More than 15 years ago I was dragged out of the Neve Dekalim Synagogue by four soldiers and then bussed out of Gush Katif. In those moments I wondered why and where the protest movement to stop one of…
James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank Group, passed away on Nov. 15, and in the conclusion of his obituary, The New York Times quoted his “mission impossible” quip about his envoy experience with the Quartet on the Middle…
Former PM Ehud Olmert attacked the US government’s decision to nullify Jonathan Pollard’s parole restrictions. “We don’t owe him anything,” said Olmert. “His coming to Israel will only increase the fallout from his case.” Nothing seems stranger than the…
J Street, in a mid-November email appeal, quoted an unnamed “top EU diplomat” in its tirade against an Israeli government call for bids for new homes in a nearly 30 year-old Jerusalem neighborhood where Ethiopian Jewish and Russian immigrants…
The “Deal of the Century”is a game. One group in the Trump administration wants to use this deal to give Israel the power to annex large parts of Judea and Samaria. Another group of the administration believes there is…
Rebbe Nachman teaches the following: “Repentance entails returning the thing to where it was taken from. This is the aspect of zarka, about which the holy Zohar brings: It was zarak (thrown back) to the place from which it…
As I noted in my previous article, Rav Kook teaches the following in Orot HaTechiya 28: “The holiness that is expressed from within the physical is the holiness of the Land of Israel. When the Shechina (Divine Presence) descended…
Everything in the physical world can be used as a vessel to either draw or contain Divine Light or the opposite to block it. After all, the Creator seeks to always shine his Will on all of the Creation.…
The final struggle over the Land of Israel is not rooted in the physical. While it’s true that Yishmael appears to be the violent opposing force to the yidden’s ability to draw closure to the galus, exile, the fact that…
Inside each Yid is unbounded consciousness. This point of God awareness is wrapped up in the layers of our world. Outside the Land of Israel we had no yearning; either on an individual or a national level for uncovering…