From Passover to Shavuot, the Torah teaches that the days must be counted to prepare to receive the Torah. This counting is known as Sefirat HaOmer. It is a period marked by introspection and mourning, which is unexpectedly interrupted by a spark of joy on the 33rd day of the count—better known as Lag BaOmer.

It is a day when solemnity is broken, and the glow of bonfires, the sound of melodies, and the warmth of hope come into play, carrying a powerful and timely message.

On this date, two significant events are recalled:

• The end of a plague that took the lives of 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva.
• The passing of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who before his death revealed deep mystical teachings—considered by many as the beginning of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

The passing of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, who before his death revealed deep mystical teachings—considered by many as the beginning of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

Rabbi Shimon asked that this day be remembered with joy, not sadness, since the light of Torah he shared continues to shine through the generations.

That light of Torah is Judaism’s eternal guide, especially in times of darkness. It brings clarity, strength, and hope, even in moments when life feels overwhelming. Every mitzvah, every moment of learning, and every act of kindness is a spark that lights the way.

In Tractate Shabbat 33b, it is told how Rabbi Shimon and his son hid in a cave for 12 years, fleeing Roman persecution. When they emerged, they were so spiritually elevated that Rabbi Shimon’s gaze burned everything he saw, unable to accept that people were engaged in worldly activities. A heavenly voice said to him, “Did you come out to destroy My world? Return to the cave.”

After another year of reflection, he emerged again—this time with compassion and perspective. He understood that the material world could be elevated, not rejected. His mission was to bring light into reality, not escape from it.

This message is truly meant for our days. We do not run from difficulty. We face it with faith, resilience, and above all, Torah. Just as Rabbi Shimon transformed exile into light, we too must turn pain into purpose.

Today more than ever, we face enormous challenges that demand that light. Brothers and sisters kidnapped in Gaza have still not returned home (I pray that by the time this article is published, the story has changed). Pain and uncertainty persist. But Lag BaOmer reminds that giving up is not an option. Just as Rabbi Akiva, despite the loss of his students, continued to teach Torah and raise new disciples, we too must continue—with faith, strength, and hope.

On Lag BaOmer, bonfires are lit to remember those who studied Torah in hiding. But today, those fires mean more than memory. They are flames of faith that those who are missing will soon return. They are a symbol of a brighter future, where peace and understanding are guiding pillars.

This Lag BaOmer, let us ignite not only fire—but our souls. May the Torah continue to be our guide, our strength, and our comfort. And may we soon see the day when all the hostages return home safely and healthy, so we may celebrate life, freedom, and the eternal light of the Jewish people.

Chag Sameach!!

Rabbi Ari Oliszewski is the rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Virginia Beach.

The heroic Maccabees’ successful revolt of the few against the many in 167 B.C.E. following the dictates of the Syrian Greek King Antiochus iV, that sought to deprive the Jews of practicing their own faith, was truly a stance of a proud conscience. Our refusal to submit to a superior physical power when our spiritual inheritance was at stake is a clear indication of how deep a bond we held with both our religious convictions and sovereign independence, ready to sacrifice the sacred gift of life for the sake of an ancestral covenant with the compelling God of Freedom and Responsibility.

The word Hanukkah and its festival meaning represent the spirit of dedication to irreplaceable ideals and ideas through the cleansing of Jerusalem’s temple of old from pagan defilement. The Talmud’s insisting focus on the miracle of the cruse of oil lasting eight days reflects the rabbis’ aversion to the bloodshed and the Hasmoneans’ intra-political strife, associated with the war and beyond. Consequently, the Books of the Maccabees were not included in our own biblical canon, but were fortunately preserved through the Catholic one.

In truth, the conflict was not only against the enemy from without, but in response to the experienced assimilation from within. The encounter with the dominant, flourishing, and tempting Greek culture led, however, to a fruitful philosophical engagement influencing Rabbinic thought and logic.

The flickering lights of Hanukkah have come to symbolize the miracle of Jewish survival in spite of great odds, while endowing the human family with an enduring hope for a world trans- formed and redeemed. Let us continue to pray and labor that the ancient promise of prophetic shalom from the distant hills of Judea, the first such inspiring and pioneering message of universal embrace, will yet be realized for all of God’s children including the offspring of Isaac and Ishmael whose familial bond cannot be denied.

How frustrating and telling that there are Palestinian and other Arab leaders attempting to re-write history with the shameful aid of UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) by removing the incontrovertible Jewish connection, as well as the Christian one with the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and thus from the Land of Israel, seeking to extinguish Hanukkah’s authenticity.

