views,” Dov says proudly. "Now we have over a million followers.”

Lily holding Dov when he was a baby.

In one TikTok video, Lily addresses the question: “Is there anyone who was with you in the Holocaust that you wish you could talk to again?” Looking into the camera, wearing a pink suit and a white hat, Lily nods and answers in lightly accented English, her eyes filling with tears:

Yes, my mother. Because we went into this terrible place (Auschwitz) together and I came out from it alone. They (the Nazis) took my mother. It is so interesting how old you are. It makes no difference. I’m already in my 90s so you normally wouldn’t have a mother or even a grandmother. And even so – nothing you miss so much in life than your mother. When you think of your mother you are again a young child. A young child who has protection and who is looked after. A mother is someone who gave you your life and kept for you your life – that is a mother. And when this person is not here anymore, then you really feel the loss. No matter how old you are, mothers you are the most important things in the world.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/A-Taste-of-Talmud-Delving-into-a-Case-Scenario.html?s=ac
A Taste of Talmud: Delving into a Case Scenario
Sep 11, 2021  |  by Rabbi Gavriel Rubinprint article
A Taste of Talmud: Delving into a Case Scenario
Time to put on your Talmudic thinking caps.

In an interview on Israeli TV the South Korean ambassador, Mr. Young Sam Ma, commented, “We were very curious about the Jews’ outstanding academic achievements. How is it that Jews are such geniuses? The conclusion we reached is that one of your secrets is studying Talmud.”

Here's a taste of Talmudic thinking.

Real Case Scenario:
Sarah uses her credit card regularly and with every purchase, she receives a certain number of points towards a selection of rewards. Her friend Kayla occasionally borrows Sarah's card to make her own purchases, and Kayla reimburses her later. Reward points are allotted for Kayla’s purchases as well.

According to Jewish law, does Kayla deserve a share of Sarah’s rewards?

To answer this question, we first have to figure out what is actually happening when Kayla makes a purchase with Sarah’s card. One might say that with every purchase there are really two transactions going on:

the purchase of the blouse, or whatever it might be, from the store.
the “purchase” of credit from the card company (who gets a cut of the purchase price).
If this is the right way to look at it, then all we care about is the second transaction, since the card company is the one giving out the points. So now, who is “purchasing” the credit, Sarah or Kayla?

When Kayla hands over the card, the salesperson will probably do a credit check. On whom?


On Sarah, obviously, since it is her card. If she is “in the black” the sale will go through and she will be charged at the end of the month. Kayla will reimburse Sarah, but if there is any problem, Sarah is the one who will have to deal with it. In fact, the card company does not even know Kayla exists!

One can argue, then, that Sarah is the real credit-purchaser, even when Kayla uses the card. If this is the right way to look at it there is no reason Kayla should receive a share of the bonuses.

But I Also Helped!
On the other hand, you might counter that even if technically Sarah is the real purchaser (in the eyes of the card company), Kayla did cause her to earn the points.

The Talmud says that when a storekeeper gives an errand boy a freebie for making a purchase he must share it with the one who sent him, since it was the sender who caused him to receive it. In the words of the Rabbis the freebie was caused by “this one’s money and that one’s feet.”

Here, too, Kayla caused Sarah to receive the points by making a purchase. That seems to make it a case of “Sarah’s money and Kayla’s feet.” If we look at it this way then Kayla does deserve a share.

The Real Deal
There is another way to look at the matter, however. (There always is!)

We asked before who is really making the purchase (of the credit). But there is a more fundamental question we can ask, namely: what is the real transaction? True, a purchase was made. But is that what counts?

Sarah does a lot of things with her card. She uses it to make purchases, to pay her utility bills and take cash from the ATM. She also uses it to extend loans to her friends. How does she do that? By allowing them to use her card to make their own purchases. Of course, the real lender is the card company. Sarah just passes the loans on.

So when Kayla makes a purchase using Sarah’s card what is really happening is that Sarah is taking a loan from the card company and passing it on to Kayla. That is the transaction that matters. The purchase is merely the reason for the loan. It turns out, then, that Sarah alone is making the transaction, namely the taking of the loan, while Kayla is merely the recipient.

Who Cares Who It’s For?
To better understand this conclusion, imagine Sarah buys a new mug to replace one of Kayla’s that she broke last week. In this case although replacing Kayla’s mug is the reason for the purchase, clearly this transaction is being made by Sarah alone.

Similarly in our case, enabling Kayla to buy the blouse may have been the reason Sarah took the loan from the card company (by letting Kayla use her card), but when all is said and done, it was Sarah who took the loan, not Kayla. Therefore, Sarah alone deserves the bonuses.

Separate Accounts
Just to make sure the principle is perfectly clear, let’s think about a case where the conclusion would be the opposite. Imagine that instead of the card company it was the store that was offering a bonus – “Buy one blouse and get one free.” Here, too, one might think Sarah deserves a share in the freebie, since it was the use of her card that caused Kayla to receive it.

