Behar-Bechukotai: Sabbaticals, Scholarship and Severity
Dear readers,
Can you find your last few phone bills? I know where mine are. They’re piled high on my desk, keeping company with an assortment of reports, invitations, and various important-looking scraps of paper. Together, they wait patiently for the day when they will be sorted and neatly filed away. The realities of everyday life keep pushing such activities further down on my to-do list.
Some things are too important to wait until the right moment appears. As busy as we may be, essentials don’t belong on the back burner. Deadlines and schedules, whether self-determined or externally prescribed, help ensure that priorities are addressed in time.
This week’s Torah reading highlights this concept. Shabbat comes once a week, a day to refresh and reconnect with our Creator. Every seven years, during the Sabbatical year, the land lies fallow, allowing us to refocus on the true source of our sustenance. Property sales are canceled every fifty years when the Jubilee is observed, emphasizing the transience of material acquisitions. Designated times remind us to take a step back and focus on what truly counts.
Celebrate these special times, and reflect on the lessons they teach us. Allow their effect to spill over into your life, each and every day. And maybe find a moment to clear off your desk too.
Now take some time to enjoy a good, inspiring read!
Rochel Chein,
Responder for Ask the Rabbi @ Chabad.org
Lending money is the highest form of charity, far greater than giving handouts. A handout may preserve a life for a day, but a loan preserves that sense of self-sufficiency necessary to get back on your feet.
The day’s first battlefield is your bed, and the first shot is fired when the alarm clock rings. What is the first action we’ll take on the battlefield?
Maya asked a few questions, peered into cupboards and bedrooms in her best social-worker manner, and then left. I was sure we passed the test . . .
We were free people. But freedom is not automatic. It is something that needs to be learned, integrated and experienced. And if you have never been free, you may not know how to do it . . .
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, of sainted memory, learns a life-altering lesson from the spring season.
We need to connect with G‑d in real “communication,” rather than just passing the moments of prayer on autopilot.
I perceived G‑d as an onlooker to my life. He was dispassionately watching from above as I struggled through the daily challenges, waiting for me to slip in order to shoot down the punishment.
The Sabbatical and Jubilee years, doing business with G‑d, reward and rebuke, and a system for evaluating value.
It’s the first word a baby learns to speak. It’s the kindest word in any language. It’s the name of G‑d.
My heart swelled. I empathized with her awkwardness, her inability to casually approach the group and join the activity . . .
In a healthy relationship, the love must deepen and grow, or the relationship is at risk of becoming static and stale. The same is true in our relationship with G‑d.
The poor man ate greedily. As he left, a man with kind eyes nodded. The poor man knew that this man had saved his life.
Should not an accomplished scholar be considered more valuable than a simple laborer?
Rabbi Nissen Mangel, a renowned philosopher and author who was sent to Auschwitz as a 10-year-old boy and spent five years in the death camp before his liberation in 1945, addressing the concept of belief in G‑d after the Holocaust.
Sheri Ben Aroya talked about her life, and how it changed one ordinary day with a terror attack that left her paralyzed down the right side of her body.
How to unmask a blessing in disguise:
Stare it in the face and say, “I know you are not just a lousy day or bad luck. I know you are a good friend—even if for the life of me I cannot determine how. I know there is only one Source of All Things, and nothing can convince me that evil descends from Above. Evil descends fr...