Hanukkah’s celebration of religious freedom of choice is vigorously tested and contested and the controversy over Jewish worship at the Western Wall and its southern end (Robinson’s Arch). The Women of the Wall’s long struggle for equal acceptance, as well as the painful disappointment of the Reform and Conservative streams over the unfulfilled agreement by the Israeli government for egalitarian worship in the southern section, are a cause for concern in the context of Jewish pluralism in Israel along with Israel-diaspora relations.

As the United States, the State of Israel, and the entire free world fight the blight of terrorism with contemporary Iran’s Hamans begrudging the Maccabeean victory leading the way, much can be learned from the old and new Maccabees’ saga and spirit. in the still restive region where Hanukkah’s drama took place, so ironically and tragically, Syria’s dictator Assad with Iranian and Russian participation sheds his people’s blood including so many children in the barbaric bombing of Aleppo. The Islamic State (ISIS) continues its assault on civilization. The terrorists negate the life-enlightening, pluralistic, and inclusive principles of Hanukkah’s bright Menorah daring to challenge the darkness of oppression in all its destructive forms. All humans have now become vulnerable Jews, yet empowered with our people’s indomitable faith and noble example to face a formidable foe—physically, spiritually, and psychologically—and prevail.

Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman is founder and spiritual leader of Temple Lev Tikvah in Virginia Beach.

The permanent and salient fact of Jewish history is that we choose, in important ways, to be different from the peoples constituting the majorities of the societies with which we interact. That choice has kept us Jewish. But at the same time, that choice has, all too often, been treated as a problem by our neighbors.

By the end of biblical times, our ancestors were living under the rule of a pagan empire, Persia. Persia fell to Greece, and Greece to Rome, but still, Jews were under pagan rule. Pagans often thought that Jews were anti-social, in that we venerated only one God, but with a few prominent exceptions, provided that we paid our taxes and kept the peace, Jews did not suffer religious persecution at the hands of pagans.

The rise of Christianity and Islam ushered in new and harder times for Jews. Now, our ancestors were living under the rule not only of people of different religions, but of rival monotheistic faiths. Christians said we were wrong to reject Jesus. Muslims said that both the Christians and the Jews were wrong to reject Muhammad. Each of those overlords, in their own way, relegated the Jews to second-class status—not all the time, and not in every way, but being regarded as a problem in the eyes of the majority was a basic fact of medieval Jewish life.

The nature of the political state changed radically in the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Starting with France and the United States, modern countries began to define themselves as associations of citizens, rather than as a collection of different corporate groups under the rule of some monarch. It was at this time that the issue of loyalty came to the fore.

A generation after the French Revolution, French traditionalists—peasants from Alsace—complained to Napoleon that the Jews ought not be citizens of France. Napoleon used that complaint to secure a pledge of loyalty to French law from the representatives of French Jewry. Notice that there was no presumption that French Catholics would be disloyal, simply by virtue of their religion. But Jews did not have this presumption of loyalty. In France, the Jews had to take extraordinary steps to reassure the state that they were loyal. Only thus would they be confirmed as citizens.

Napoleon extended the status of Jews as citizens to the German states he conquered. When he was defeated, in 1815, the victorious German states stripped the Jews of their citizenship. To earn it again, the Jews would have to prove themselves “worthy.” That would mean initiating a wholesale series of religious reforms, to make Judaism stand out less from the Christian norm in the various German states.

That also explains why classic Reform Judaism was officially opposed to Zionism until the 1930’s. Pressured to prove themselves loyal to their various states, including the United States, Jews did not feel free to espouse the cause of an independent Jewish state. Here in Norfolk, the anti-Zionist “American Council for Judaism” remained a bastion of that mind-set even after 1948.

Throughout the past 75 years, American opponents of Israel have too often charged Jewish Zionists with “dual loyalty.”. This is certainly tainted with anti-Semitism. One heard no comparable charge of dual loyalty against Irish Americans, for example, when they lobbied their American representatives to espouse policies regarding the quest for (Catholic) Irish independence from Protestant Great Britain, or when they sought for the USA to show understanding for the plight of Catholics in Northern Ireland during the time of troubles there.

Jews have frequently been given an added burden of proving loyalty despite Jewishness. As a matter of Jewish self-respect, we ought to challenge that, from whatever quarter it emanates, and however it may be dressed up in secondary rhetoric.