But here again there are really two completely separate transactions going on – one between Sarah and the card company and the other between Kayla and the store:

Sarah borrows money from the card company (through use of her card).
Meanwhile Kayla uses this money to purchase a blouse.
Just as the taking of the loan is a transaction between Sarah and the card company alone, so is the purchase of the blouse a transaction between Kayla and the store alone. (If Kayla had bought a handgun instead of a blouse it would have been her background that the salesperson checked, not Sarah’s.) So just as Kayla deserves no part of the credit card bonuses, so does Sarah deserve no part of the extra blouse.

This case was taken from a new book by Rabbi Gavriel Rubin, based on the interactive lectures of Rabbi Yitzchak Menachem Karlinsky: The Bomb Thief and Other Curious Cases: Leaves from the Jewish Logic Tree. Available from Amazon in paperback or Kindle. Click here to order.

https://www.aish.com/ci/s/12-Business-Lessons-from-the-Book-of-Genesis-.html?
12 Business Lessons from the Book of Genesis
Sep 18, 2021  |  by Michael A. Eisenbergprint article
12 Business Lessons from the Book of Genesis 
The characters are entrepreneurs and innovators, industrialists struggling to adapt to modernity and negotiators seeking to preserve their unique identities.

The world is undergoing massive transformation. Innovative technology and digitization are disrupting traditional industries. Populations are shifting. Wealth is abundant; tech innovation is rapid. We have trust issues, new currencies, and political divisions. Big Tech’s power is unprecedented. Developments in AI, Big Data, Machine Learning are happening too fast for our moral and legal regulations to keep up.

How can we build a time-honored framework to guide our innovation in these turbulent times? What can Judaism teach us about tech, wealth, regulation, negotiation, and other modern, consequential topics?

Humanity has actually faced all these “modern” challenges before. The characters of the Book of Genesis are just like us. They are entrepreneurs and innovators, industrialists struggling to adapt to modernity and negotiators seeking to preserve their unique identities.

Here is a lesson from each Torah portion from the Book of Genesis, based on my new book, The Tree of Life and Prosperity: 21st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis.

1. Bereishit: Mission (Im)Possible
There are no children in the Garden of Eden. In the Garden of Eden, all of Adam’s and Eve’s needs are met without any labor. The Garden was a failure. Ergo, we don’t just need to work in order to live, earn a wage. We work in order to be productive people striving to create a better world for us and our children.

2. Noah: The Frustrated Inventor: Technological Innovation and Moral Innovation

Noah’s invention of the plow ushered in human flourishing on the one hand, and moral corruption on the other. After the flood, Noah’s amazing invention of wine – the water of the ancients – and fermentation also leads to licentiousness. Innovation moves the world forward and necessarily so. However, if it is not undergirded and supported by timeless principles, it can lead to destruction or corruption of values.

3. Lekh Lekha: Wealth: Trial and Error
The patriarchs were wealthy people and Nachmanides even says this is inherent in their blessing. The Bible challenges us to use wealth properly, take care of the orphan and widow and use our capital to espouse timeless values.

Michael Eisenberg
4. Vayera: An Ember Saved from Fire
Here we see two models for society: one within Sodom based on corruption, greed and xenophobia, which strives to accumulate wealth for its own sake. In contrast, Abraham's society is built on shared interest, mutual responsibility, hospitality, and concern for the weak. Societies are built on values. It is the responsibility of each one of us to create and spread ones that we care about.

5. Hayei Sarah: Game Theory at the Cave of the Machpelah
Abraham’s adroit negotiation with the Hittites to purchase the Cave of the Machpelah in order to bury his wife Sarah revolved not only around financial issues, but also on moral, ethical and religious axes. Staying true to our principles and core values can help us optimize negotiation success. People respect those who respect themselves and stand up for their values.

6. Toldot: The Birthright and the Blessing
Isaac spurred an agricultural revolution, settling down and striking roots. Esau, a hunter and nomad, wasn’t able or willing to adapt to the new economy. Now we are going through a digital transformation. Many traditional jobs are being replaced or changed fundamentally. During turbulent times, it is critical that we adapt accordingly, while staying true to our identities.

7. Vayetzi: Quid Pro Quo
After fleeing Esau at the behest of his mother Rebecca, Jacob meets Rachel at the edge of the well in Paddan-Aram. Covering the well is a stone – a form of technological, social and legal protection against a potential “tragedy of the commons,” whereby certain shepherds might take advantage of the public good. Jacob removes the stone and waters the flock of Laban.

“Our distrust is very expensive,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. So too here, we see the importance of interpersonal trust and the price that is paid in its absence. Families, communities and societies that are undergirded by trust are more efficient and effective.

