Dear friends,

Three phrases that can change your life “Isn’t it amazing?” “You are beloved” and “Challenge is good”.
I don’t know what will happen, but seeing the picture in the news of Jonathan Pollard and Ester, his wonderful wife with the headline, “May be soon released” made more than my day. It made me revisit the last time I spoke to Ester. My dear friend, Leah Faigin is a long-time friend and fan of the Pollards. She was kind enough to introduce me to Ester: Jonathan was not there for me to meet. He was serving his impossibly long prison sentence for spying for Israel. I wrote to him periodically, and sent him the weekly letters I write to you. He couldn’t write back; his funds and privileges were limited, and had to be saved for Ester and for his lawyers. Ester lived in Israel at the time. I called to invite her for a Shabbos. I will never forget what she said. “Yes. I will come with Yohonason as soon as it is possible”. I didn’t know what to think, let alone know what to say. She saw hope where I saw a fait accompli. He would never be here. Never be free. Doesn’t she get it? Sure, you should have bitachon, but don’t you have to be realistic. Why not come for Shabbos? My higher self soon answered my lower self. “She’s right! Anything is possible? When was the last time you thought about Kriyat Yam Suf- the splitting of the Sea? When you let yourself go back to the times when you were in Israel in 1967. Did you predict what would happen in just 6 days”. My higher self silenced my lower self, and my sceptiscm changed into deep admiration for Ester’s bitachon in a matter of a few moments. But the thoughts coming from the other side, my “realistic” self, returned. 

Then things changed. Mr. Pollard had been given 30 years, and served every day of it. Even then he was released to live a semi free existence. He was housebound in the literal sense every Shabbos. He had to wear a device that connected him to the security authorities, and couldn’t leave his tiny Manhattan apartment. His crime was letting Israel know the information America had about the danger Iraq posed as it progressed in building an atomic reactor.  In the end,  Americans used the information, and let Israel, its ally do the dirty work. The reactor was destroyed, as was decades of Pollard’s life. His sentence was unprecedented. People who had sold seriously dangerous information to enemy states were given prison sentences that dwarfed the one that he endured. President Trump is considering letting him finally be free to go to Israel to live, which has been his dream. My dream is unlikely to materialize any time soon. There were many people who were far more proactive than I was in trying to bring Pollard home, and when Ester and Yohonson decide that it is time for some social life, I doubt if I am (or should be) very high on the list.
You may be wondering why I am telling you all of this. The reason is that every so often its worth questioning your level of trust in Hashem. In Chovos HaLevavos (Duties of the Heart), Rabbenu Bachaya Ibn Pekuda tells you some ways in which you can get yourself “unstuck”.

1-Realize that people who believe in Hashem’s presence, love, and power, and who know that the Torah is true, may or may not think about these concepts very often. The reason is that the material world is so engaging! Tomorrow is Shop for Shabbos day. My daughter Chani is in the States for a visit, so it looks like I will be braving Cheaperkol’s Thursday lines. I can already see myself standing in front of the ice-cream freezer deep in thought. On one hand, ice cream sandwiches are really great. On the other hand, they have no fudge. Maybe the minis would be a better choice. You can eat a few without feeling guilty. I will spare you the rest of my soliloquy, but trust me, it’s not over till it’s over. This is only part one; since you and I like physical pleasures, you and I have to earn the cash to buy them. This is another grab at your emotional capacity. Oh yes. Don’t forget that living standards are continually rising. Gourmet food, season by season clothes shopping, and serious decorating are all normal. This certainly wasn’t the case a generation ago. Still more emotional grabbing. You may have very little time or passion left for anything real and enduring. He provides you with a profoundly moving answer, articulated with his usual erudition. I will put it to you in my words.

LEARN TO SAY, “ISN’T IT AMAZING?”

Revisit the ice cream display. Isn’t it amazing that Hashem created so many tastes and textures? Isn’t the way your body can handle them all (which is as you know a hugely complex process) really amazing? Isn’t the fact that you have more than your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents could ever have even dreamed of amazing? You have enough money to buy non-necessities (well some people consider ice cream a non-necessity) really amazing?

If you think like this, a very interesting change takes place. What is common place (hitting Cheaperkol on Thursday) becomes amazing. So much compassion, involvement, outpouring, form the Source of all things. What is almost unimaginable like the picture in the news of the Pollards smiling, becomes completely possible. Not prosaic, but not all that much bigger than life-not because their miracle became smaller, but because life became bigger.

