Loud and Clear By Eran Feintuch | January 13, 2021
As the Chabad shaliach to the global deaf community, Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff sounds the call of Torah for those who could never before hear it
Photos: Ezra Trabelsi
You know those inspiring stories about someone who overcomes enormous challenges to accomplish the impossible? Well, that’s the kind of story I planned on writing about Rabbi Yehoshua Soudakoff. Rabbi Soudakoff, deaf from birth, left the LA public school system for yeshivah, eventually earned semichah despite being unable to hear the shiurim, and at the young age of 20, had already become a leader of the Jewish deaf in America. But Rabbi Soudakoff essentially waves all that away, because his new frontier is so much larger than his own personal victories. In his new role as the Chabad shaliach to the global deaf community, he’s bridging the chasm that often separates deaf Jews from normative Jewish life and bringing Yiddis
What is
tefillah? It’s a question that addresses something so basic, so foundational to our daily living as a Jew and human that we almost never entertain it. Mistakenly translated “prayer,” which is derived from the Latin word meaning “to beg,”
tefillah plays a central role in our identity, but its true relevance, meaning, and power are not always clear. Rabbi David Aaron shared a profound insight on the nature of
tefillah, one that can transform how we relate to and experience its beauty and wonder.
In Parshat Vayechi, the saga of Yosef and his brothers ends, as Yaakov gifts each of his children with
Rav Lopiansky’s model of truth-seeking as applied to the recent election results
A recent column, “Get Thee Gone,” critical of President Trump’s post-election behavior, attracted a fair amount of criticism. I learned a good deal from that criticism, including something about myself to wit, all things considered, I prefer praise to criticism (about which more later.)
As far as most not all of the critics were concerned, any column that mentions the president is either pro-Trump or anti-Trump. And anything that is not 100 percent pro-Trump is, by definition, anti-Trump. No further analysis of the points made is required.