8. Vayishlaḥ: From Love to Fear
Arriving in Shechem, Jacob seeks to build a foundation of mutual economic cooperation and trust by purchasing fields from the local population and cultivating good will. After the prince rapes his daughter Dina, Simeon and Levi betray their father’s worldview by manipulating the locals and killing them. Jacob wanted to build a society predicated on trust and love, but his sons chose fear as a governing principle. We can learn from this incident that trust is more effective, but many people capitulate to fear.

9. Vayeshev: Land Reserve
Joseph envisions agricultural innovation to support the growing family and provide sustenance all year long. His brothers became envious and spiteful, unwilling to adapt to the changing times, stuck in their old ways. Joseph’s entrepreneurial mindset results in backlash and jealousy from his brothers. So too in every generation, changemakers and black sheep are called out. But these visionaries are often the ones who change humanity.

Perhaps we ought to believe in them a bit more. Former Canadian spy and current self-improvement specialist Shane Parrish recently wrote, “When everyone agrees with you when you make a decision, you get paid linearly. When everyone agrees with you after the fact, you get paid exponentially.” Joseph got paid exponentially.

10. Miketz: City Mouse
Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dream to mean that Egypt would experience seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Joseph then rehauls the Egyptian economy – to focus on commerce and trade, while building urban grain storage, local distribution centers, and other infrastructure. His planning and foresight saved the country during the famine. So too in life, proper preparedness for crises and innovation are key to overcoming challenges.

11. Vayigash: A Warning Sign
This Torah portion is a cautionary tale about the complexity of systems and the unseen negative impacts of too much government intervention. Joseph saved the Egyptian economy from catastrophic famine and the threat of external enemies. But then he over-centralized and significantly raised the level of vulnerability to the unseen risks that had accumulated within the system. It behooves us to be wary of solutions that purport to solve all the issues at hand. The natural world does well in many ways, and sometimes we should stand back and let the world turn.

12. Vayeḥi: The Land and the Sea
Both entrepreneurs and managers are critical in any enterprise. You need people to imagine the future and executers to create and manage successful companies. Jacob prepares Israel’s export economy for this in the partnership between Issachar and Zebulun.

Click here to listen to a thought-provoking discussion with Michael Eisenberg on the first segment of Aish's Good with Money podcast.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/How-an-Imprisoned-Jewish-Doctor-Invented-a-Typhus-Vaccine-in-Buchenwald.html?
How an Imprisoned Jewish Doctor Invented a Typhus Vaccine in Buchenwald
Sep 18, 2021  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
How an Imprisoned Jewish Doctor Invented a Typhus Vaccine in Buchenwald
And kept his groundbreaking discovery a secret from the Nazis.

Today, the deadly disease typhus is largely confined to history books, eradicated in great measure by the work of Ludwik Fleck, a brilliant Jewish scientist who was imprisoned by the Nazis. Forced to experiment on prisoners in the Nazi death camp of Buchenwald, Dr. Fleck managed to invent a vaccine against typhus – and keep his world-changing discovery a secret from his brutal Nazi overlords.

Fear of Typhus and Hatred of Jews
When we look back on the Holocaust era, it’s difficult for us to appreciate the extent to which the Nazis and others feared typhus and to understand the way that terror was employed by Nazis to stoke fear and hatred of Jews. Yet the intense terror of typhus outbreaks helped to fuel the Nazis’ hatred of Jews.

Typhus epidemics raged when people lived in close proximity in unsanitary conditions and cannot change their clothes or bathe regularly. Armies were particularly prone to typhus outbreaks during wartime, when soldiers lived in squalid conditions and lice – which spread the disease – ran rampant.

Dr. Ludwik Fleck

With the rise of the Nazi movement, Jews were increasingly blamed for typhus. “The Nazis often portrayed those they persecuted as vermin, parasites, or diseases,” the United States Holocaust Museum notes. During the Nazi era, German “medical professionals repeatedly pushed the false claim that Jews were especially responsible for outbreaks of typhus…” In Nazi propaganda, Jews were commonly depicted in political cartoons as lice; the implication was that they carried diseases, particularly typhus. “Jews are lice; they cause typhus” declared a Nazi propaganda poster disseminated in Poland in 1941.


"Jews are lice; they cause typhus."
The threat of typhus, particularly, was used by Nazis as an excuse to confine Jews to ghettos in Nazi-occupied cities. Ironically, the terrible conditions in overcrowded ghettos were precisely those that allowed typhus to spread. In 1940, 380,000 Jews were imprisoned inside the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest Nazi ghetto. Over 80,000 residents eventually succumbed to starvation and disease. (Virtually all remaining Jews were deported to Nazi death camps where they were murdered.)

In 1941, SS General Reinhard Heidrich instructed the SS’s chief physician to deliberately introduce a typhus epidemic into the Warsaw Ghetto. Soon, typhus was raging through the ghetto, killing large numbers of starving, malnourished, imprisoned Jews there.

