The other day I was watching a documentary about the chareidi (religious) Jews in Israel and the controversy with the secular Jews. As usual it portrayed the religious Jews in a negative light, focusing more on the so called “enlightened” views of the secular society. A totally non Jewish perspective, as usual.  And it made […]

17th of Tamuz again…..so why do we fast for something that happened in the past?   Okay, we could say we are fasting so as to prevent future problems and avert negative situations. That is true as well. But the fact is, for a Jew, it is not really the past. Because the destruction of

It is the beginning of the new month of Adar. This is certainly one of the best months of the year for the Jewish people: a month of good “mazal”. A month of joy. In fact, the Torah tells us that when Adar enters, we must increase in joy. But how do we do that?

What is it about difficult situations in life that cause people to feel so depressed and to lose their chayus or their positivity?  I think part of the reason is that all of us imagine how we would like our lives to be. We imagine ourselves growing old with our spouses, taking vacations, traveling together

When the Jewish people were in Egypt, we all were instructed by Moshe Rabbenu to quarantine in our houses the night of the Pesach seder until the morning. Nobody was allowed to leave their homes. Everyone put blood over the lintels of their houses so that Hashem would pass over their homes and strike the

The more a govt tries to be politically “correct”, the more they tend to become morally wrong.  Politically correct basically means politics first. But usually morality, decency and kindness suffer and are put on the back burner.  And innocent people suffer. An evil terrorist reared his ugly head and attempted to destroy an entire jewish

In life we learn from others. The people who shape our lives the most when we are young are our parents.  We learn in two ways from our parents, and in both cases we need to appreciate them and be grateful. Firstly,  we learn from their good examples and their knowledge and wisdom. We emulate

Yesterday I drove by a sign that said “recycling and redemption” and I thought to myself: we are all “recycled souls” (from a previous incarnation) and we are on the way to redemption.  And truthfully that is what life is all about: correcting our past lives (tikunim) and preparing for redemption. Now that the elections

Why is it that the whole world always wants to see a happy ending?  I realized that when people read books, watch movies, hear stories, they always want to know that there was a happy ending. Everybody wants to know that the good guys win and the bad guys are defeated. I was pondering this

Well, here we go again: rejoicing. It is all about happiness.  We have many holidays that have a theme of happiness to them: Purim, Pesach, Shavuot, and even Chanukah all celebrate events that lead to great happiness. But on the holiday of Succot we don’t have an event we are celebrating in particular. We are