“Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek!” “Be strong, be strong, and we will be strong!” The weekly portion we read this week is Parshat Pekudei (Exodus 38:21-40:38), which comprises the concluding chapters of Sefer Shemot, the Book of Exodus. As the ba’al koreh, the Torah reader, approaches the final verses, we stand. And when he pronounces the last words, we exclaim loudly and with dramatic flourish: “Chazak, chazak…,” “Be strong, be strong…”
"Words, words, words!", he shouted at me. He was a young man, raised as an observant Jew, but now in rebellion against his traditional upbringing. His parents had asked me to meet with him for several sessions to see if I could at least temper his rebellious spirit, and perhaps even convince him to return to the path they desired him to follow.
It was a cold and wintry day, about this time of year, when I paid a visit to a small Jewish community in the Midwest. The rabbi of the local synagogue invited me to join him for the afternoon prayer service, Mincha.
This week’s Torah portion, Vayakhel, (Exodus 35:1-38:20) begins on a familiar note. After all, it was just last week, on Purim, that we read Queen Esther’s dramatic response to Mordechai’s request that she personally intervene with King Achashverosh on behalf of the Jewish people. Initially, as you will surely remember, she is quite hesitant to accede to his request.
His name was Rabbi Simcha Zissel Levovitz, of blessed memory. He had studied in the famed Lithuanian yeshivot, witnessed their destruction, and escaped the Holocaust. He reached the shores of America just a few years before I was privileged to experience his tutelage.
You have surely noticed the great changes in the way charitable causes do their fundraising these days. There was a time when fundraisers, who often were themselves dignified and prestigious rabbinical figures, knocked on the doors of potential philanthropists in the hope that they would not be turned away.
We were walking down the long airport corridor on the way to the boarding gate. Somehow, it seems that whenever my wife and I have a flight to catch, anywhere, our gate is always at the furthest end of the long hall. We had plenty of time until the airplane departed, but somehow I experience an urgent need to rush whenever I am in an airport, and so we were in a hurry.
Since my childhood, I have been an avid reader. When I first discovered the joy of reading, I read everything I could get my hands on. Even today, my taste in reading is very eclectic. However, there is at least one genre of literature that I seem to avoid.
What is life all about? One answer to that question is that life is all about beginnings and endings.
It was over 40 years ago, but I remember the feelings very well. They were overwhelming, and were not dispelled easily.
Times were very different then. When one of our books was torn, we didn't junk it. We took it to a little shop where a bookbinder rebound it.
She was a Hindu princess. She was one of the brightest students in my graduate school class. We studied psychology, and she went on to return to her country and become a psychotherapist of world renown. For our purposes, I shall refer to her as Streena.
As a person who likes to see the connections between the Jewish calendar of holiday celebrations and the weekly Torah reading, I have long been perplexed by the proximity of Purim to this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa (Exodus 30:11-34:35).
Birthdays are important, and the older one gets, the more important they become. With age, birthdays begin to stimulate ambiguous feelings.
She was a Hindu princess. She was one of the brightest students in my graduate school class. We studied psychology, and she went on to return to her country and become a psychotherapist of world renown. For our purposes, I shall refer to her as Streena.
It is hard to sustain a spiritual high. Those of us who are committed to religious observance know that long periods of successful adherence to our standards are sometimes rudely interrupted by sudden, seemingly inexplicable lapses. Long-enduring spiritual experiences yield to momentary temptations and vanish in a flash.
This column is a product of my experience with two of my mentors, one who passed away relatively recently and the other who passed away long before I was born.
People are motivated by many things. The search for pleasure is certainly one of the great motivators of human beings. So are the search for power and the search for riches. There are also those among us who seek to be liked by others, to the extent that the search for adulation is their primary motivation in life.
My interest in the relationship between a person and his or her clothing goes back to my early days in graduate school. I was taking a course on human personality, under the tutelage of a remarkably insightful and erudite woman, Dr. Mary Henle. I was so enthusiastic about the courses that I took with her that I asked her to supervise my master’s degree thesis.
Whenever I think of people I knew who dressed impeccably, I recall three of my favorite people. One was my maternal grandfather, a businessman who was firmly dedicated to religious observance, but who chose his clothing carefully and was proud of his collection of cufflinks, tie clips, and colorful suspenders.
If you have raised a child, you have had this experience. Your little boy or girl came home from school with a sample of his or her artwork. To you it just looked like a hodge-podge of scribbles, random color smears. But your child exclaimed, "Look, Mommy, it is a picture of the trees and fields that we pass on the way to grandma's house." Or, "Wow, Daddy! I drew the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky!"