Felafel on Rye

An amazing thing happened to me last night! While I was sleeping, an angel appeared in a dream and told me to start a new Jewish religion. “A new Jewish religion?” I asked, bewildered. “That’s right,” he replied. I was certain that I was hallucinating because I had fasted yesterday and that my mind was playing tricks. So I went back to sleep. But the angel appeared once again and told me to start a new Jewish religion.

The month of Elul is known for being the time of the year most favorable for t’shuva - generally known as penitence or repentance. But t’shuva is much more than feeling bad over the transgressions which we have committed. Rabbi Kook teaches that t’shuva is the force that makes the world go around.

These days, it’s pretty hard to know who really is Jewish. Let’s take the example of the singles-bar scene in New York. A lot of times a Jewish guy will start talking to girl (call her Debbie) and during the conversation, he’ll ask if she’s Jewish, and she says, “Sure,” when she isn’t Jewish at all. So I have devised an almost foolproof test to determine if a person is really a Jew.

We can disagree with a reform Jew and even despise his opinions, but we should love him for his connection to the Jewish Nation.

The fact that a Reform Jew wishes to adopt a counterfeit form of “Judaism” is his affair. But the religious Jew is not bound by that. The State of Israel does not have to recognize on an official level the falsehood that every Jew may adopt on a private level.

The Jewish Press asked Rav Kustiner if the IDF command has responded to the storm of protest. “Not that I am aware of,” he replied. “I am only a very tiny screw in the system. They don’t ask my opinion.”

How can it be that in this clear time of Redemption, when millions of Jews have returned to the Land of Israel from the four corners of the world, in the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy that crises and setbacks like the evacuation of Migron still occur?

There's plenty of blame to go around.

The history of January 1st should make Jews think twice before they celebrate New Year’s and take part in its heathen festivities.

We learn from Moshe that the true meaning of Haredi is someone whose fear and reverence of God so fills his being that he rushes to do every mitzvah as speedily and completely as he can. We also find this Haredi quality in Moshe’s great desire to live in the Land of Israel. Moshe wanted to make aliyah more than anything else. This is a sign of a true Haredi Jew – a towering love for the Land of Israel and a passionate desire to live there.

We learned in Lebanon that we can’t defeat the enemy with our Air Force alone. What’s the point of a truce that will last for three weeks until Hamas fires more rockets at Israel?

Rabbi Kook explains that this misplacing of priorities between the means and the goal stems from the sin of the earth during the days of Creation. By understanding the depth of this teaching, we can learn to be happy, not only when we finally attain our goals and ideals, but also at every moment of our lives.

His books are still banned in charedi yeshivot, and, in the eyes of a large part of the charedi world, the students of Rav Kook are barely considered rabbis.

If Eve had read www.jewishsexuality.com, she wouldn’t have followed after her eyes and got us all kicked out of the garden. If Adam had read jewishsexuality.com, he wouldn’t have eaten the “apple.” Today, we don’t have to make the same mistakes they did. We have the teachings of the Torah and the advice of the Sages to rely upon. While I won’t quote from the holy Zohar here, for people who enjoy the secrets of Torah, there’s a lot more to the snake than his pretty long tail.

There is an old aphorism which claims that two things in life are certain: death and taxes. To this, Rabbi Kook would add a third certainty — t’shuva.

In galut, wee become possessed by the foreign lands and cultures where we live.

The yartzeit of our Matriarch, Rachel, falls this year on Shabbat. Every year, more and more people gather at Rachel’s Tomb to pay respects to the Matriarch who is known as Rachel Emanu - Rachel Our Mother. Thousands of pilgrims will travel there today and tomorrow from all over the country, and perhaps 200,000 more will make the annual pilgrimage the day after Shabbat, every type of Jew there is, religious and non-religious, Haredim, Hasidim, and Dati Leumi, men, women, and children, busload after busload after busload, from far and near, waiting long hours for their turn to enter the small but beautifully renovated tomb near Betlechem on the way to Efrata .

Rabbi Meir Kahane, perhaps the most dynamic Jewish orator of our time, a speaker capable of inflaming hearts and inspiring the masses, a par-excellence TV debater who chopped the glib intellectual banter of opponents into tiny insignificant scraps, he had a bothersome stutter in his youth, which had to be mastered in order to fulfill his dream of reaching out to the Jewish People.

“The non-observant Jew knows. Deep in his heart he knows. He knows that the path [he treads] is a false one, that the Judaism he professes is a mockery.... His moment of truth lies within him. His is the power to call it into being. Let him but dig deeply into his Jewish resources and draw from them the traditional Jewish qualities of courage, determination and sacrifice."

Recognizing the terrible danger of unsupervised Internet viewing has extra significance now, at the time of Hanukah.

The attorney general has now ruled that the sign is not offensive and that banning it violates democratic freedom of expression, which should only be suppressed in extreme cases.

If Smotrich doesn’t play ball, he may find himself on the sidelines this time around, warming the bench with Moshe Feiglin, who has already decided not to run, declaring that his unique ideas cannot be heard in this electoral atmosphere.

I left the station with the feeling that he had played a game of pinball in my brain.

Once again today, Diasporas leaders are not leading the Jewish People to Israel. Instead the Jews in the Diaspora are 'diasporing' away.

Rav Kook often studied Rebbe Nachman's writings with guests during Suedat Shleeshi meal on Shabbat

Doing my best to copy Sholom Aleichem’s gifted portrayal, and adding a bit on my own, I transformed the downtrodden Jew of galut into a proud pioneer in the Holy Land and a brave fighter for Jewish freedom. It’s a saga that I am sure you and your children will love. And now, thanks to The Jewish Press, it’s free!

I am demanding that an independent inquiry committee be established to investigate foreign involvement throughout the ranks of Tzahal.

For any reader who may be confused about the obligation to live in the Land of Israel, this sweeping halachic and Talmudic overview of Rabbi Kahane will surely put all uncertainty to rest. Because of its vital importance to each and every Jew, we will be presenting it in two installments.

These “civilians” are not “innocent.”

We spent Shabbat in Ashkelon, visiting my wife’s parents. On Motzei Shabbat, my wife stayed in Ashkelon (in the red glare of the rockets fired from Gaza) so that she could take her mother for a medical treatment in the morning. I drove back to Yerushalayim with my children. Along the way, we passed a stretch of fertile farmland. The heavenly rains that had fallen during Shabbat seemed to have awakened the earth, and the pungent aroma of fresh cow manure wafted into the car. My younger boys started gagging and making jokes, the way children do about such things.