Parsha

In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us. -Flora Edwards

The priestly blessing in this week’s parsha begins with the famous request that God bless and keep/guard (shomer) the Jews. While the meaning of blessing is reasonably straightforward, the meaning of keeping or guarding is less clear.

A person sometimes becomes spiritually dispirited because he believes his sins are too many and that he has forfeited his G-d-given inheritance.

For an organization to move forward there needs to be internal agreement and alignment with respect to the organization’s goals and the plans to achieve them. Without this unity of purpose things will likely get derailed at some point.

To fathom how great Hillel Butman (ZT"L) was, Natan Scharansky looked up to him.

One of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world. -Yiddish Proverb

Jewish children, particularly before the age of bar mitzvah, are effected for life when they immerse themselves in Torah study.

Watching the Jews spend forty years traveling by families, patriarchal clans, and tribes, the same units which governed the division of the Land, we can remember, Jews have multiple identities, ideally harmoniously combined.

A message both particular and universal...

Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him. -James Allen

But what happens if we actually become partners? As the Rabbis well understood, that should be a game changer.

Yes, things change, sometimes too quickly to comprehend, unless we realize that all the Sh'vilei Emunah, Paths of Faith, offer opportunities to explore new paths and discover how each can take us back to Sinai.

What is the source of true happiness and success in life?

Like a grandmother who blesses her grandchildren, she blessed us all. Marie Nachmias raised her hands and eyes to the sky, and the crowd, including the prime minister, rose spontaneously and applauded her.

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants thereof.” However, Rashi, Ramban, and Meshech Chochmah show tradition understood the key word, deror, as indicating a version of liberty surprising to the Western mind.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors. -Plutarch

Long before the Danites’ penchant for connection with gentiles would reach its climax in the days of Shimshon, the Torah warns them of its great dangers

Since he was saved,the Kaliver Rebbe said Shema Yisrael thousands of times in front of wide, varied audiences. In the prayer book that he published, he added this verse at the end of the prayer in memory of those who died in the Holocaust.

Currently, Jews live in a world which denies many of the Torah’s views about what constitutes proper sexuality. I suspect it has been true more often than we stop to notice—

The story of the Exodus from Egypt teaches us to be alert and attentive to “windows of opportunity” that appear in our lives – so seize them.

Wishing you a Happy Passover and a Good Shabbos...

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason. -Benjamin Franklin

“Once, when I was a child in Jerusalem, I couldn’t restrain myself and asked him: ‘Is it true that you are one of the lamedvav (36) tzadikim?’... R’ Aryeh smiled and replied with one word: ‘Sometimes.’

Rav Eliyahu Dessler understands that this statement of losing one’s mitzvos for speaking lashon hara is one of those statements that is not meant to be taken literally.

“After 2,000 or more years of exile, you could say that from the six days of Creation until this day, we have not merited to see a day like this, that we are holding elections in a Jewish state. Shehechiyanu! Blessed is the One that kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this day!" When Torah meets democracy.

According to Chassidus, the general redemption needed to be preceded by personal redemptions from every single person. That is, every person should prepare himself to be redeemed from all the elements that hinder his life

Time is Too slow for those who wait, Too swift for those who fear, Too long for those who grieve, Too short for those who rejoice. But for those who love, time is not. -Henry Van Dyke

When the Torah constantly asks that its words "Be new in our eyes, as if we are receiving the Torah today," it is not simply asking that we are open to a new reading of a verse, or application of a law. The Torah is asking us to live in a state of Paradigm Shift, a life in which our approach to prayer changes each day, as should our approach to all the commandments and texts.

The ethics of each new birth represents a microcosm of that debate. We have good reason to hope that the education and upbringing we provide our children will ensure that they bring more good to the world than evil. But there is not a single one of us who can bring up even the best of our children to never do evil. And given that this is the case, giving birth is also an act of responsibility for the evil that one thereby adds to the world.