In 1941, SS General Reinhard Heidrich instructed the SS’s chief physician to deliberately introduce a typhus epidemic into the Warsaw Ghetto.
Soon after this Nazi-initiated epidemic, in October 1941, Dr. Jost Walbaum, the Chief Health Officer of the Nazi-imposed Polish government told an audience of physicians that it was necessary to imprison and murder Jews in order to stop typhus and other infectious diseases. “The Jews are overwhelmingly the carriers and disseminators of typhus infection,” he announced. “There are only two ways (to “solve” this). We sentence the Jews in the ghetto to death by hunger or we shoot them… We have one and only responsibility, that the German people are not infected and endangered by these parasites. For that, any means must be right.” These chilling words were met with applause.

Typhus, World War I, and Dr. Fleck
Typhus profoundly shaped the course of World War I. A major epidemic broke out in Serbia with the start of fighting in 1914; within a year, 150,000 people had died of typhus in Serbia, including 50,000 POWs. The mortality rate of the Serbian outbreak reached as high as 70%. A third of the doctors in Serbia died of the disease. According to the London-based Microbiology Society, the raging outbreak of typhus in the midst of World War I “dissuaded the German-Austrian command from invading Serbia in an attempt to prevent the spread of typhus within their borders.”

At the same time, typhus began spreading throughout the Russian army on the war’s eastern front. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russia’s typhus epidemic raged out of control. History and science writer Arthur Allen documented the incredible story of Dr. Fleck and the race to invent the vaccine against typhus in his 2014 book The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (Norton and Co.). In a 2015 interview, he described the terrible toll that typhus took at the time. "Following World War I, when there was this terrible chaos all over the Eastern Front after Lenin pulled his troops from the Eastern Front, and Russian soldiers were roaming through all parts of Russia – what’s now Russia, Ukraine, Belarus – and there were POWs in Poland. And the disease just spread like wildfire through that entire region. There have been estimates of as many as 20 million cases of typhus and...3, 4, 5 million deaths…”

One of the many soldiers fighting on the German side of the war who watched typhus’ spread with horror during World War I was Ludwik Fleck, a young Jewish medical student from Lvov, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (in 1919 it became part of a newly-independent Poland; today, it is part of Ukraine). Lvov was home to a thriving Jewish population when Dr. Fleck was born in 1896. He attended medical school, but his studies were interrupted by World War I, during which Dr. Fleck worked as a medical officer and witnessed first-hand the terrible toll that typhus took on soldiers and civilians alike.

During World War I, Dr. Fleck came into contact with Dr. Rudolf Weigl, an older and acclaimed biologist. Shocked by the horrific effects of typhus he witnessed in the military, Dr. Weigl began working on a vaccine against typhus, building on research that was being done throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. Dr. Weigl collaborated with other scientists, including his wife Zofia, and managed to produce an effective vaccine against typhus in a laboratory setting, using lice as the hosts of the disease. The vaccine worked, but it was extremely difficult to produce and Dr. Weigl resisted experimenting on humans.

As the acclaimed Polish microbiologist Stefan Krynski has noted, typhus vaccine production in the years before World War II was extremely limited. Dr. Weigel’s “hesitation before introducing for use in humans was based on extreme caution, enhanced by the fact that he himself was not a doctor of medicine…” Dr. Weigl’s early typhus vaccines degraded quickly, but he established a research lab in Lvov and recruited prominent scientists – many of them Jews – to help research typhus and other diseases.

At the time, it was difficult for Jews to obtain research positions in Polish universities. Dr. Fleck, by now a prominent virologist in his own right, was one of many talented Jewish scientists who was unable to obtain an academic appointment. Instead, Dr. Fleck established a private medical lab in Lvov where he analyzed several diseases, including typhus. His work brought him into contact with Dr. Weigl and his team, one of the local scientific labs which didn’t discriminate against Jewish researchers. In Dr. Weigl’s lab, Dr. Fleck made a major breakthrough, inventing a skin test to diagnose typhus.

Rising Hatred of Jews
While the Nazis consolidated power in Germany in the 1930s, Poland’s right-wing nationalist government fomented anti-Semitism and passed anti-Jewish laws inside Poland, too. Under Prime Minister Felicjan Slawoj-Skladkowski, who served as Poland’s prime minister and minister of the interior from 1936 to 1939, Poles were encouraged to boycott Jewish businesses and even to riot against Jews in various Polish towns.

Jewish butcher shops were forced to shut, Jewish businesses found it difficult to receive commercial licenses or bank loans. Prime Minister Slawoj-Skadkowski encouraged boycotts of Jewish businesses and professionals. In Polish universities, students were forced to sit in special sections of the classroom. Polish rioters attacked Jews in towns including Radom, Brest-Litvost, Vilna, Czestochowa, and Lvov, Dr. Fleck’s home town. The authorities refused to intervene, instead arresting members of Jewish self-defense groups, not Polish rioters.

