I try to focus these weekly columns upon individuals who are barely mentioned in the weekly Torah portion. They often have an important, but insufficiently appreciated, role to play.
Why did I choose the title “Person in the Parsha” when I began to compose these weekly columns many years ago? I hesitate to tell you the truth; namely, that I had several reasons for doing so. But one reason was the fact that almost every parsha has in it a central human figure, Abraham or Moses for example, and often several such figures. Surely, a weekly column must include some comment about that person’s heroic achievements or occasional frustrations.
Imagine a very important project in which you were once involved. It could have been at work, in school, or in your personal life. You gave it your all. You used all the resources at your command, involving many other people, spending quite a bit of money, and investing a lot of your own time and energy. You were confident that you had done everything possible to guarantee the success of this project.
All men are mortal. Yankel is a man. Therefore, Yankel is mortal. You have just read a basic lesson in logic, one that appears in almost every textbook on the subject.
It is a question that I learned never to ask. I first learned this lesson in my training as a psychotherapist, long ago. I was seeing a gentleman for a number of problems, including his marital difficulties.
It seems that war is one of the most common of all human activities. Study history of the human race, and you will not find many years that were not blemished by warfare. Read the literature of the world, and you will find very few books whose pages are not bloodstained. Study the Jewish tradition, beginning with the Bible itself, and you will find very few narratives that do not contain the images of battle.
I love metaphors. An apt metaphor can help stimulate boundless creativity and can lead to a deeper and richer understanding of the concept being studied.
If your child, employee, or colleague asks you that question, you can be sure that he or she is sincere, wishes to learn, and will succeed. The person who asks, "How am I doing?" is asking for constructive feedback. That person is expressing a need to know whether or not he is doing a good job, and if not, what he can do to correct his work.
It is a question with which every religious person has at one time been confronted and been confounded. Even those of us who are not theologically inclined have struggled with this question: Why are my prayers not answered? After all, we do believe in the efficacy of prayer. Why, then, is it so often a frustrating experience?
"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." We have all heard this phrase, and many of us have used it. It is especially apt when it is used to describe a person with many virtues and talents who just can't use them because of the social or physical circumstances in which he finds himself. That such a person faces profound frustration is, to say the least, obvious.
Every so often, I come across a sentence of another person’s writing which expresses one of my own thoughts in a language far superior to my own. Over the years, I have contemplated and written about the concepts of “honesty” and “integrity” and the difference between the two.
Too often leaders cling to power and become blinded to their own vulnerabilities.
It was at a house of mourning, and she was saying something that I had heard many times before. In fact, I had said it myself when I was sitting shiva for my own mother.
Very often, we think that if a person is especially spiritual, he cannot possibly be very practical. It is as if religious devotion and good common sense just don’t go together.
Imagine standing at a crossroads. We have all been there. We have all experienced moments in our life’s journey when we had to make a crucial choice and decide whether to proceed along one road or along another. (Except for Yogi Berra, of course, who famously said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it.")
I don't usually disagree publicly with lecturers, particularly when they are expressing opinions which are mostly consistent with my own. But there was one time when I felt that I had to speak up and object to one of the speaker's expressions.
Scholars have had a lot to say about the role of aristocracy in the course of human history. Those of us who grew up in the United States of America were taught about the advantages of democracy and thus developed a prejudice against the very word "aristocracy." We were convinced that aristocracy meant government by a select group of people who earned their right to govern by virtue of their birth.
It is good for the body and good for the soul. It helps one lose weight, provides time for contemplation, is a favorite leisure activity, it can be entertaining – even edifying – and it costs nothing. In fact, there is no down side to it at all. It is the act of walking, or more colloquially, "taking a walk."
It is a lesson I first learned in a course I took on the skills of interviewing long ago. The instructor taught us that the way to really size up a candidate for a job is to determine how he uses his time. He taught us that one question designed to assist the interviewer to make that determination is, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I love visiting residences for senior citizens. For one thing, being around truly older people invariably helps me feel young by comparison. Recently, I was a weekend guest scholar at such a residence. I dispensed with my prepared lectures and instead tried to engage the residents of the facility, not one of whom was less than ninety years old, in a group discussion. This proved to be a very wise move on my part, because I learned a great deal about the experience of getting old. Or, as one wise man insisted, “You don’t get ‘old’—you get ‘older.’”
There is much that the Torah leaves to our imagination. Regular students of the weekly Torah portion soon become convinced that the narratives they read each week are deliberately abbreviated, as if to encourage us to fill in the missing links on our own.
There are many steps that we ascend on our journey towards the holiday of Passover. It is as if it is impossible to just plunge into the holiday without proper preparation. These steps include the many special Sabbaths that precede the holiday. They include the Parshiyot of Shekalim, Zachor, Parah, and HaChodesh, and they culminate this week with Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath, the final Sabbath before Passover.
He was an old man, and in many ways came from a very different world than I. And yet he taught me more than anyone else ever did. One of the things he taught me was that no one suffers as much as a parent who loses a child.
The world did not know that he was a mystic. He was an accomplished diplomat, who knew how to deal with people in positions of great power. Some characterized him as a shrewd, and even manipulative, manager of men. His name was Dag Hammarskjold, and he was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations.