Israel

My earliest memory as a 4 year old child, is walking into the terminal at the old Jan Smuts Airport to say farewell to my grandmother who was about to travel to Israel to visit my uncle and his family who had made aliyah to Haifa just 3 years before. I imagined that the plane [...]

On Rosh Hashana night we dip apples into honey. Why honey? The reason is because honey is sweet and also because we get honey from bees. Actually, we get two things from bees, honey and beestings, one sweet, one painful. Bees feature in these weeks Parasha. Moshe reminds the nation how immediately after the sin [...]

How wonderfully weird is Succot. Everything is upside-down! We leave our comfortable homes and live, eat and sleep in a temporary dwelling to reenact and to remember the time our ancestors spent under the protection of the clouds of glory that accompanied them everywhere. It is also to remind ourselves about the actual physical booths [...]

The spies reticence to enter the Land of Israel that we encountered in last week’s Parasha, was perhaps because they sensed that the marvellous miracle days of leaving Egypt and surfing through the desert were coming to an end. No more manna from heaven. No more miraculous well, gushing forth sweet water or protective clouds [...]

Korach, the anti hero of this week’s Torah Portion, is known to be a really talented individual. Wealthy, clever, great Yichus (prestigious lineage) and yet he challenges Moshe Rabbeinu with a few pathetic questions based on a few of  the Halachot, laws that Moshe previously taught in the name of G-d. He asked whether a [...]