Arthur Allen describes the atmosphere in Lvov’s medical school: by 1937, no new Jews were being admitted to the school. “Members of anti-Semitic student clubs...menaced the remaining Jewish students in the streets and the halls of the university, armed with razor blades slotted into wooden sticks. Of the many Jewish students beaten and attacked, at least three died…”

Dr. Rudolph Weigl

Many Poles refused to give into this atmosphere of hate, including Dr. Fleck’s mentor Dr. Rudolf Weigl. One day when Dr. Weigl walked into the lecture hall where he taught in the Lvov medical school, he saw all his Jewish students standing, forbidden to sit. “What’s going on here?” asked Dr. Weigl. When anti-Jewish students explained that Jews were forbidden to sit in the class, Dr. Weigl replied, “In that case, I will stand until they sit.” (Quoted in The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis by Arthur Allen.)

Creating a Vaccine inside the Lvov Ghetto
Nazi forces entered Lvov on June 29, 1941. Jews were forced to give up their property and herded into a cramped ghetto. Approximately 5,000 Jews were shot by Nazis during the establishment of the Lvov Ghetto. Over 110,000 Jews were soon imprisoned behind the ghetto’s walls. Starvation and disease – including typhus – were rampant.

Liquidation of the Lvov Ghetto,

Dr. Ludwik Fleck, along with his wife Ernestyna and his son Ryszard were forced into an apartment in the Lvov Ghetto with two other Jewish families. For several months, Dr. Fleck managed to keep up his research inside the ghetto. Along with three fellow Jewish scientists – a Dr. Olga Elser, a Dr. Bernard Umschweif and a third scientist whom Dr. Fleck identified as Dr. Anhalt – he miraculously managed to create a typhus vaccine in laboratory conditions inside the Ghetto’s “Jewish Hospital”. Their survival was largely due to Dr. Rudolf Weigl, who listed these Jewish scientists as associates in his lab, which was now working for the German Army.

After the Holocaust, Dr. Fleck described the research he carried out in the Lvov Ghetto: “It was of major importance to work out such a method that would allow us to produce the vaccine in the primitive conditions of the ghetto…I managed to create the typhus vaccine made from the urine of the patients (in the Jewish Hospital) suffering from the typhus fever. The vaccine saved lives of many people in the ghetto as well as (nearby) Janowska Concentration Camp, where we vaccinated the prisoners....”

Dr. Ludwik Fleck
The incredible success of Dr. Fleck’s typhus vaccine didn’t go unnoticed by the Nazi guards. They asked Dr. Fleck if it were possible to inoculate Germans too. “I answered that it was doubtful, as they were of different race and the vaccine had been made from the urine of ill Jews…” Dr. Fleck recalled telling them.

In March and April 1942, the Nazis murdered 15,000 Jews who’d lived in the Lvov Ghetto. They were sent to the Janowska concentration camp, and from there were sent by trains to the Nazi death camp Belzec. Among the thousands of murdered Jews were Dr. Fleck’s two sisters, Antonia Fleck-Silber and Henryka Fleck-Kessler. Both women had been teachers in the Vocational School for Jewish Girls in Lvov. They were murdered, along with their husbands, in Janowska.

Vaccine Miracle in Buchenwald
Dr. Fleck, his wife and son, were deported to Auschwitz. At first Dr. Fleck was forced to do backbreaking slave labor, but soon the camp officials recognized Dr. Fleck’s medical expertise and sent him to Auschwitz’s infirmary to help conduct medical experiments related to bacteria and infection on prisoners. At the end of 1943, Dr. Fleck was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. There, the German government was trying to set up a laboratory to invent a durable typhus vaccine that could be mass produced and shipped to German soldiers.

The leader of this project was a German quack scientist named Joachim Mrugowsky who’d faked much of his research and was, as Dr. Fleck would later describe, “scientifically illiterate”. After his lab in Berlin was destroyed by British bombers, author Arthur Allen describes, Mrugowsky “decided to produce the vaccine at Buchenwald, thinking that allied bombs would not fall there. Jewish inmates of the concentration camp – those whom the Nazis condemned to death as mere human lice – would be employed to manufacture it, thereby saving the German troops at the front.”

At the time, the best-known typhus vaccine was that produced by Dr. Rudolf Weigl. However, Dr. Weigl’s method incubated typhus in the bodies of lice. With their overwhelming fear of lice, there was no way the Nazis would allow researchers to breed lice in Buchenwald. An entirely new way of making typhus vaccines would have to be invented. Dr. Mrugowsky recruited another German scientist named Dr. Erwin Ding-Schuler to assemble a typhus vaccine lab in Buchenwald. Dr. Ding-Schuler went about choosing Jewish scientists from among Buchenwald’s inmates to staff his prison lab. Many of the men he selected weren’t actually scientists or medical doctors, but were pretending they had medical expertise as a way to appear useful to the Nazis and stay alive.

