Emulating Aaron

The importance of emulating Aaron is demonstrated in this week’s parsha in the encounter between Moshe, Aaron and Pharaoh. Aaron "loved peace and pursued peace, loved mankind and drew them closer to Torah.

When necessity dictates that we deal in a strict manner with others as Moshe and Aaron did with Pharaoh in Va'eira, we must always make sure that we employ "the staff of Aaron" - and are guided solely by the highest principles of love for our fellow Jew.

QOTD

To defend a country you need an army. But to defend an identity you need schools.

Chief Rabbi Sacks

Moment of Zen

Don't be so upset with the world
Anger at the world is anger at God

Accept what God gives to you and what God takes away
Nothing in this world belongs to anyone

North Korea

From Foreign Policy

Information about North Korea, one of the few remaining Stalinist regimes, is hard to come by. With no human rights organizations allowed into the country, a strictly controlled state-run media, and very little citizen access to the Internet or news from the outside world, North Korea is the most secretive society in the world.

Nonetheless, based on testimonies from the estimated 300,000 North Koreans who have been able to escape, as well as satellite evidence, it is known that the Pyongyang regime runs the world's most extensive system of gulags, or Kwan li so, incarcerating as many as 200,000 unknown political prisoners spread out across six large prison camps. Testimonies from defectors describe the treatment of these prisoners in terms that amount to crimes against humanity, including systematic torture, public executions, slave labor, and forced abortions. Moreover, the regime practices "guilt by association," incarcerating family members of political prisoners, including children, for up to three generations.

Makes me feel very grateful to live in an open society, despite its problems, God Bless America.

holy seperate

In Judaism kadosh, holy, means separation. To sanctify is to separate. Why? Because when we separate, we create order. We defeat chaos. We give everything and everyone their space. I am I and not you. You are you and not I. Once we respect our difference and distance, then we can join without doing damage to one another...The most beautiful symbol of the problem and its resolution is the ceremony of havdalah at the end of Shabbat and especially the havdalah candle. The wicks are separate but the flame they make is joined. So it is between husband and wife. So it is between parent and child. And so it is, or should be, between brothers.

Rabbi J. Sacks

The Festival of Lights

The festival of lights, day one...

...and day eight

I love Hannukah, no jelly donuts this year but I did have the best potato latkes of my life, lets all try to remember to bring a little more light into the darkness this year.

QOTD

Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Bob Nesta

Trying To Find A Balance

From: Atmosphere - Trying To Find A Balance

I'm not insane, in fact I'm kind of rational

When I be askin', "Yo, where did all the passion go?"

East coast, West coast, down South, Midwest

Nowadays everybody knows how to get fresh

Somebody give me a big yes (YES!)

God Bless America, but she stole the B from "Bless" (Accept it)

Picture of the Day

A beautiful winters sunset

Always keep moving

On the first night of Chanukah, all eight candleholders stand before you. But you light only one. Tomorrow night you shall light two. You know that eventually you will light all eight. From which we learn two things: First: Move step by step in life. Take things on at a pace you can handle. Second: Always grow. Always keep moving. If you did one good thing yesterday, do two today. Your ultimate achievement is always one step ahead.

The Chanukah Lights remind us in a most obvious way that illumination begins at home, within oneself and one’s family, by increasing and intensifying the light of Torah and Mitzvos in the everyday experience, even as the Chanukah Lights are kindled in growing numbers from day to day. But though it begins at home, it does not stop there. Such is the nature of light that when one kindles the Chanukah Lights are expressly meant to illuminate the “outside,” symbolically alluding to the duty to bring light also to those who, for one reason or another, still walk in darkness.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson זצ״ל

Bageling

This wonderful story was sent to me from this blogs most loyal reader, it has the ring of truth. When the new neighbors moved into the place next to mine, I ran into one of them moving in and he immediately said to me that he had noticed my mezuzah and knew that we would get along.

As it turns out he was bageling me, I just didn’t realize it until I read this.

Enjoy:

It all started when my friend -- who wears a kippah -- was back in college and suffering through a tedious lecture. As the professor droned on, a previously-unknown young woman leaned over and whispered in his ear: 'This class is as boring as my Zayde's seder.'

The woman knew that she did not 'look' Jewish, nor did she wear any identifying signs like a Star of David. So foregoing the awkward declaration, 'I'm Jewish,' the girl devised a more nuanced of heralding her heritage.

This incident launched a hypothesis which would henceforth be known as the Bagel Theory.

The Bagel Theory stands for the principle that we Jews, regardless of how observant or affiliated we are, have a powerful need to connect with one another. To that end, we find ways to 'bagel' each other - basically, to 'out' ourselves to fellow Jews.

There are two ways to bagel. The brave or simply unimaginative will tell you straight out that they are Jewish (a plain bagel). But the more creative will concoct subtler ways to let you know that they, too, are in the know.

I suspect that Jews have been bageling even before real bagels were invented. And while my husband and I may not have invented bageling, we do seem to have a steady diet of bagel encounters.

An early bagel favorite occurred when my kippah-wearing husband and I were dating, and we spent a Saturday evening at a funky coffee house with friends. We engaged in a few boisterous rounds of Boggle. Observing our fun, a couple of college students at a nearby table asked if they could play too. After we rattled the tray and furiously scribbled our words, it was time to read our lists aloud. One of the students, who sported a Rasta hat and goatee, proudly listed the word 'yad.' Unsuspecting, we inquired, 'What's a yad?' He said with a smirk, 'You know that pointer you read the Torah with.' Yes, we were bageled at Boggle.

On our honeymoon in Rome, we were standing at the top of the Spanish steps next to a middle-aged couple holding a map. The husband piped up in an obvious voice, 'I wonder where the synagogue is.' My husband and I exchanged a knowing look at this classic Roman bagel and proceeded to strike up a conversation with this lovely couple from Chicago. After we took them to the synagogue, they asked to join us at the kosher pizza shop. As we savored the cheese less arugula and shaved beef pizza - to this day the best pizza I have ever had - this non-religious couple marveled at traveling kosher and declared they would do so in the future, a satisfying bagel to be sure.

In the years since, our bagel encounters have become precious souvenirs, yiddishe knick-knacks from our family adventures in smaller Jewish communities. Like the time the little boy at the Coffee Bean in Pasadena, California, walked up to my husband, pulled out a mezuzah from around his neck, smiled and ran away (a non-verbal bagel!). Or our day trip to the pier in San Clemente, California when an impish girl in cornrows and bikini scampered over to say 'Good Shabbos.'

We have been bageled waiting at airline ticket counters, in elevators, at the supermarket checkout. On a recent trip abroad, however, we did not get bageled even once. That was in Israel where there is no need.

Ultimately, why do we feel this need to bagel? Does it stem from our shared patriarchs, our pedigree of discrimination and isolation, a common love of latkes or just the human predisposition to be cliquey? I maintain it is something more. Our sages say that all Jews were originally one interconnected soul which stood in unison at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. Now scattered across the Earth, as we encounter each other's Jewish souls, we recognize and reconnect with a piece of our divine selves.

The bagel may have a hole, but we bagel in a quest to feel whole.

from darkness

From Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson זצ״ל,

There are dark jewels in this world that can be salvaged, purified and taken as precious bounty for the good.

And there is darkness itself, the essential absence of light, that must only wait its time to expire.

How can we tell between them?

If the darkness fights back, there is hope.

It means there is something there worth fighting for.

If I am

"If I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, I am not I and you are not you; but if I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then I am and you are."

R. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk