Then that night, something crazy happened. The campsite was on a hill. My fellow campers and I had placed our tent on that hill, and we figured it was okay not to put our tent stakes in the ground because we were going to be inside it.
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Healing is a deep and universal human need, and praying for the sick and afflicted has always been part of my ministry as a rabbi and teacher—never more so than in recent years, with the Covid pandemic and a good number of friends and colleagues beginning to decline in health and vitality.
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On May 14, 1948, before signing Israel’s Declaration of Independence, David Ben Gurion looked back over 2000 years of our history and declared how the Jewish people had returned in a second exodus, “undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers.”
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The life of Moses can be seen as three distinct movements, forty years each. First, Moses spends forty years thinking he is somebody. In the second act he discovers that he is nobody. But in the third forty years Moses discovers what Hashem can do with somebody who accepts he is nobody.
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The Prophet Yogi Berra told us, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” Such sage advice! But it is true that we can learn a lot for our own lives by watching how our ancestors lived theirs.
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God knows all things, but he has assigned to human beings, and therefore to us, a priestly responsibility. Even though our ancestors were groaning under heavy bondage, they still represented God and had the authority to call upon him to intervene.
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Who among us hasn’t contemplated revenge? Who hasn’t caught themselves musing at length about toppling an enemy from their pedestal, wanting them to feel for a moment the same pain that they inflicted? When Yosef was hauled off to prison at the whim of Potiphar’s wife, who do you think he blamed?
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Let’s make no mistake; the Maccabees did not fight for religious freedom, but to cleanse the land for the worship of the one true God of Israel. While they fought to end the Greek cultic practices imposed through the tyranny of Antiochus, they also fought to end the long-felt effects of assimilation.
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When our Gentile friends or co-workers ask us “what’s Hanukkah about, anyway?” we tend to give them sugar-coated references to light, miracles, and funny games with spinning tops. But this is only half of the story.
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A little old Jewish lady decides to make the long journey to speak with a holy man in India. When she arrives, his attendants turn her down—the guru is thronged by admirers—but she is so insistent that they finally let her in on one condition: she can only speak three words.
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