ב"ה

Emor 5765 - May 13, 2005

A Path and a Choice

Follow your bliss? If it’s going to make other people like you, that’s the thing to do? Not the sort of advice you’d expect from a Talmudic sage . . .
Parshah
Emor in a Nutshell
Laws specific to the Temple priests, festivals on the Jewish calendar, the menorah and the showbread. Penalties for murder, assault and destruction, followed by an execution.
Living
Believing Is Seeing

No, I didn't get the phrase muddled up; it is the cliché itself that's backwards...
Omer Insights
Why Do We Count the Omer? by Yeruchom Eilfort... Language of the Soul by Jay Litvin... A Spiritual Guide to the Omer Count by Simon Jacobson... Numbers Are Funny Things by Yanki Tauber... Revelation and Struggle by Zvi Yair...
Story
The Czar’s Army’s Iron Pots

The rebbe’s youngest son, Shmuel, who was seven years old at the time, wandered around the room, talking to the men who sat tearfully reading Tehillim as they waited to be received by his father . . .
Sea of Reeds

It is natural when young
To burn like the Mediterranean sun:
To measure one's shadow against
That of a mountain's...
And you shall count for yourselves from the morrow of the Shabbat, from the day on which you bring the Omer offering, seven complete weeks they shall be; until the morrow of the seventh week, you shall count fifty days . . . and you shall proclaim that very day a holy festival.
— Leviticus 23:15
Print Magazine

It’s G-d’s world. Everything He gives is good, the sweetest good.

But it is often a good far too great for us to understand. We imagine it is not good, because that’s the only way to make sense of it with our small minds.

Yet the truth is, He gives us all the good we can handle. If we could take more, He would g...