From the World of Rabbi Avraham Kook
“The turbid, stormy waters of secularity roar and foam, as they seek to swallow up all that is sacred. In their quaking enormity, they inundate nations and peoples, but the strength of Israel shall never founder”
(Ma’amarei HaRe’iyah 150)
Rabbi Dov Begon – Rosh Yeshiva of Machon Meir
Message for Today:
Increase Light!
We customarily read the episodes about Joseph on the Shabbat that falls out on Chanukah, and that is no coincidence. The miracles performed for Joseph were akin to those performed for Israel during the Second Temple Period. Joseph was thrown into a pit full of snakes and scorpions, and he was saved. He lived in Egypt among corrupt people who were at the bottom of the forty-nine rungs of impurity – yet he remained righteous. He was in prison, and he rose to greatness, even becoming viceroy of Egypt.
In the same way, Israel, during the Second Temple Period were ruled over by the Greeks. They had no political independence. The Greeks and the Jewish Hellenists longed to swallow up Israel within the Greek Empire, to blur their Jewish identity and to make them forget their holy Torah and its mitzvot. Israel was like a person sitting in a dark pit, with snakes and scorpions all around him. Yet a miracle was performed, and the Hasmoneans defeated the Greeks. The few vanquished the many and the weak vanquished the strong. At the end of the war they lit the menorah in the Temple, thereby demonstrating for all to see that they had emerged from darkness to light. And the light of Israel continues to shine forth from Jerusalem.
Today, we are grateful not just for the miracles performed for us in those times, but also for those performed for us now. We have to open our spiritual eyes and see how G-d performs miracles for us, and how He brings salvation and comfort. After two thousand years, we have emerged from the “pit” of the dark exile, which was full of snakes and scorpions. The Jewish People lives on despite countless attempts by the nations of the world and their religions to bite and sting us, to poison the nation’s soul.
And just like Joseph, we climbed out of a deep pit and ascended to a high roof, from Holocaust to Rebirth, from a poor country, governed by austerity at its creation, to a country that by the world’s standards is economically and militarily strong. Yet it is not enough to be strong economically and militarily. We have a duty to become stronger from a spiritual and moral standpoint, for “where there is no vision the people cast off restraint” (Proverbs 29:18).
Certainly we have faith in the eternity of Israel. No effort will succeed in blurring our identity, uniqueness and purpose as an eternal people intent on bringing light to the world. They will not succeed in extinguishing the lamp of Israel. Yet our own duty is to increase the light, the light of Torah, the light of love, the light of faith. We have to learn to recognize our identity and destiny down through the generations and especially at this moment. By such means we will be privileged in our day to see a new light shine over Zion!
Shabbat Shalom!
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Rabbi Shlomo Aviner– Chief Rabbi of Bet El
Kosher Internet
Everybody knows that Internet is a great source of woe for mankind. This is the case not only for G-d-fearing Jews and not just for the holy Jewish People but for all people everywhere. True, it has good things in it, information and service sites, and we have our various Torah sites, and it could have been a wonderful tool, but in actual fact it does more harm than good.
It leads to people wasting enormous amounts of time surfing the net for nonsense. It broadcasts cheap, shallow culture. For example, 60% of National Religious youth regularly enter pornographic sites. This being the case, better that it had never been invented, for the fear of G-d is more important to us than information and services, and even more important than Torah learning.
Therefore, if someone asks us whether or not they should bring the Internet into their home, our answer is: No! Don’t do it folks! But if one has no choice due to work, or if someone just doesn’t ask us, there is a partial solution through the various filtering programs: In Israel there are Rimon, Etrog, iconito, Moreshet and Netiv. All of them are good, and each one has its advantages and disadvantages regarding efficiency and ability to filter. Everyone should choose according to what suits him personally, but a filter program is an ABSOLUTE REQUIREMENT according to Halachah.
Such indeed is the ruling that has been handed down: If someone has to go somewhere and he has two possible routes, the involving a river where women role up their sleeves to do their washing, and a more modest route, he is obligated to take the more modest route (Bava Batra 57b).
A second solution is to have password without which it is impossible to open the Internet, with two or three people each possessing part of the password, such that the Internet cannot be used without their all being present. The illustrious Rav Wosner ruled that the laws of “Yichud” [seclusion with a female behind closed doors] apply here.
Obviously, the optimal solution is for a person to become so purified, elevated and sanctified as to view all this filth with scorn. Yet that is not enough. The evil impulse can attack a person from within or from without, as our Master Rav Avraham Yizchak HaKohen Kook explained (regarding the Talmudic debate over whether the evil impulse is more a fly, which comes from without, or like a wheat kernel, resembling a heart split in two (Ein Aya). Rambam likewise writes:
“It is a person’s nature to imitate his friends and acquaintances and to develop behavior and attributes like theirs. Therefore, a person must befriend righteous people and always frequent the wise, so as to learn from their deeds, and he should distance himself from the wicked who walk in darkness, so as not to learn from their deeds. As King Solomon said, ‘He that walks with wise men shall be wise, but the companion of fools will be broken’” (Rambam, De’ot 6:1).