The team worked round the clock and invented a novel new way to breed typhus in animals that weren’t normally used in this type of typhus research. Dr. Ding-Schuler’s research methods involved using guinea pigs, rabbits and mice. Just before Christmas in 1943, the vaccine was ready: Dr. Ding-Schuler injected prisoners with the vaccine and waited for the results.

Tragically, the typhus vaccine didn’t work. Dr. Ding-Schuler falsified the experiment records to make it look as if he’d done what no one else had achieved: develop an effective typhus vaccine that could be used outside of a lab and which didn’t involve breeding lice. Yet he needed help in finding what had gone wrong.

Dr. Fleck managed to create a life-saving typhus vaccine, working with Jewish slaves as his colleagues in the unimaginable hell that was Buchenwald.
It was then that Dr. Ludwik Fleck was transferred to Buchenwald, and Ding-Schuler placed him in charge of the vaccine project. Right away, Dr. Fleck realized that Dr. Ding-Schuler had no idea what he was doing. Privately, Dr. Fleck called him a dummkopf, Yiddish for idiot. Dr. Fleck later recalled that the Nazi scientists at Buchenwald “looked into their microscopes and continuously misunderstood what they saw… There was no individual author of the error. The error grew out of the collective atmosphere.”

Dr. Fleck adjusted the method that typhus was being bred and managed to create a life-saving typhus vaccine, working with Jewish slaves as his colleagues in the unimaginable hell that was Buchenwald.

Duping the Nazis
Once Dr. Fleck adjusted the vaccine production method, he and his fellow Jewish scientists decided to keep their discovery secret. Dr. Eugen Kogon, a Jewish scientist imprisoned in Buchenwald who led the Jewish team producing the vaccine, later described what happened. “Since Ding-Schuler demanded large quantities of vaccine, we produced two types: one that had no value and was perfectly harmless, and went to the front; and a second type, in very small quantities, that was very efficacious and used in special cases like for comrades who worked in difficult places in the camp.” (Quoted in The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis by Arthur Allen.)

"We were consciously producing a non-active vaccine… Ding, the idiot, never wised it up…”
Whenever the Nazis became suspicious and demanded vaccines to test, Dr. Fleck and the other Jewish scientists would send a vial of the precious real vaccine, and independent tests would confirm that the vaccine worked. Dr. Fleck later recalled that Dr. Ding-Schuler’s “lack of knowledge of science was very useful in the sabotage activities that were soon undertaken by a group of doctors and scientists from the Concentration Camp Buchenwald… We were consciously producing a non-active vaccine… Ding, the idiot, never wised it up…”

While Dr. Fleck and others produced small quantities of vaccine using rabbits, guinea pigs and other animals, Dr. Rudolf Weigl continued to manufacture vaccines derived from lice in his laboratory in Lvov. Dr. Weigl was also determined to trick the Nazis and help Jews.

Dr. Weigl was compelled to turn almost all of his vaccine over to the Nazis, but author Arthur Allen has documented that Dr. Weigl was allowed to keep 8,200 doses each month in order to conduct further experiments and inoculate family members and friends. Instead of honoring this arrangement, Dr. Weigl acted heroically. He sabotaged the vaccine doses he gave to the Nazis, and donated the doses he was allowed to keep to resistant groups, orphans, Jewish fighters and priests. He even managed to smuggle 30,000 precious doses of vaccine to the Warsaw Ghetto, where typhus was rife, to inoculate 30,000 Jews there.

Testifying to Nazi Atrocities
After he was liberated, Dr. Ludwik Fleck testified about the horrors he’d witnessed. “When it comes to the reprehensible experiments carried out on prisoners, I had an opportunity to give testimony on that matter in the Nuremberg Court,” Dr. Fleck later recalled. Among the many gruesome medical “treatments,” experiments and tortures he described, was the deliberate infection of large numbers of prisoners with typhus, so they could then be given the vaccine.

At the Nuremberg trials, Dr. Joachim Mrugowsky, who set up the typhus project in Buchenwald, was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was hanged. Dr. Ding-Schuler killed himself in an American military prison before his trial. He left a letter asking Dr. Kogon, the Jewish director of vaccine trials in Buchenwald, to look after his wife and children. Yet Dr. Ding-Schuler’s wife soon died – from typhus.

In Postwar Poland, Dr. Rudolf Weigl was accused – wrongly – of having been a Nazi informer. He was largely ignored by the Polish scientific establishment and died in 1957, his great heroism and scientific brilliance all but forgotten. In 2003, Yad Vashem declared Dr. Weigl “Righteous Among the Nations” and planted a tree in his honor in the Avenue of the Righteous in Jerusalem.

In 1957, Poland experienced a resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the Flecks fled, joining their son in Israel.
Dr. Fleck survived the Holocaust, along with his wife and son. Their son, Ryszard Fleck, moved to Israel with the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. Dr. Fleck and his wife stayed in Poland, where Dr. Fleck held distinguished posts in the University of Lublin and University of Warsaw, conducting research and writing philosophical works. In 1957, Poland experienced a resurgence of anti-Semitism, and the Flecks fled, joining their son in Israel.

