When we take a bird’s eye view of the holidays that inaugurate the New Year, we see a collection of diverse and disturbing of images for G-d. The predominant image for G-d, on Rosh Hashanah, is King and Judge who is writing us into a cosmic Book of life or …
Yom Kippur is all about love and forgiveness. It’s about how we are always inseparably close to G-d. On Yom Kippur we get a glimpse of ourselves, our choices and our relationship to G-d from another perspective–G-d’s perspective. This is the transformational power of Yom Kippur that makes it into …
The Kabbalah teaches, “There is no king without a nation.” This point requires deep exploration especially on Rosh Hashanna when we acknowledge G-d as our King. It may make sense that, in the human world, a king is dependent on having subjects who acknowledge his sovereignty. The last Emperor of …
The magic formula to true and lasting happiness. And you shall be happy in all that the Lord your G-d has given you (Deut. 26:11) Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. — …
Judaism does not believe in faith. The Hebrew term emuna has been loosely translated into “faith” but that is not quite right. To understand the true definition of emuna, we have to examine its original meaning and its association with other similar Hebrew terms. Interestingly, the word emuna is correlated to three Hebrew words. One …
Unfortunately, many people think “serving God” is submitting to a Slave Driver who dwells in heaven and demands, “You must serve me! Obey my commandments and do them with a smile! Or else I will punish you.” In other words, they fear that a life of mitzvot is about complete …
When we read the Torah some of its laws disturb our moral sensitivities. When this happens we must remind ourselves of the purpose of the Torah. Not all the laws of Torah represent its ideals. Some of them may even seem to contradict the very ideal that they are serving …
“I (G-d) will raise them up a prophet from among their brethren, like unto you (Moses); and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (Deut. 18: 18) The Torah claims that G-d revealed Himself to the entire …
“Thou shalt not harden thy heart, nor shut thy hand from your needy brother; surely open thy hand to him.” — Deut. 15:7-8 The Talmud teaches: “Tzedaka [commonly translated as charity] saves from death.” When we need an incredible influx of life force — because we are facing impending physical …
Imagine somebody suggests to you that you should tell your spouse “I love you” three times a day. Sounds like a great idea. You wake up in the morning and start rushing off to work. “Oh, my gosh!” You hurry back and say, “Honey, I love you. See you later.” …