ב"ה

Pinchas 5765 - July 22, 2005

What Is Your Bottom Line?

What would arouse your righteous indignation? What would it take to galvanize you into action in defense of what you consider sacred and inviolate? Is there something that would incense you? Anything?
Parshah
Pinchas in a Nutshell
Pinchas is rewarded for his zealotry. Another census, the laws of inheritance, and the division of the Land of Israel. Moses appoints Joshua as his successor.
Story
The King's Gift

Just as the sun had sighed its last rays, the king and his guards sighted a small bright cottage, whose light bravely defied the dusk of an already darkened valley...
Breaking Walls

The Kabbalah of the Three Weeks: a buried seed of goodness, a 21-day almond wood, walls that protect and walls that imprison, the pregnant Tet, and a cosmic birth that puts history to rights.
The Three Weeks
Three weeks of the Jewish year--Tammuz 17 to Av 9--are designated as a time of mourning over the destruction of the Holy Temple and the resultant galut (physical exile and spiritual displacement) in which we still find ourselves
A Jewish Psychology of Motivation

Doing good without believing in reward is the flip side of doing good only for reward. In the one case, good is constrained to the metaphysical; in the other, it is limited to a crass physical expression . . .
G-d acquired five acquisitions in His world: the Torah is one aquisition, the heavens and the earth is one aquisition, Abraham is one aquisition, the people of Israel is one aquisition, and the Holy Temple is one aquisition
— Ethics of Fathers, 6:10
Print Magazine

That force that holds electrons in their orbit and planets in theirs, explodes incessantly within the stars above and is the darkness that fills the empty space—that force is a single whole, and it is G‑d.

It is not all of G‑d. It is an expression of G‑d. All of it could disappear in a single instant, and for Him nothin...