The rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment in America, particularly within its prestigious universities, is indeed a cause for concern. Institutions like New York University, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, UC Berkeley, MIT and the University of Michigan, which are renowned for…
Rabbi Akiva is known to have laughed upon witnessing the destruction of the Temple. Why did he laugh? It is because he grasped the unfolding of a necessary process leading to a far greater future state. The ruin of the…
As we approach Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the ruin of the Holy Temple and the shattering of our unity as a single entity, we face existential threats and witness a growing trend of Israelis wanting to leave the country.…
Jews in America can either mingle into their surrounding society so as not to stand out, and by doing so, try to avoid various forthcoming blows; or they can be strong Jews, demanding what is rightfully theirs and not giving…
Amid anxiety of a looming attack on Israel from multiple fronts following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, my students asked me in relation to the verse from Jeremiah, “Out of the north the evil will break forth,” which Baal HaSulam…
We are at a turning point in our history because we have exhausted our egoistic paradigm and can no longer continue developing as we have until today. What is the “egoistic paradigm”? It is that we developed according to the…
I once visited a place in Israel that housed the furniture and utensils of Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam). I noticed how “Medinat Israel” (Hebrew for “The State of Israel”) was inscribed on his challah knife’s handle. It is a…
Many people have hated and continue to hate Jews because they possess a certain tool that can determine whether or not they aim themselves at the single force of love, bestowal and connection that guides reality. Why is the Jews’…
Indeed, many great Jews were not originally Jewish. For example, Rabbi Akiva was born a non-Jew, but became the Jewish people’s leading teacher in his time. King David, renowned as Israel’s greatest king, had a non-Jewish great grandmother, Ruth. Also,…
In Kabbalah, a correction is a change of the intention—from an intention to receive to an intention to give—upon the desire to enjoy, which is our nature. We undergo such a correction, the setting up of the intention to give or…
Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag, nicknamed “Baal HaSulam” (the “Master of the Ladder”) for his monumental multi-volume “Sulam” (“Ladder”) commentary on The Book of Zohar, is widely renowned as the greatest Kabbalist of the 20th century. Other than The Zohar commentary, he invested immensely in…
We are standing before a great change in the world, and by “world” I mean human relations. Nothing matters more than the connections between people, and they need to change. We cannot change stones or trees or animals or the…