Thus one should distance himself from the darkness, wickedness and foolishness of the Internet.
There is another fine solution in America which can be used here as well, and it has approbations from the rabbis of America and of Israel. By the way, there is a kollel director here who accepts kollelniks into his program on condition that they are subscribed to this program. It is called webchaver, and it transmits a weekly report on all the sites visited by the user, placing at the top, in bold, all the problematic sites entered, that reaches the friend chosen by the user. That friend can be the person’s wife who uses the same computer, but with a different email address. It costs four shekels a month.
Rabbi Yaakov Filber
From time to time we hear about young people who grew up in the homes of parents who are renowned educators, paragons of virtue. Those young people attended the finest educational institutions, but in the end they stray from their parents’ path and throws aside their religious yoke. Such cases arouse wonder and puzzlement. “How could such a misfortune have occurred?” we ask. How could young people, whose home, education, social milieu and all the other educational elements were top notch, end up as educational failures? The Torah teaches us that there is no insurance policy on a person’s education. Who could be greater than our father Abraham, who taught the whole world, and the Torah testifies about him, “I have given him special attention so that he will command his children and his household after him, and they will keep God’s way, doing charity and justice” (Genesis 18:19). Not only did he educate his home, but everywhere he arrived he would proclaim G-d’s name. As Rambam testified:
“With the people converging on him and asking him about his words, he would each one, in accordance with that person’s thinking, , until he had restored that person to the path of truth. Ultimately thousands and tens of thousands had gathered to him, and these are ‘the people of Abraham’s house’. In their hearts he planted this great principle, writing books about it and informing Isaac.” (Hilchot Avodah Zarah 1:14).
Despite Abraham’s educational success, he did not succeed in educating his household, neither Ishmael his son nor Lot his nephew who had grown up in his home.
How are we supposed to view the incident with Dinah at Shechem, with its educational mishap that caused Jacob such aggravation? Should we view it as a failure of Jacob’s family or a crime of Schechem and Chamor? Seemingly Jacob had been watching over Dinah carefully. As the Midrash teaches:
“‘He took… his eleven children’ (Genesis 32:23): And where was Dina? He placed her in a trunk and locked it. He said, ‘This evildoer is arrogant. Let him not cast his eye on her and take her from me.”
We likewise find in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (Ch. 38): “Jacob’s daughter was a tent dweller. She would not go out.”
And if Jacob was so protective of his daughter Dina, how did she end up getting caught in the snare of Shechem ben Chamor? We can answer simply that the entire blame lies with Shechem, an evildoer who could not control his passions. Dina was an innocent victim of his lusts. Yet in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (ibid.) we find:
“When Jacob arrived at his home in Canaan, a snake bit him. Which snake? Shechem ben Chamor. Jacob’s daughter was a tent dweller who never went out. What did Shechem ben Chamor do? He brought girls to play and beat drums outside her tent. Dina went out to see the girls playing, and Shechem took her.”
Here we have Dinah stumbling in two stages. In the first stage, Dina went out to see the wild behavior of the non-Jewish girls, as happens to religious youths in our own day. They don’t change their skins from believers to heretics overnight. Rather, their parents indulgently allow them to go to festivals (such as those at Arad or Tzemach), to see the frivolity, and how can they avoid sin at those milieus? Afterwards, when the parents no longer have control over their children, “Shechem” appears and takes them prey.
Another reason is the personal example of the home, that has an influence on the children’s behavior. Regarding Ezekiel 16:44, “Behold, every one that uses proverbs shall use this proverb against you, saying: Like mother, like daughter,” Midrash HaGadol comments:
“The verse is talking about the Matriarch Leah. The Torah lays the fault for the daughter’s sin on her mother. Was Leah promiscuous? G-d forbid! Rather, the Torah compares one ‘going out’ to another. Since it says, ‘Leah went out [to Jacob]’ (Genesis 30:16), involving mild boldness, the Torah therefore links Dina’s brash “going out” (34:1) to her mother’s. It doesn’t say, ‘Dina bat Yaakov went out’ but ‘Dina bat Leah went out.’”
The lesson is that the moment someone becomes the head of a family and a parent, he must be careful regarding even mild misbehavior, because a person’s children watch him and learn from his deeds, as we see in the case of Dina. Leah’s mild brashness [to convince her husband to cohabit with her] led to her daughter’s brazenness. And what did Dina’s “going out” consist of? The Midrash teaches (Tanchuma Vayishlach 10), “She went out to see and to be seen”. The culture of wishing to “see and be seen” is alien to the spirit of Judaism, and once Dina adopted it, she sinned.
Translation: R. Blumberg
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