1310 essays
Read
Essays on the weekly Torah portion, the holidays and Jewish thought.
G-d Letter To A Skeptic I was pleased to receive your response to the invitation to participate in our classes. Contrary to what you might think, I was… Chassidus Outline Of The Faith 1. The essence, the main principle Judaism has a universal world view that sees the purpose of humanity in general and the Jewish… Holidays Response To 911 Our minds and hearts have been numbed. We have all become victims of history’s most heinous terrorists act. We are now grieving… Judaism Response To An Anti-semite In brief, the question about marriage to a minor is evidence of a selective of knowledge of the Talmud, and a total lack of… Judaism Seeing The Other Side One of the problems that plagues the Jewish community (and, in truth, all of society) is division and discord. This is even more… Judaism Sexuality And The Rabbis What could an old-style Chassidic rabbi say about sexuality in the modern day? Some of the readers are expecting the routine fire… Judaism Self Hating Jew?! Lately we’ve been hearing the term “self-hating Jew” employed to describe the various critics of Jews, Judaism and Israel. I must… Judaism Should We Laugh Or Cry? Mourning and sadness are not the most natural Jewish feelings. How do we relate to Judaism’s saddest period of the year, the… Judaism The Philosophy Of Jewish Law In assessing the role and influence of Jewish Law on today's society, we frequently hear a reference made to the "Judeo-Christian"… Moshiach The Rebbe And Liberation: Liberation On All Fronts The Rebbe’s birthday on the 11th of Nissan coincides with the Festival of Passover, the Season of our Freedom. It is therefore not… Rebbe The Rebbe! Gimmel Tammuz—the third day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz—is the day that created a barrier between the Chassidim and the Rebbe.… Chassidus The Shammai-Hillel Approach To Tolerance And Love Who’s not for tolerance, unity and love? Yet, the more we seem to be talking about theses ideals, the more splintered and… Judaism The Uniqueness Of Jewish Ethics Ethics is what distinguishes the symphonic world of order from the cacophonous world of chaos. Whatever ethical system one… Judaism 70 Thoughts to Live by The following are 70 maxims that are an attempt to capture the spirit of Judaism as it is illuminated by the teachings of Chassidic philosophy. Kabbalah Safe Kabbalah – Acting or Teaching? The belief in the Messianic Age and the Resurrection of the Dead – according to the Kabbalists – is not merely a further step in the journey of the soul and in its climb to unprecedented heights, as Maimonides would have us see it. They represent a totally different parallel… Kabbalah Safe Kabbalah – Against Your Will You Live; Against Your Will You Die All of the above has been sated succinctly by our Talmudic sages: “Against your will you must live.” Taken at face value this refers to the lack of choice we have in our own births. Nobody asks us who our parents will be and if and when they will decide to have a child. Kabbalah Safe Kabbalah – Awakening from the Dead-Remez There is, however, another more remote connotation to our expression of gratitude when we say Modeh Ani. While it cannot be debated that Modeh Ani is first and foremost an expression of gratitude for simply waking up alive, there is a hint of another awakening for which we are… Kabbalah Safe Kabbalah – Divine Ecology: Reincarnation Reincarnation Is Jewish When the soul stands before the heavenly courts, angels carrying wagonloads of Mitzvot and transgressions, come before the tribunal to argue for and against the soul of the deceased. Kabbalah Safe Kabbalah – Don’t Withhold – Drush If Drush is the process by which we look beneath the surface for some deeper message other than the obvious one, then Modeh Ani should be understood as a challenge to us to emulate G-d’s remarkable attitude towards us. Kabbalah Safe Kabbalah – Four Dimension-Pardes Torah, as Divine wisdom, is the single most overt expression of G-dly energy in the world. But, even Torah, in order for it to be understood by us, has to be “dressed” in garments that make it closer to our finite human mind. The teachings of Kabbalah, we shall see, represent…