THE BRAVE NEW LAND

Mazal Tov to my nephew Daniel, family, and friends! He had his Bar Mitzvah last week and has now entered the ranks of minyan goers around the world. We went up to Jerusalem earlier in the week for his Torah reading at the Kotel, which he pulled off without a hitch, and at the last minute before driving home, I decided to join him, his father, and some other friends spelunking down King Hezekiah’s Tunnel to Shiloach Pool. Just for a little background on Hezekiah’s Tunnel: according to recent radio carbon dating, it was dug about 700 B.C.E., which corresponds to Biblical references to the tunnel in Kings 2, 20:20; Chronicles 2, 32:2-4, and 32:30. The tunnel runs 131 feet beneath the City of David, just south-east of the Old City in Jerusalem. According to the Tanach (Hebrew Bible) and the plaque that was found inside the tunnel (robbed by the Turks and now languishing in an Istanbul Museum), the tunnel was dug in order to safeguard Jerusalem’s water supply from the attacking Assyrian arm...

When we look around the world and see the ever decreasing space that separates continents and cultures, it is quite evident that something batty is going on. I mean, are we living on the Moon? Maybe for clarity purposes, click here to read a blog by Alan Dershowitz that illustrates the issue quite well. It kind of seems like we are grabbing at straws in order to explain what is happening in the world. It makes me wonder, was it always like this? When the Romans took over the world, did they blame all their problems on the Jews? What about the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Moors, the Spaniards, the English, and the Germans? Now the Jews are even blamed with Global Warming by the Cult of Environmentalism? I guess the thought is that, if a civilization has been around so long, virtually unchanged in terms of its moral, ethical, religious, and cultural, characteristics; it had to have had something to do with all the problems that the world now faces. After all, the Jews have been there thro...

In Genesis, it says that G-D uttered only one thing to Adam before both Adam and Eve ate from the tree. He said, “You may certainly eat from every tree in the Garden, but from the Tree of Knowledge of the difference between good and evil, you shall not eat from it, for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die.” G-D didn’t say a word to Eve about it; however, Eve knew that she should not to eat from the tree when the snake asked her about it. She told the snake, “But of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the Garden, Hashem said, 'You shall not eat from it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'" This is how we know that Adam made up the part about ‘touching’ the fruit when he told Eve about it and when Eve touched it, she saw that she did not die, so naturally she ate from it. Adam saw that Eve did not die and he also ate from it. That is how we know that the first time that Mankind made a mistake was because Adam attached his own little white...