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An Obstacle to Miracles

The pages of the Tanach are filled with stories that make the most exciting soap opera look like an unedited student documentary. There’s drama and thrills and emotion and adventure and characters you will grow to hate and love and fear and admire all at the same time. On the surface it can seem positively psychedelic, but through the lens of the commentators, profundities are revealed that will make your jaw drop. As a faithful prophet of Israel, Elisha was reporting the troop movements of the invading Arameans to the Jewish armies. The increasingly frustrated Aramean king accused his officers of betraying their country, but they protested that they weren’t traitors, it was the work of the all-seeing Jewish prophet. The king sent horses and chariots to seize Elisha, and they soon surrounded the town he was in. Elisha had an attendant who cried out in alarm to his master when he saw them coming: “What shall we do?” Elisha reassured him with the cryptic statement, “Those on our side are
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Willpower is for losers

Friday afternoon is a hectic time in any frum household. As the sunset deadline looms, pressure mounts to get all the Shabbos preparation done in time. Children must be cleaned and dressed, muktzeh must be put away, supper cooking time must be carefully co-ordinated before leaving the house, time-switches must be set up, alarms deactivated, and all the details that guard and honour the Shabbos Queen seen to. Yet for two weeks out of the past three the streets of Victory Park have seen me jogging around the block for precisely thirty minutes as the sun touches the treetops. I can handle the exercise, but it normally takes a perfect confluence of factors to get me to put on my running shoes. The weather has to be just right, I have to be in perfect health, nobody must need me for the next hour or so, and I have to magically achieve that rare state of enthusiasm for physical effort. How did it happen that I came to be sweating on a Friday afternoon when there were so many more urgent
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Harmonizing

To the delight of my Facebook friends, every time I score a goal in the office 5-a-side soccer league I post a video of the event to my timeline. They and I are deeply grateful to YouTube and the entire software and hardware infrastructure that makes this all possible, not to mention the referee who clicks his remote at the pivotal moment. Now my football feats can be recorded for posterity and analysis by those who will be studying my life in the future. If you are worried about these videos cluttering up my Facebook page, I can reassure you that I keep them to a minimum, say about two a season. No, I don’t cull the boring ones – I post them all. I love soccer. I wouldn’t be playing otherwise, no matter how career-advancing my line manager hints it is. But I’m more of a quantity over quality type of player. I run around frantically after the ball like a madman, to little effect, until I am completely spent (current records: 9.4 min). Thereafter I collapse into the waiting arms of
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Davening

Long ago when I was just a kid, when my chin was as smooth as my head is now, the way we categorised someone's level of religiousness was by how often he went to shul. If he’d never seen the inside of a shul, he was a nogoodnik, to be marvelled at and pitied. If he only came when forced in an armlock by his mother to attend his cousins’ barmitzvahs, he was considered estranged. If he went three times a year, he was average. If he went every Friday night he was old school traditional. If he went Friday nights and Saturday mornings he was a pillar of the community. And if he went to shul on Yontifs too, he was as frum as the Rabbi’s children, please G-d Amen. Going to shul was the celebrity spokesman for the mitzvahs; the public face of our mysterious heritage. It was common knowledge that there were people out there who went to shul every day, but what they did there was never made clear. There’s no brocha during the week. Shul was a place you attended. You went to shul.  Y
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My Friend Needs Help

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I have this... friend, see? And my friend has this... problem. But he can't ask for help. I know what you're thinking. "Well, if he has an embarrassing problem, he should just pretend to ask for help on behalf of someone else. That way no one will know it's actually his problem." Very funny. No, this isn't my problem. I'm not saying I don't have any problems, just that this isn't one of them. (For an up-to-date list of my problems I can forward you the latest spreadsheet/ powerpoint presentation, put together by my wife and what I have always assumed to be a high-powered consortium of judges, spiritual-leaders and in-laws. Additional bandwidth charges may apply. Not for sensitive viewers.) But no, this isn't one of my problems. I'm talking about someone else, a good friend of mine, whom I love dearly, who is either blissfully ignorant or sadly oblivious of his... shortcoming. He can't ask for help because he doesn't eve
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Don’t bite the stick

There are many sayings in the Talmud about the coming of Moshiach. They speak of the upheaval and change in the natural order which will occur as history approaches its climax. The Rabbis of the Talmud took this seriously, as they do all of our tradition, and were so afraid of the difficult times ahead that they publicly wished they would not have to go through the pain of the world ‘giving birth’ to Moshiach. The sayings are short and cryptic, but like all of the Torah laden with meaning. We would recognise very well the allusions to runaway inflation, state atheism and disrespect for the elderly. Others are not so clear. There is an explanation for one of the sayings which has always stuck with me. More than just a description of the descent of society, it seems to me to have a very practical application in our daily life. בעקבות משיחא חוצפא יסגא ויוקר יאמיר הגפן תתן פריה והיין ביוקר ומלכות תהפך למינות ואין תוכחת בית וועד יהיה לזנות ותגליל יחרב ותגבלן ישום ואנשי תגבול י
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Tzaddik headspace

Modern psychology has much to teach us about healthy ways of managing our thoughts and emotions, but so do the mitzvos. Like a healthy body, the mental benefits with regard to keeping mitzvot are mostly indirect - when you're healthy you're able to serve G-d without the added stress of illness or incapacity. But there are some mitzvot where healthy thinking is almost a prerequisite. Love your neighbour like yourself  וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ  ( ו יקרא יט:י ) This famous commandment is described in the Gemara as the foundation of the entire Torah. In a plain sense, it obligates us to treat everyone as we would like to be treated. When you contemplate the wording, however, a beautiful facet is revealed. The commandment does not say you have to love your neighbour  more  than yourself. Intrinsically, a person loves himself more than any other entity around them. If someone tells you that they love someone more than they love themselves they are probab
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