Parsha

The great mussar giants often said: It is not the hand that has to strike the heart; it is the heart that has to hit the hand.

It is clear that when we drink wine on Shabbos, we are enjoying a small taste of the World to Come.

Instead of being on fire over our virtual identity, let the true fire from our neshama burn brightest.

Hashem gives us another chance, each year, in the hopes we will find our way back.

Learning Torah and perforning mitzvos are not only something we do, it becomes part of who we are.

The Torah was given to us, not to rise above the world to the realm of souls divested from physicality, but to make the physical world itself holy.

It is actually in the merit of our struggle with the Evil Inclination that we are worthy of accepting the Torah.

Simjon Rosenfeld, 96 years old, was the last survivor of the Sobibor death camp. In a camp in which 150,000 Jews were murdered, he and his friend managed to kill 11 SS people and escape. Most of the rebels were caught and murdered. Simjon survived, until yesterday.

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.

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the teacher of the Zohar who we honor on Lag B'Omer, plants seeds of infinite growth in our minds so each of us can begin our time travel with Torah with a taste of her eternally expanding wisdom embedded in our souls

“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.