In Israel Dr. Fleck worked in epidemiology in the Institute of Biological Research in the Israeli town of Nes Ziona. He continued to write philosophical works. Dr. Fleck’s last paper was written in Israel, titled “Crisis in Science: Towards a Free and More Human Science.”

Dr. Ludwik Fleck died in 1961 and is remembered today most of all for his work as a scientific philosopher, not his groundbreaking discovery of a vaccine for typhus. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Dr. Fleck was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the modern age. His groundbreaking discovery of a typhus vaccine, and his insistence on using it to help his fellow imprisoned Jews, laid the foundation for a lifetime of scientific research and contemplation of the role of humanity and morality in science.

Sep 20, 2021
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
We All Want to Fly: Two Short Messages for My Kids
God is speaking to us all the time, if we just look for His messages.

My kids and I were outside building our sukkah, surrounded by a bunch of kids from the neighborhood, everyone excited to take part in what seemed to be one of the biggest building projects of the decade.

Two small incidents happened that gave me the opportunity to show my children how God speaks to us all the time, if we just look for His messages.

A boy came by with a small blue and white bird perched on his shoulder. We all gathered around mesmerized, taking turns holding the cute bird. It crawled on top of my head and I asked the boy, “Why doesn’t the bird fly away?” (I never had a bird growing up and know nothing about birds as pets.)

He answered me in Hebrew, “Because his wings were clipped and he can’t fly.”

I was stunned.

“That’s terrible! All this bird wants to do is fly, and someone came and brutally disfigured him, robbing him from fulfilling his potential. I could never have a pet like that. It’s cruel.”
My kids thought I was overdoing it (maybe they had a point), and then I seized the obvious teachable moment. “This is what some parents -- and others -- do to their kids. They clip their wings by holding back their encouragement and telling them that they can’t reach their dreams. God created them with enormous potential – they want to fly – and others prevent them from spreading their wings. Isn’t that cruel?”

My 10-year-old son Noah rolled his eyes, but later that day he showed me he got the message. He wanted to borrow my married daughter’s sukkah that wasn’t being used this year. He promised he'd take full responsibility for it, and get all the additional building materials he’d need. I was skeptical.

With a glint in his eye, he said, “Abba, don’t clip my wings.”

Checkmate.

The boy with the bird left, just as a two-year-old girl started yelling, “Everyone look at me! Everyone look at me!” We all turned. She was hanging on to a short slanted ledge on the side of the building less than a meter off the ground, and wasn’t going to stop screaming until all attention was diverted to her.

My boys laughed at her desperate need for attention.

“Don't laughr,” I said, “we're just like. She’s just more honest and transparent.”

“What do you mean?” Noah asked.

“Well why do you want your hair to go up in the front? That’s your way of saying, ‘Everyone look at me! Aren’t I cool!’ And why does Meshulam care so much about being in good shape? That’s his way of his saying, ‘Everyone look at me!’ We all crave attention. Let’s make sure we get it for doing meaningful things.”

As we sit in our sukkah under God’s sheltering sky, may we be open to seeing His messages and taking them to heart, and may we spread our wings and fly, true to our soul’s mission. Chag sameach.

https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/How-to-Tap-into-The-Meaning-of-Sukkot-5-Inspiring-Life-Lessons.html?s=ac&
How to Tap into The Meaning of Sukkot: 5 Inspiring Life Lessons
Sep 19, 2021  |  by Slovie Jungreis-Wolffprint article
How to Tap into The Meaning of Sukkot: 5 Inspiring Life Lessons
Plug into the joy and spiritual depth of this incredible Jewish holiday.

The holiday of Sukkot brings us to a place of joy, celebrating our newfound connection to the spiritual energy we've plugged into during the High Holidays.

Here are 5 life lessons to reflect upon as we sit within the wall of our sukkah.

1. Look Up
When sitting in the sukkah one must be able to see the sky through the covering of the roof made out of leaves. It's as if a mystical voice is calling out to us and whispering, "Look up." Know that you will go through moments in life that will be terrifying. Your forefathers left Egypt and came into the desert wilderness not knowing how they would survive. No food. No water. The sun was scorching hot. There were snakes and scorpions. But God enveloped His children with Clouds of Glory that served as protection that continues to serve as a lesson until today.

The sukkah is our reminder that faith and trust in God is the greatest weapon to combat fear. These past 18 months we’ve realized how much is out of our control. The world is spinning. It may feel difficult to hold on. Lift your eyes and see the Source of life. Don’t crumble. The sukkah is here for every single one of us to experience. Bask within the shelter of faith.

2. We Don’t Need All the Stuff
The sukkah is a temporary dwelling. We leave our homes and for 7 days we live in the sukkah. All the comforts of home are inside. Somehow we are content, even tasting joy, as we join those we love in celebration. What happened to all the stuff we thought we need to be happy?

