Haazinu-Oct 11, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 6:07 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:01 pm
Sukkot:
Sunday October 13th
Light Holiday Candles: 6:04 pm
Monday October 14th
Light Holiday Candles after: 6:58 pm
Tuesday October 15th
Holiday ends at 6:57 pm
Torah Message:
A Copper Penny
“For G-d’s portion is His people; Yaakov is the measure of His heritage.” (32:9)
Once there was a young boy standing in the courtyard of the shul in Vilna. He was bent over, his eyes scouring the pavement, searching intently for something. He looked here and there. Occasionally he would stoop lower and examine the ground to see if he could find what he was searching for. In frustration, tears began to well in his eyes.
The time came for mincha, the afternoon prayer, and the courtyard began to fill with people. They all noticed the little boy crying and searching. “What are you looking for?” they asked him. “My mother gave me a copper penny and I lost it on my way to cheder (school),” was the tearful reply. Everyone started to help him look for the copper penny. They scoured the courtyard. Not a single square inch was left unexamined.
It was not to be found.
Vayelech-Oct 4, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 6:16 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:10 pm
Yom Kippur:
Wednesday Oct. 8th
Light Holiday Candles: 6:11pm
Holiday ends: 7:04 pm
Torah Message:
Living in the Present
“And he (Moshe) went” (13:17) The Ramban writes: after sealing the new covenant with all of the Jewish People, they returned to their homes, and then Moshe ‘went’ and walked throughout all the camp to bid farewell to his beloved people and console them so that their sadness at his departure should not cloud their joy in the new covenant.
The worst thing about the Summer Holidays is that they come to an end. I was sitting with my son on the beach watching the Mediterranean Sea cresting against the coast of the Land of Israel on the last day of our holidays and he said, “It’s amazing how the waves are so powerful, they rise so high, and a moment later they’re just so much foam. It’s a bit like the holidays. You have a wonderful time and then it’s gone.” It reminded him of an idea from the “Pachad Yitzchak” — Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner zt”l.
Nitzavim-Sep 27, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 6:25 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:19 pm
Torah Message:
Coming Home
“And you will return to Hashem, your G-d, and listen to His voice… (30:2)
I guess every family has its more and less religious members. My father was one of thirteen siblings and his father came from Birshenkovitz in the Ukraine. In the early years of the twentieth century my grandfather, his mother and his five sisters all left the Ukraine. I don’t know if they all left together, but all the sisters and their mother, Yocheved, ended up in the US, and my grandfather in England. In the 1920s my grandfather and some of his sons opened a furniture factory that was very successful until the eldest son, Irving, died tragically in a car accident. Without him the business soon went into liquidation. Recently, with the wonders of email, the greater Spivack clan regularly swaps family history stories, and I recently posted the following: “My father (of blessed memory) once told me about a visit of Bobbe Yocheved’s to England. She came to their furniture factory one Friday afternoon. There was a lumber delivery taking place. She realized that they were not going to be able to offload all the lumber before Shabbos came in, and so she told the transport company to reload all the lumber, take it back to the depot, and deliver it on Monday morning. They were flabbergasted, but she was adamant and got her way. I don’t think that won her too many popularity bouquets from the lumber company, but I was impressed with the length that she was prepared to go to uphold her principles.”
Ki Tavo-Sep 20, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 6:35 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:29 pm
Torah Message:
Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
“And Hashem has distinguished you today…” (26:18)
The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci has been called “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world.” Like many examples of phenomenal success, such as the Beatles, critics and curators are at a loss to define exactly why the Mona Lisa has become the greatest icon of painting. Some say that it’s the way the Mona Lisa’s eyes follow you around the room. But that’s true of any portrait where the subject is looking directly at the viewer. I once made a photographic portrait of Rav Moshe Shapiro, zatzal. A student of his purchased a print from me in the largest size I made. After a few weeks he told me that he gave it away to another talmid of Reb Moshe’s because “his eyes kept following me round the room and I felt I was being watched all the time.”
In his book “Adjusting Sights,” about a religious soldier fighting on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Chaim Sabato describes fighting in one of the most desperate battles — Nafah quarry — in which his platoon was wiped out by the Syrians. He writes that he had with him a book of Tehillim (Psalms), stained with the tears of his mother, and he opened it up and started to read, “Mizmor L’David, Hashem Ro’i...” — Hashem is my Shepherd, I will not want.”
Ki Teitzei-Sep 13, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 6:45 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:38 pm
Torah Message:
Solidly Spiritual
He cannot give the right of the firstborn to the son of the beloved one ahead of the son of the disliked one, the firstborn. (21:16)
One of the greatest men who came into this world was an unassuming rabbi who was born in Russia and lived most of his life in New York City. There are enough stories about Rabbi Moshe Feinstein to fill many books. Here is one small story which is enormously revealing.