Rabbi Michael Panitz, Temple Israel

The awesome and complex journey—physically, spiritually, and psychologically—from servitude to an oppressor to service of the Most High, became a model of liberation for the entire human family, culminating in the Messianic vision of a world transformed.

We have chosen to convert the bitter herbs of our exile into the sweet charoset of homecoming for all. It is the symbolic hovering presence at the Seder table of the prophet Elijah for whom we open the door and set aside a special cup of wine, which provides the eternal hope of universal shalom. It is the peace we have kept alive as a flickering light in the darkness of a trying history.

Passover’s promise is ultimately rooted in its revolutionary view of the infinite worth of each of the Creator’s children—recalling that God silenced the heavenly angels when jubilant at the drowning of Pharaoh’s troops. When we preserve our adversary’s humanity, difficult as it is, we maintain our own essential human stature, even as we are commanded to rise up against evil. Passover’s mighty spirit of renewal of a people, as well as an individual, also applies to the natural order of springtime’s return with the beauty of Earth’s budding and recovery that we are pledged to forever secure.

How revealing of our people’s healthy spirit and the Rabbinic balanced mindset that the Festival of Freedom is designated for reading the sensual Song of Songs. Yet, we recall that the puritanical opposition to its inclusion in our Biblical cannon was overcome when Rabbi Akiva argued and won with his creative interpretation that the scroll was really about the binding love between God and Israel.

At this awesome season, so curiously close to Passover’s twin themes of bitter enslavement and sweet redemption, we are poised between Yom Hashoah’s monumental burden of sorrow, and Yom Ha’ Atzmaout’s uplifting joy of Israel’s 71st anniversary celebration—between the Holocaust’s helplessness and Hatikvah’s hopefulness.

The rabbis attached an ethical dimension to Biblically defiling body conditions. To diminish one’s reputation became tantamount to no less than shedding one’s blood, given that a good name, Shem Tov, was deemed to be a person’s crowning glory. The sinfully genocidal Nazi ideology insisted on dehumanizing as a means for a person’s and our people’s total destruction in spirit and body. Yom Ha’ Atzmaout restores the Jewish people’s human dignity and proud standing in the comity of nations, affirming the divinity within all God’s children, which we first shared with the world. Our covenantal call, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy,“ is our guiding light.

Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman is the founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Chaverim in Virginia Beach. He is Honorary Senior Rabbi Scholar at Eastern Shore Chapel Episcopal Church in Virginia Beach.

The salvation found through an intermarried Jewish queen who happened to be, or was placed, in a pivotal position to help her kin while in dire straits, adds an intriguing dimension to a drama whose historical veracity remains uncertain. The challenges and lessons contained in the fascinating Scroll of Esther have remained applicable throughout the Jewish saga.

The Rabbis have taught that in the messianic era yet to come, of all the Jewish holidays, only Purim will continue to be celebrated. Is it perhaps because we should never take Jewish survival for granted and need to always be on guard? Is that why God’s name is not mentioned, even once in the scroll, a notable exception to all the other books in the Bible?

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, stated that when the lion and the lamb will dwell together, he still would like to be the lion just in case…. That is ample testimony to what the Jewish people have learned the tragic way. We are thus invited to ponder those unique features of a mesmerizing account in which Jews are called upon to act in God’s name. Of course, the absence of the divine name does not necessarily imply God’s silence nor indifference to such matters of supreme importance.

Curiously, the terrorizing dictatorial leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran (once Persia) now celebrating the 40th anniversary of their theocratic revolution, continue to seek hegemony in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Their bloody involvement in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and elsewhere is ample testimony. They have not given up on “wiping Israel off the map.” This time with the aid of nuclear power, aware of Israel’s mortal vulnerability given its limited geography, to conclude what Haman and Hitler began.

Has not the Haman-like, and even the more dangerous leaders of Iran, read the Scroll of Esther and taken to heart the fate of those who seek to destroy us? Denying the Holocaust, they seek to deny Israel’s existence, and if necessary, to hasten its demise through a “real Holocaust.”

Alarming is the precipitous rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, as well as in the U. S., with the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue massacre of 11 Jews.

Queen Esther was forced to hide her Jewish identity otherwise she could not get into the palace to fulfill her mission of saving her people. Still, the beautiful and heroic Esther had to be prodded by wise and courageous Mordechai. However, she did perform, forever earning an honored place in the pantheon of Jewish heroines and heroes.

