Tag: LLP

The Beis HaMikdash was destroyed due to sinas chinam, baseless hatred. With the Three Weeks and Tisha B’Av now behind us, have we learned anything from this national tragedy, or is history repeating itself?

I had just finished reading The Prime Ministers (Toby Press) and enjoyed every one of its 700-plus pages. Yahuda Avner’s “fly on the wall” account spans the governments of Levi Eshkol (Six-Day War), Golda Meir (Yom Kippur War), Yitzhak Rabin (Entebbe, Oslo), and Menachem Begin (peace treaty with Sadat, attack on Iraqi nuclear reactor, Lebanon invasion), describing sensitive, frightening and sometimes hilarious events, mostly of the kind you will never read in a newspaper.

There is hardly a Jewish child who has not been taught the story in the Talmud (Kiddushin 31a) of Doma Ben Nesina. He was the son of a jeweler who refused to wake up his sleeping father when representatives of the Beis Hamikdash (Holy Temple) came knocking on his door, wishing to buy certain precious stones for the Kohen Hagadol's breastplate (urim v'tumim).