As bleak as things may seem, Israel has more potential for prosperity than any other country. My teacher’s father, Rav Yehuda Leib Halevi Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), author of the Sulam (Ladder) commentary on The Book of Zohar, kept a special Shabbat knife in…
We have been celebrating Israel’s Independence Day for 68 years. With our bare hands we have built a strong army, solid economy, advanced technology, and modern medicine. And yet, despite impressive achievements, it seems as though we have not truly…
Last week, a video of two Israeli police officers beating an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian descent surfaced on the web, and the genie of racism in Israel leaped out of the bottle. It has been lurking there for decades, but Israelis are…
We are still masters of our fate; the choice is still in our hands. Let’s not miss out again. I was born a year after the end of World War II. During my formative years, we spoke of the lion…
Kabbalah.info released an infographic containing commons reasons why people have hated Jews throughout history, as well as a statistical analysis of anti-Semitism in the world today. The infographic gives as neatly packaged historical overview of reasons people have hated Jews throughout history.…
Let us take these last days of Passover and use this weekend to cultivate brotherhood and friendship. Last weekend, we celebrated our forefathers’ liberation from slavery. Some did it over Gefilte Fish, some relished the Fatoot (traditional Yemenite soup with…
It seems like ever since Jeremy Corbyn has been elected as the UK Labour Party leader, anti-Semitism has been given a serious boost and moved from the rear alley of the party to centre stage. All of a sudden, the…
This Passover, let us pass over from alienation to brotherhood, from indifference to mutual responsibility. Soon, as we do every year, we will be seated once again around the seder table. According to the Jewish calendar, Passover is actually the…
2015 began very badly. It’s not that 2014 was a joy ride, but the level of anti-Jewish violence has evidently jumped a phase. On January 20, I wrote in a blog post for The Jerusalem Post that it looks like…
Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, claimed in an interview to the Daily News that in the latest conflict with the Palestinians in Gaza (Protective Edge), in the summer of 2014, Israel killed “over 10, 000 innocent people.” The fact is that even…
There are Jews who are passionately anti-Zionists. There are dozens of Islamic states, but you would be hard stretched to find Muslims who resist the very notion of an Islamic state. Even if you did, they would not have the…
When someone says, “Muslims are…” or “Blacks are…,” that person is immediately categorized as an Islamophobe or a racist. But when someone says, “Jews are…” or “Israelis are…,” some people justify such statements in the name of free speech. This double…