Esther’s people are not yet fully safe, but are finally capable of defending their lives in a way that was not possible before. Remember, experienced Uncle Mordechai engaged in successful counter plots. Self-defense is a top Jewish and human mitzvah, particularly in the post-Holocaust era. It is a sacred imperative beyond blotting out Haman’s name at the raucous Megillah reading. A sovereign Jewish state and an influential American Jewish community make a critical difference.

May we act and pray so that the contemporary Iranian plot will meet the fate of oblivion of the early prototype of biblical Amalek’s descendants, while we are ever vigilant. Our ultimate goal, so elusive for so long, remains a peaceful world of Shalom through the sacred task of Tikkun Olam’s healing, hope and harmony for all of God’s children.

Dr. Israel Zoberman, founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Chaverim and Honorary Senior Rabbi Scholar at Eastern Shore Chapel Episcopal Church

Abraham was chosen to begin the chain of Jewish living, learning, laughing, and loving, for he proved to possess, unlike Noah, that healthy dose of surging chutzpah and compassion that challenges even, and particularly the Most High when necessary. This confrontational response for the sake of heaven and earth has allowed Jews to transcend boundaries, smashing every age’s idols of stifling and dehumanizing convention.

Abraham and Sarah were refugees and immigrants from Mesopotamia, the cradle of Western Civilization, today’s Iraq and Syria—so ironically and tellingly. They were restive rebels on a journey that would profoundly impact humanity, leaving behind an advanced culture, but one that could not satisfy their spiritual quest and creative aspiration. Imagine Abraham’s moral outrage and righteous indignation at the seven-year-old war in Syria and half a million dead citizens, the use of chemical weapons, the barbaric bombing of Aleppo and other sites, and the plight of millions of Syria’s people and refugees. What a painful reminder of World War II and the Holocaust. Surely Abraham would have commended Israel for saving many innocent Syrian lives, including recently those hundreds of the heroic White Helmets and their families.

The thundering divine call, charge, and command to Abraham, echoing still, Lech-Lecha, to venture forth from his familial and familiar environment—physically, spiritually, and psychologically—both pushed and permitted him to depart from the world he had inherited in order to usher in a new one of his own making, that he may indeed be rewarded with becoming a blessing for no less than the entire human family. Isaac was ultimately spared, along with his progeny on the altar of the then practiced pagan custom of child sacrifices, because his father dared embrace, in spite of his background and not without divine intervention, the precious gift of life.

The members of our first family of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Ishmael proved to be complex individuals with opposing agendas. Their very touching humanity reflects the revolutionary and courageous approach of our sacred Biblical literature to be faithful to reality. But the flawed humaneness of our heroes, as well as our own, becomes a noble opportunity and a caring invitation to discover the divine potential within them, and us, to grow, change, and mature.

God’s fulfilled offer was that all members of Abraham’s fractured family facing the threat of fratricide would be blessed, each in a distinct and unique way with restored dignity and hope, while tragically with lasting and troubling historical consequences. This conflicted foundational legacy remains our covenantal Jewish bond and awesome human challenge to turn violence into vision, hurt into healing, adversity into advantage, trial into triumph, and blemishes into blessings.

Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman is the founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Chaverim.

The holidays of ancient Israel are good illustrations of this. The neighbors of our biblical ancestors had the notion of High Holidays, comprising a half-month beginning with the New Year, continuing with rituals of Atonement, and concluding with a jamboree celebrating the harvest and the renewal of society’s lease on life. This lays down the baseline of our own Autumn holidays. But beyond that borrowing, the distinctive Jewish message is made clear in the monotheist beliefs and ethical emphases of the Jewish festivals of Tishre.

The ancient Mesopotamians had two New Year festivals, one during the lead-up to the Full Moon nearest the Vernal Equinox, and the other—like our own Days of Awe—in the half-month leading up to the Full Moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox. There were local variations as to which was more important, but an ancient Sumerian myth, Enlil Chooses the Farmer God, expresses the opinion that the Autumn is when the New Year truly begins. Their high god adjudicated a quarrel between two of his sons, representing respectively the work of the farmer and the shepherd, standing in for Winter and Summer. The high god gave the nod to the farmer, meaning that the New Year of the Autumn, leading into the winter, was deemed the more important. This corresponds to the physical geography of Mesopotamia, where the autumnal rains, after the parching heat of the summer, brings the landscape back to life and allows for the sowing of the coming year’s crop of winter barley.