Many of you sometimes feel stuck (at least that’s what you tell me when you write.). I am not going to tell you that things will change tomorrow.  I can’t tell you when or if you will find the right man, job, friends, college, or doctor. What I am telling you is the more attention you pay when you buy ice cream, the more you can see the world of the Possible with all of its beautiful colors and tastes.
​
Love,
Tziporah 

​Dear friends,

It’s THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN. You are probably scratching your heads trying to figure out what I can possibly mean. There is no holiday coming up until Purim. Yes, TuBShvat is around the corner, but how early to I have to begin thinking about the Rosh Hashanah of ……the trees?

The time that I am referring to is Shovavim. This word is an acronym for the series of Parshas that will be read in the next six weeks (Shmos Vaeirah Bo, Bishalach, Yisro, Mishpatim). They are the ones that narrate our emergence as a people, beginning with the story of the enslavement and the beginnings of the exodus, and ending with the laws of Hashem’s justice that set us apart as people. It’s a time in which the national journey is meant to be reflected in making a personal journey towards greater freedom.

Huh?

As of last reading you were comfortably ensconced in your chair, trying your best to balance your life and hopefully enjoying most of the process of being alive. Do you need or want greater freedom If you are living a highly structured life, does that mean quitting your job/marriage/kids/other responsibilities that you have worked hard for? I can’t imagine that your secret fantasy is to get up in the morning (or whenever) with endless time stretching out before you, with nothing to do, no one to talk to, and nothing likely to change. “Man is made to toil” if you haven’t noticed, and this verse (from Mishlei) is unquestionably true. From that perspective, who really wants more freedom? 

You may want to free yourself of….yourself!

If you are like me, there is a self you want to be, and a self you actually are. They live together in uneasy peace. What keeps them apart? Slavery to desire, habit, and fears are slave-masters. They keep you enslaved to your self. Not the self you want to be, or even the self you are, but the self that lurks under the surface and pulls you down towards the self that you never ever want to be. 

No one is more enslaved than a baby. On the surface he is free, he can do whatever he wants, and no one can tell him otherwise. He is enslaved to his limitations needs and desires. He can’t make real choices and isn’t in charge of himself. If anything, a two-year-old throwing a tantrum is even less of a free person. His temper, (and yes, again) desires are all he knows. 

Being free ultimately means being able to find the part of you that is eternal. That part of you is even free of the inevitable fate of all of us, death itself. One of the illusions that you may have is that good deeds are over when they are over. This may be true on a simple level (the wallet you returned to the stranger is now safely in his pocket. End of story), but in the more genuine schema it isn’t. The good in any deed is a spark of something eternal. When you choose good over The Other Stuff, what you are really doing is choosing eternity over transience. All the fantasy, fear, base desires, selfishness that is hidden (thankfully) below the surface is doomed to oblivion. There is nothing within them that binds them to Hashem. 
The Tzadikim are free. They are who they want to be. No matter what is happening on the outside, they have a self that is unchained. 

When I graduated high school, the school gave the girls a book called Bastion of Faith as a gift. It was a story about one of the men I consider to have achieved a great deal of personal freedom He was the person he wanted to be under all circumstances. Many of you have heard of him, and possibly also heard this story. He was one of the greatest authorities on Jewish law in his time. His name was Rav Moshe Feinstein. He knew that ignorance enslaves. This awareness drove him to do battle with ignorance by becoming the head of one of America’s first yeshivos. He knew that assimilation robs you of your identity. He did battle against the assimilationist reality of his times, a reality that chained so many of your great grandparents to the dream of being anyone except who they are. Rav Feinstein went door to door collecting money to build a mikveh for the women of his Lower East Side community who wanted to still be themselves, freely and without apology.  This commitment included building people. Once when he was driven by car, his driver opened the door to let him in and accidently closed it on his hand. He knew that the young man would be devastated, so he remained silent until he reached his destination and freed his hand from the door. No force, not social convention, status, or even his own body could force him into subservience.

Does the exodus story inspire you? Let it put you in touch with yourself. You have the Torah that you learned inside, telling you what the choices really are. You have the freedom to choose your environment. You have the freedom to make your life the kind of life you dreamed of in Yerushalaim no matter where you are today. You are strong enough to do it. 
 