When a Jew finishes speaking to his Creator in the amidah, the standing prayer, he takes his leave by walking backward three paces as a servant would take his leave of a great king. If someone is standing behind you and is still praying this prayer, the halacha forbids you to back up into a space four amot (approximately two meters) in front of the person still in prayer. One day, Rabbi Feinstein had just finished praying in his Yeshiva on Staten Island, New York. As it happened, someone was still praying behind him. As he was waiting patiently for this person to conclude so that he could take three paces backward and complete his service, someone told him that there was a call from Israel, a matter of urgency but not life-threatening that demanded his attention. Rabbi Feinstein continued to wait for the fellow behind him to take three steps backward. Nothing happened, so deeply was this fellow immersed in prayer. The person who had brought Rabbi Feinstein the news of the call started to become agitated:
Shoftim-Sep 6, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 6:54 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:48 pm
Torah Message:
Pain and Gain
“Who is the man who has built a new house and has not yet inaugurated it? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the war and another man will inaugurate it.” (20:5)
Rashi: “And this thing will pain him.”
Rashi’s comment on the above verse cannot mean that the thought of someone else inaugurating his new home will be extremely painful to him. For in the painful-thoughts department nothing is more painful than the thought of death itself.
The Midrash teaches that when the Romans executed Rabbi Chananya for teaching Torah in public they wrapped him in his Sefer Torah and set it alight. To prolong his agony they packed water-soaked wool around his chest. Rabbi Chananya said, “The parchment is consumed, but the letters fly up in the air.” The Roman executioner was deeply moved by Rabbi Chananya’s holiness and asked, “If I remove the wool from around your heart, will I have a share in the World-to-Come?”
Re’eh-Aug 30, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 7:04 pm
Shabbat Ends: 7:59 pm
Torah Message:
In G-d We Trust
“You shall open your hand to your brother, to your poor, and to your destitute in your Land.” (15:11)
Sign seen hanging in a store:
“In G-d we trust, everyone else pays cash.”
A philosopher once asked Rabban Gamliel, “Your Torah commands you over and over again to give charity, and to not be afraid of its affecting your financial security. Isn’t such a fear natural? How can a person give away his money without worrying that perhaps he should have saved it for a “rainy day?”
Ekev-Aug 23, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 7:13 pm
Shabbat Ends: 8:08 pm
Torah Message:
Compulsories
“And it will be that if you harken…” (13:17)
Photographer Joe Lipka once observed in LensWork Magazine that all artists start out by imitating their role model. Why else would you want to pick up a brush or a camera or a guitar unless you already saw something that grabbed your imagination and made you feel, “I want to do that!”? The problem is that having achieved a level of competence and duplicating the work of the maestro — what he calls ‘compulsories’ — most people fail to take the next step by stepping outside their comfort zone and replacing necessary plagiarism with art. It’s frightening letting go of the virtuoso’s apron strings, throwing away the training wheels and striking out into the great unknown. But that’s the only way we can really escape the treadmill of reinventing the wheel.
Va’etchanan-Aug 16, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 7:21 pm
Shabbat Ends: 8:17 pm
Torah Message:
Loose Change
“For you shall not cross this Jordan” (3:27)
A dark night. A passenger jumps down from a bus. As he jumps, some small change falls from his pocket.
Too embarrassed to ask the driver to wait so he can use the headlights of the bus to collect his nickels and dimes from the sidewalk, the passenger quickly reaches into his pocket and places a twenty-dollar bill on the ground in the vicinity of his small change. He shouts to the driver, “Hold the bus! There’s a twenty-dollar bill of mine somewhere down here on the ground!”
Devarim-Aug 9, 2019
This Shabbat:
Friday Candle Lighting: 7:29 pm
Shabbat Ends: 8:26 pm
Torah Message:
Please!
“These are the words…” (1:1)
It’s always a refreshing experience to walk off the plane in London. I keep forgetting how polite the English really are. The wheels of English social intercourse are oiled through a millennium of homogeneous culture (the last invasion of the British Isles was in 1066), in which politeness is arguably the highest social virtue. Immigrants fast become more English than the English. When I grew up, someone who wore a turban, or a chador, or had different skin color, was guaranteed to carry along with that a heavily accented and foreign demeanor. Now when you speak to someone clearly ethnic, their accent could be as cockney as the sound of Bow Bells, or as a cut-glass as an ex-Etonian – but they are so polite. Yes, the English are so polite even when you can see they hate you.