An intriguing point of contact is found in the ritual of atonement, shared in broad outlines by our ancestors and their Mesopotamian neighbors. During the Akitu New Year’s festival, the pagans cleaned their Temple and enacted a predecessor of the biblical “Scapegoat” ritual: “On the fifth day the temple was sprinkled with water…then a sheep was beheaded and the walls of the chapel were rubbed with its body. This done, the head and the body were thrown into the river, while the officiating priest and slaughterer were sent into the desert…to observe a quarantine until the end of the festival. The ceremony was called kuppuru.…” Both word and concept are parallel to our own Yom Kippur.

But if the language of pagan myth and ritual provided the background to the details of our religion, the distinctiveness of Judaism emerges upon closer examination. The ritual of expelling one goat to the wilderness and of sacrificing another animal, sprinkling its blood upon the altar, was the first word, not the last word, in the Jewish notion of atonement. The Yom Kippur that developed in the course of our Jewish journey, and that is predominant today, in our Temple-less phase of existence, focuses on the ethical and the interpersonal. As the rabbis express it: “Yom Kippur secures atonement for sins committed against God. Yom Kippur does not secure atonement for sins committed against one’s neighbor, until one has conciliated his neighbor.”(Mishnah Yoma 8:9).

As Jews, we want to be able to learn good ideas from our neighbors, but also to insist on our distinctiveness. That is how we contribute to a better tomorrow.

Rabbi Michael Panitz, Temple Israel 

This whole season is designed to help us focus on all of these vital questions and to help pull us away from our more usual reveries: What can I do? What difference does it make? Who will step up to help? What business is it of mine? and so many more common and paralyzing questions. The Days of Awe and the U-netaneh Tokef prayer insist that we re-focus, move away from the questions of impotence and excuse and embrace the questions of change and transformation.

Surrounding the intense questions of U-netaneh Tokef is the familiar refrain, “On Rosh HaShanah it is written and on the Fast of Yom Kippur it is sealed!” We commonly read this refrain as if God is sitting in Heaven with a large book marking who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. According to this interpretation, the book is a threat, a sword of Damacles hanging over our heads, demanding that we be good and do as we are told lest the death stroke fall as punishment. This reading is indeed terrifying, but is one I hardly find motivating. Yet, there are other ways to understand the book’s metaphor.

What if God is not the one writing the book, but rather we are the authors of our own stories? We write our own Book of Life, if you will. On Rosh Hashanah we can be the ones writing what will be for us in the new year; we can start taking the initiative to write our own story. These Days of Awe demand that we stop living our lives as if our fate is in someone else’s hands and begin taking the initiative to live the life that is meant for us. We can start by stifling the questions of angst and consternation, the questions that pretend we have no control of, or influence on, our lives. It is true that no one can know the answers to the terrible questions of U-netaneh Tokef, but that’s just the point. By recognizing the things we cannot control, we are invited to also recognize the things we can and to start doing something about them.

And there is no better year than this coming one to recognize that we hold the pen and we fill the pages. I was recently chatting with Rabbi Gila Dror of Rodef Sholom in Newport News and Rabbi Michael Panitz of Temple Israel in Norfolk. Rabbi Dror pointed out the last two letters in the Hebrew writing of the new Jewish Year, 5779, are ayin and tet. Rabbi Panitz pointed out that if you made them into a word you would have et, the Hebrew word for ‘pen.’ Therefore, this New Year 5779 could be called, “The Year of the Pen.”

As 5779, the Year of the Pen, approaches, may we all remember that on Rosh HaShanah, as we reflect on existential and spiritual questions, we hold the pen in our hand and begin writing our story for the next year. And on Yom Kippur, when we exit the Days of Awe and reenter the world with our commitments and plans at the ready, we seal our path for the year to come. May we all find fulfillment in whatever our Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur practices are and may we all exit the season back on the path that God meant for us to travel.

L’Shanah Tovah Tikateivu.

Rabbi Jeffrey M. Arnowitz, Congregation Beth El

One year, Rabbi Gordon spoke about the past. He reminisced about the days when people travelled around Norfolk by foot or by horse and buggy. If you made a wrong turn or you missed something, you could turn around and walk back a few steps. People had time to stop and smell the azaleas. It’s not like that anymore. We drive cars, we take trains and we board planes, and now, light rails. It’s not so easy to go back. If we make a wrong turn, we could be 10 miles out of the way before we even notice. If we miss something interesting at the side of the road, there is no way that we are going to back up on the highway and get a better look. As time goes on, we move faster, and as we move faster, we move further away from the past.

