Rabbi Wein.com The Voice of Jewish History

The culmination of the great month of Tishrei occurs with the commemoration of the holiday of Succot. It provides a joyful relief and release from the intensity of the first two major holidays of the month, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. While we experience an enjoyable sense of celebration, of commemoration and exalted purpose with these two unmatched high holy days, there is a sense of tension...

For me, the holiday season that we are now in, is a time of mixed emotions. They engender within all of us the understanding that circumstances change in the progress of life and its events. Therefore, I am taking the liberty of sharing some of my holiday memories with you. Nostalgia can be very alluring, but there is also always a modicum of hard-headed realism that memories of the past always...

In our current world that is so heavily influenced by the presence of the Corona pandemic in our midst, we are all aware of and/or participate in the world of zoom learning and classrooms. In this remote world of distant conversation and learning from afar, there are requirements that must be met in to be able to ensure one's ability to participate in a learning experience. The most...

In my younger days, I had great certainty about life, people, events, and the future. Because of this, I had an opinion regarding almost every issue and every human being known to me. However, my years of being a student of great teachers in the yeshiva tempered me in this, as in well many other life matters as they arose. I began to observe that my teachers oftentimes would not express any...

The Hebrew month of Elul has traditionally been the month of intensive reflection and spiritual preparation. It is the month that precedes the holy days of judgment, and time of repentance and forgiveness. It personifies for us the preparations necessary for an individual who was about to go on trial regarding a serious matter, even one of life and death. No rational person would enter such a...

There is no question that the most prevalent and constant feeling during our lifetime is that of frustration. We are frustrated by great and small things, that are often beyond our control and ability to handle. Every day, and sometimes even every hour, we suffer from some frustration – a phone call that refuses to be answered, mail that is misdelivered. There are certain people who are not...

One of the accepted experiences here in Israeli life, and I suspect that it is also the situation in Jewish life generally throughout the world, is the necessity to invest time, money, and the accompanying aggravation into what is euphemistically called “home-improvement”. There are various causes that necessitate the human desire never to leave well enough alone. There is, therefore, an...

As often happens when I sit down to my computer to write this weekly opinion article, I am faced with several choices as to the subject that the article should be. Often, I am bereft of ideas and subject matter, and I find it difficult to produce an article that would have some benefit to the reader about a subject in which I am not vitally interested. At other times, I suffer from pure writer's...

The Jewish people has searched for some sort of physical and psychological response to the destruction of the Temple, the millennia-long dispersion throughout the world, and the continuing enmity from much of the non-Jewish world and societies. Consolation is hard to come by, let alone comfort and some sense of serenity. The pain of centuries of humiliation, discrimination and violence cannot...

It has often been stated that no individual person is indispensable. In spite of all rumors to the contrary, the world continues to go on apace even after we have departed from the scene. Yet, there is an important caveat to this corollary. It is the statement that though no one is indispensable, and no one is really replaceable either. Even though we may think of ourselves as mere cogs in the...