Say It in Your Own Words
Why this endless self-explaining, this perpetual conversation we feel obliged to "make", these torrents of verbiage sent over the airwaves and set in pixel and print each day? Why this need to put everything into words, as if nothing truly exists until it is trimmed and stretched to fit a set of humanly emitted sounds?
Why do we talk so much?
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| THE PARSHAH IN A NUTSHELL |
Devarim
Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22
Week of July 30 - August 5
Moses begins his "repetition of the Torah" to the assembled Children of Israel. For thirty-seven days, from the 1st of Shevat to the day of his passing on Adar 7, he reviews the events that occurred and laws that were given in the course of their 40-year journey from Egypt to Sinai to the Promised Land....
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| FROM THE CHASSIDIC MASTERS |
The Artist's Signature
There is a paradox in the central theme of the Jewish view of the cosmos: The universe is understood as infinite plurality extending from absolute oneness. It is even noted that true diversity can only come from truly formless simplicity, for otherwise it would be limited in some certain form or direction.
From one, many. This, the Lubavitcher Rebbe points out, is also the common feature of every system of the universe, from the galaxies to the atom, from the human being to the cells of which he is made.
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A Guest, a Fish, and a Prayer
After the third Shabbat meal, the holy Rabbi retired to his room to rest for a bit, but his feeling of unfulfilled purpose gave him no peace. He decided to do a shaalat chalom ("query by dream"). Before he lay down, he composed his mind carefully and focused on his request: "May Heaven inform me why I have been sent to this town. Where are the hidden sparks of holiness that I am supposed to elevate? What must I achieve?"
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A Taste of Future
The transition from an industrial to an information society has had a profound effect on the "selfishness" of wealth. When wealth comes from materials, it is hard to deviate from the basic conception that when a piece of the pie is given to somebody else, your share is less.
But it is becoming more and more evident that, today, it is knowledge and creativity, not materials, that produce wealth. Statistics bear this out. The weight in tons of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped 25% in the past two decades, while its value has more than doubled. Today’s millionaires are people with ideas that have benefited others, not yesterday’s gold miners and oil tycoons.
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Bitachon
Are you hero or victim? The hero convinced the disease can never touch him? Who never cries nor feels the fear, the panic, the regrets that are also part and parcel of his condition?
Or are you the victim, certain that he will be among the worst of the statistics? Who never encounters his bravery nor feels the transcendent power of rising above and banishing death from his consciousness, if only for a moment?
Neither have bitachon.
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Vision In The Dark
The future redemption will be more spiritually intense than any previous one.
Stages In Giving The Torah
Devarim consists of talks given by Moses, preparing the Jews for the tasks ahead of them in the Holy Land.
The Choice
The girl became hysterical, and could barely speak clearly because of her sobbing, but I was unmoved...
THE REBBE: 50 YEARS
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