Sukkot gives us a spiritual time out to think about what really matters.
The 7 days represent the seven decades of a person’s life. What really counts in the end? Life is temporary. No one wishes that they had amassed more ‘stuff’. Rather we wish we would’ve spent more time with those we cherish. We regret moments lost, words not said, and opportunities for love that never return.


Sukkot liberates us. We are given time to take a spiritual time out and think about what really matters.

3. We Come from Greatness
Each night we are given a beautiful prayer to say as we invite a holy guest into our sukkah. All together there are 7 ushpizin, guests, who grace our sukkah with their spiritual presence: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Josef, Moses, Aaron and David.

These 7 transformed a morally desolate world into a place of kindness, compassion and awareness of God.

Each of us are given an ability to draw upon the blessings of those who came before us. Their every struggle and challenge become a stepping stone for our personal life journey.

When we realize the greatness we come from, we are given the strength to pick ourselves up and keep walking. We, too, can bring light into a world of darkness. We must only invite greatness into our lives.

4. Discover the Gift of Humility
A sukkah taller than 20 amos (around three stories) cannot be used. The lesson is deep. If there is one character trait that pushes Godliness out of our lives, it is arrogance. When you are so full of yourself, there is no space for anyone else, even God.

If you want your life to be filled with love and meaning, discover the gift of humility. Know how to put others first. Don’t live a ‘selfie life’, where the lens is only turned on yourself. Feel the pain of another. Each day ask yourself: how is this world better because I exist? Make space for others. Be a giver.

When my child was once crying, my 6-foot 2 father bent down to hear him. He picked my little boy up, cuddled him on his shoulders and said, “No one should ever be too high to hear the cries of a child.”

We are all that child. And none of us can ever feel too high to hear the cries of another.

5. Feel God’s Hug
A sukkah requires at least two complete walls plus a third wall that can even be one handbreadth.

The image is that of a hug. The sukkah is God’s embrace of us. Each and every one of us is precious. When you give someone a hug, you wrap your hands around their back and pull them close. Their face is not seen. So too, we are being embraced. It does not matter what we think we look like, spiritually, or mistakes we made that we believe may create obstacles as we try to plug into our souls.

Enter the sukkah and know that you are loved. Every person who wants to come close is hugged. Unconditionally.

The sukkah is speaking to us. We just need to open our hearts to hear its whisper.

Click here for more inspiring articles about the meaning of Sukkot.

The value of love. A touching story to share before Yom Kippur.

There is a fellow who owns a jewelry store in Israel. One day a nine year old girl walked into the store and said, “I am here to buy a bracelet.” She looked through the glass cases and pointed to a bracelet that was $3,000. The man behind the counter asked her, “You want to buy that bracelet?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Wow, you have very good taste. Who do you want to buy it for?”

“For my older sister.”

“Oh that is so nice!” the storekeeper replied. “Why do you want to buy your older sister this bracelet?”


“Because I don’t have a mother or father,” the little girl said, “and my older sister takes care of us. So we want to buy her a present, and I’m willing to pay for it.” She pulled out of her pocket a whole bunch of coins that totaled just under eight shekels, a little less than two dollars.

The fellow says, “Wow! That’s exactly what the bracelet costs!” While wrapping up the bracelet he said to the girl, “You write a card to your sister while I wrap the bracelet.” He finished wrapping the bracelet, wiped away his tears, and handed the little girl the bracelet.

A few hours later the older sister entered the store. “I’m terribly embarrassed,” she said. “My sister should not have come here. She shouldn’t have taken it without paying.”

“What are you talking about?” the storekeeper asked.

“What do you mean? This bracelet costs thousands of dollars. My little sister doesn’t have thousands of dollars – she doesn’t even have ten dollars! Obviously she didn’t pay for it.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” the storekeeper replied. “She paid me in full. She paid seven shekel, eighty agurot, and a broken heart. I want to tell you something. I am a widower. I lost my wife a number of years ago. People come into my store every single day. They come in and buy expensive pieces of jewelry, and all these people can afford it. When your sister walked in, for the first time in so very long since my wife had died, I once again felt what love means.”

He gave her the bracelet and wished her well.

During the High Holy Days, we come to the Almighty and we want to buy something very expensive. We want to buy life. But we cannot afford it. We don’t have enough money to pay for it. We don’t have the merits. So we come to the Almighty and we empty out our pockets, giving him whatever merits we have plus promises for the future. I’ll pick up the phone and call someone who is lonely, I will learn an extra five minutes of Torah, I will be kind and I will be scrupulous about not speaking lashon hara (gossip) for one hour a day.

The Almighty says, “You don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve felt what love means.” He sees how much we love Him and how much we yearn to improve, and He says, “You know what? You have touched my heart. Here it is, paid in full.”

The story was told over by Rabbi Go’el Elkarif who said he heard it from the person to whom it happened.