Our community has a glorious past. There are people that many of us know and love who have been a part of the Norfolk Jewish community for almost 100 years. They have defended and represented Judaism through thick and through thin and through times when people thought that we would cease to exist.

They will tell you that a lot has changed in 100 years. There are a lot of new people. The songs are sung to different tunes and the bubbes and zaides of their childhood are no longer in the back of shul making sure that everyone is entertained and feeling comfortable. Yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We are still passionate about Judaism. We faithfully study Torah and aim to follow its words and lessons to the best of our abilities.

We need to embrace the present. We need to cherish it, and we need to become a part of it. But we dare not forget those who preceded us and define what we stand for today.

A man once climbed to the top of a mountain. It took him several months of training and several weeks of planning. When he got to the top of the mountain after several days of climbing, he was shocked to find a little boy playing soccer. This boy could not possibly have climbed the mountain, yet there he was.

“How did you get here?” the mountain climber asked. The boy looked at him with a very puzzled face, “I was born here.”

Let’s remember the people who brought us to the top of the mountain. Let’s find ways to respect our communal bubbies and zaides and make them proud.

Rabbi Sender Haber, Congregation B’nai Israel

The awesome and complex journey— physically, spiritually, and psychologically—from servitude to an oppressor to service of the Most High, became a model of liberation for the entire human family, culminating in the Messianic vision of a world transformed. We have chosen to convert the bitter herbs of our exile into the sweet charoset of homecoming for all. It is the symbolic hovering presence at the Seder table of the prophet Elijah for whom we open the door and set aside a special cup of wine that provides the eternal hope of universal shalom.

Passover’s promise by a compassionate and passionate heritage is ultimately rooted in its revolutionary view of the infinite worth of each of the Creator’s children, recalling that God silenced the heavenly angels when jubilant at the drowning of Pharaoh’s troops. When we preserve our adversary’s humanity, difficult as it is, we maintain our own essential human stature, even as we are commanded to rise up against evil. Passover’s spirit of renewal of a people, as well as of an individual, also applies to the springtime’s return with the beauty of the earth’s budding and recovery that we are pledged to forever secure.

How revealing of our people’s healthy spirit and the Rabbinic-balanced mindset that the Festival of Freedom is designated for reading the sensual Song of Songs. Yet, the puritanical opposition to its inclusion in our Biblical cannon was overcome when Rabbi Akiva argued and won with his creative interpretation that the scroll was really about the binding love between God and Israel.

Today’s troubled Middle East, home of the inspiring Exodus, is in dire need of replacing degradation with dignity and unremitting terrorism with humane teachings, ever mindful of the unabated Syrian tragedy. The State of Israel remains an enlightened Western island of progressive values, retaining its democratic essence in a wide sea of barbarism and backwardness begrudging the survival of the world’s only Jewish state.

At this awesome season, so curiously close to Passover’s twin themes of bitter enslavement and sweet redemption, we are poised between Yom HaShoah’s monumental burden of sorrow, and Yom Ha’atzmaut’s uplifting joy of Israel’s 70th anniversary celebration—between the Holocaust’s helplessness and Hatikvah’s hopefulness. We recall that in the midst of the Tabernacle’s zenith of celebratory dedication, two of the four sons of Aaron the High Priest, Nadav and Avihu, who were just all anointed as Kohanim, were tragically consumed by fire. Devastated, Aaron’s response was one of silence, which perhaps was the best option as he was personally and professionally challenged, threatening to undo his very being. At the risk of lifting a verse of a sensitive text of theological quagmire, the following resonates with shocking relevance to Yom HaShoah: “And your brethren the entire household of Israel will bemoan the burning fire.”

Torah Thought The rabbis attached an ethical dimension to Biblically defiling body conditions. Thus, with linguistic aid, skin ailments turn into a violation of one human being against another. To diminish one’s reputation became tantamount to no less than shedding one’s blood, given that a good name, Shem Tov, was deemed to be a person’s crowning glory. The sinfully genocidal Nazi ideology insisted on dehumanizing as a means for a person’s and our people’s total destruction in spirit and body. Yom Ha’atzmaut restores the Jewish people’s human dignity and proud standing in the comity of nations, affirming the divinity within all God’s children. Our covenantal call, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy,” is our guiding light.

Rabbi Dr. Israel Zoberman, founding rabbi of Congregation Beth Chaverim