I wish I was really free
Like the Rav
Like Yocheved was when she stood up to Pharaoh
Like Pharaoh’s daughter was when she stretched her hand 
To save a child of a despised people
Free. like the person I could be.
​
Love,
Tziporah 

Dear friends,

It’s mid-term break, and more and more of you are showing up back here on the Ranch (okay-Neve and Bnos Avigail) every day. It’s amazing and really inspiring to see what you are doing and what you are becoming. Yerushalaim is a magnet. You all seem completely at home here, as though you just left a week or so ago, when so many of you are gone years longer. One of the best outcomes of your trip home, is that you still realize that it is a trip home. 

Almost, but not quite.

Tomorrow’s fast reminds all of us that we are not quite home. Even those of us who live here, barely know what being home once meant.  

The fast of the tenth of Teves commemorates the estrangement that is now part of our lives. 
There are three days in Teves that actually were “contenders” for being fast days because fasting for three days is far beyond most people’s capacity. The decision was made to have the 10th act as commemoration for all of the acts of tragic betrayal that took place on the 8th and 9th, 10th as well. Ptolemy (a hereditary title like Pharaoh) ruler of the Southern Kingdom of what was once the Greek Empire, demanded that 70 sages sit in separate cubicles and translate the Torah into Greek. On the surface of things (especially for those of you who are Art scroll addicts) this doesn’t seem to be a tragedy. Quite the opposite, the Torah will reach a wider audience, and Hashem’s word will be known to inestimably more people than would be the case if it were to remain accessible only to Hebrew speakers. The tragedy is that the Torah that interested the Greeks was its outer dimension. They grasped its beauty, elegance, and poetry. They had no idea of its holiness, nor did they really grasp what holiness is. They certainly had no use for mitzvos, especially the ones that demand that you go beyond your comfort level, and walk with faith. 

The 9th of Tevet marks the day of Ezra’s death. Ezra, the spiritual leader of the Jews who had returned to Israel after the first exile. Since his time many Tzadikim have died, and many seemingly more overwhelming tragedies have taken place. These leaves you wondering why his death is singled out for being a time to fast after over 2000 years have passed. 

Finally, the 10th of Tevet is commemorated for being the beginning of the end. Yerushalaim was surrounded and besieged. No one could leave or enter, making starvation a daily companion. The walls were breached in 13 places on the 17th of Tammuz, and finally the Bais HaMikdash was burnt in the midst of an unspeakable blood bath on the 9th of Av. On the surface of things this event both overshadows the others and is totally unrelated to any of them.

Ohr Gedalyahu is a book written by Rav Gedalya Schorr, of Torah Vodaas yeshiva. His own orientation was Chassidic, and he let the underlying themes of Chassidus and Kabbalah run through his writing. His essay on the 10th of Teves shows you how all three days (8th 9th and 10th of Teves) flow into one long and tragic one.

Ptomay wasn’t the Nosson Scherman of the ancient world, whose life work was to bring Torah to the masses. He was an archetypical Greek, who wanted the Torah translated so that his people could study it and come away with regard for its awesome beauty and elegance, and the depth of its wisdom. They had no real definition of kedushah, holiness, less recognition of G-d Being with us right here, right now, and still less intent to actually observe the mitzvos. This great divide between learning Torah and keeping Torah is still here today, alive and well. This is a genuine tragedy, because it relegates Torah into being dead, a piece of ancient history, rather than something alive enough for close to 100,000 people to celebrate the cycle of studying Talmud on a daily basis.  

The fast on the 9th day would have told us what had to happen to keep the Jews from being so enamored by Everything Greek that they forget anything beyond the was Torah’s form. Ezra re-introduced Ktav Ashuri, the kind of Hebrew lettering that was engraved on the Tablets of the Law, but was deemed too sacred to be used by the ordinary people. It never really found the way to the majority of people wrote. It was a holier form of writing, one in which each letter, vowel, space between words and letters is ripe with meaning. Ezra did what no other leader or prophet did before him or after. He got the people to do tshuvah. Something even Moshe was unable to pull off. One of the ways in which this took place was by teaching the deeper meaning of each letter. Gematria etc. isn’t relevant in any other form of writing except the one that Ezra taught; a language in which the letters had “souls” not just bodies, souls that had been forgotten by the masses. His death put an end to the era of return, a place that we have as yet to re-visit, hopefully soon.
Fasting takes you out of the business of eating to survive, and living to eat. It makes you aware that there is sanctity here and now, and that each letter of the Torah is far from random.

