By Riki Goldstein March 10, 2021
Chayala Neuhaus s newest composition, a powerful, inspiring single with a timeless musical style and message You needed to repeat the chorus like another three times I wanted to hear it and absorb it some more.” one listener wrote back to CHAYALA NEUHAUS about her newest composition, a powerful, inspiring single with a timeless musical style and message. Simply named “A YID,” it’s sung by Benny Friedman, with arrangements and production by Doni Gross.
As we rise to greet another day and the sun is still bright in the sky/ always a reason to hope for better times, though it seems like the answer’s worlds away,
The classic medieval commentator, Rashi, quotes an earlier midrashic source that connects the ceremonial ashes of the
Parah Adumah (Red Heifer) not just to the immediate ritual purity that its ashes bring individuals, but to a more mystical atonement for the collective national crime of the
Egel Hazahav the historic Golden Calf episode that dominates this week’s Torah reading. This year, as I reread Rashi’s comments “
Let The Cow Come And Clean Up The Mess Left By The Calf.” re: the Parah Adumah (the mom) cleaning up the mess of the kid (the Egel), who knew just a year ago that I’d be able to identify so closely with the hero of Parshas Para (the archetypal mom) through an elongated stint at home cleaning up the mess of others (and my own). To supplement an old adage: “Man plans and God laughs. And gives Man a taste of what it’s like to be the Woman, bearing the brunt of the housework, child-rearing, and most everything else.”
Early Thursday morning on the tenth of Kislev, I was informed that R’ Shalom Dreyfuss had succumbed to the coronavirus.
Shalom was just 42 years old and left five orphan boys ranging in ages from 4 to 17.
After hespedim in Passaic, Shalom was buried in Lakewood, and the family began their shiva.
That Shabbos morning, when the four oldest boys began to recite Kaddish together, there was not a dry eye in the shul.
Besides the tragedy of the death and his leaving five orphans, Shalom was the baal korei of the shul. He had over 25 years of experience and was a baal korei par excellence.e had leined the entire Torah, and just this past Sukkos he leined Koheles in the shul.
zog mir a shtikel Torah” – “say a piece of Torah for me.”
He or she isn’t asking for a well-developed Halachic argument, a full-blown sermon, or an intricate comparison of two Talmudic or Biblical texts in order to derive something earth-shaking, universal or cosmic, like the
Olam Haba – The Next World, with it’s related topics of immortality and the Time of the Coming of the Messiah.
The person wants only something nice, plain and simple. Some mildly interesting insight, down-to-earth, and to the point will do just fine. It doesn’t have to be particularly clever, demonstrating the other’s vast knowledge of Jewish texts. Sometimes this request is referred to as a “
Exactly what the seforim hakedoshim tell us about the essence of Gehinnom
Long ago in these pages, I wrote about a certain propensity of mine: “My mind is perpetually set on mashal-sensing mode, and with no discernible way to reset it, either. Everything I see and hear is at risk for being perceived in my mind as a rich, juicy parable for some deep truth about life and Torah.” I forthrightly acknowledged then that the tendency might be traceable “to early, sustained exposure to Shabbos afternoon Pirchei groups, or some other long-forgotten traumatic experience.”
Back then, I observed that not everyone shared my enthusiasm for mining profound meaning in things like, say, the then-relatively new invention called the GPS. Still, I wrote, I continued to have “a captive audience for my mind’s metaphorical meanderings: Me.”