Let the fast bring you closer to who you are, and let it inform you about who you don’t want to be, at least not any longer. You have the strength to make a clean break with Greek-Think, you can search for the Torah’s relevance, and not just its beauty. You can can be one of the most important players. You have to know how to “read” the Torah, by hearing it speak to you daily, This can get you and all the rest of us closer to the day when the destruction will be replaced by an era of renewal and redemption. 
​
Love, 
Tziporah

Dear friends,

Did you ever think that you need a vacation from a vacation? That’s how I felt when I left the Kotel the final night of Chanukah. The Kotel was as usually overwhelmingly full of its eternal beauty, from its stones to the serious daveners to the clueless tourists who are all there to find something more. It’s time to move from the stark contrast of the deep black of the Hellenistic culture of self and the flame of the way Torah burnt its emblem in the hearts of the Macabees. It’s time to just head home, make this week’s menu, put up the colored wash, and get on with the subtle joy of the ordinary.

Then I read the news. There was a sum up of the latest wave of anti-Semitism that rolled over America in the last months. Over Chanukah alone there were 13 reported incidents. It finally hit home-things are different now. Does that mean that escalating violence is the new normal? Maybe-not being a prophet- I don’t have the latest word. This is of course not the first time we were hated, nor is it the first time that this kind of thing took place in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free. It is, however the first time I personally realized that my tacit assumption that It Can’t Happen Here is based on nothing but optimism.  The force of this realization made it hard to retreat into the delightful monotone I had planned on enjoying, and maybe that’s how it has to be.

Historically there are three responses that work, all of which are learned from the way Yaakov responded to Eisov’s hostility when he found out that Eisov was planning an attack:

1-The first and most important one is tefillah. Our only real strength as a people are in our words. We have never been empire builders or knights in shining armor. Speech is the bridge between the soul and the body-it gives expression to the soul by using the body, the mouth teeth, tongue etc. We are good at making that kind of bridge. We are people of soul. We also know how to use he physical world to serve Hashem. Real prayer means addressing your soul and body to Hashem, and using words to express your utter dependency on Him, and your trust that the One who sustains every leaf on every tree sustains you as well. Don’t sabotage this realization by getting into “I deserve more/better because You owe me”, since we owe Him everything it’s a bad negotiation tactic. Let Tefillah do its job. It’s meant to express the hidden love and awe that can get lost in day to day life. Hashem answers sincere prayer, and that is why it is step one. 

2-Appeasment is also valid even though it has such awful connotations. If being willing to financially participate in valid neighborhood projects, walking the extra mile to be kind, being willing to let honesty and integrity mean being willing to sometimes NOT stand up for your rights in the system. There are people who look at us through Lavan’s eyes. When Yaakov left after decades of work, mistreatment, deceit, Lavan said, “The girls (Yaakov’s wives, for whom he worked 14 years!) are my daughters. The sheep (for whom he worked on Lavan’s terms) are my sheep. Everything you have is mine”. If we can be less conspicuous in our spending even though our money is earned, Sforno points out, we may be doing ourselves a favor.

3-Self- defense. Yaakov was willing to fight to save himself and his family. He would not accept passivity or defeatism to be his final farewell. This is too important to forget. We need to be conscious of security and also less passive about the double talk that comes from the higher windows. Hatred can’t be tolerated, but is it really dealt with? Are the perpetrators really imprisoned?  Being militant can mean thinking that “I can be strong enough to save myself” without Hashem’s help.  Nothing can be further from the truth. Your role would be to express the way you believe that He is here for you by making efforts that demonstrate how much you value your life.

Some people have asked me (remember, me-Tziporah the non-prophet) whether it’s time to move to Israel. You know me. From my perspective it’s ALWAYS the time to move to Israel. What could be better than the Kotel on a cold winter night? It’s good to come to Eretz Yisrael. I am certainly not about to say that I have the depth of insight to know whether or not it’s the time to move from the U.S. What I do know is that its time to be sure that you are glad that you are you and not them-the haters.

Yaakov’s formula of prayer, appeasement, and self-defense should ideally give you back the inner peace to let yourself be in two places at once; You are as secure in your place in Hashem’s Hands as a baby is in his mother’s lap. He doesn’t know or care where else he is. We have weathered a lot, but we are here living our lives with simchah, higher consciousness, and fun.

For those of you in Israel, I am enclosing an ad for a Shabbos devoted to regaining Simchas Chaim!
For those of you who are in Israel and those of you who are not, I will conclude with my wishes that 
You see Hashem in the ordinary
And in the fire and the dark
That your words touch your heart
And your love of life replace your fear 
Of death and destruction
​
Love,
Tziporah