Summer Warning!

Once upon a time, kids could escape the summer heat by staying indoors. But today, with the advent of the Internet, staying indoors means getting all heated up even more. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has a poster on the streets proclaiming that the Internet is the “Father of Spiritual Impurity.” Thousands of Jews are being lured away from the Torah by the pull of Internet pornography, the poster declares.

If you don't have a filter, this is where your computer belongs.

Now that summer vacation is upon us, any parent who hasn’t done so already, will download an anti-pornography filter if he cares about his children. In our home, we have three different filters to make sure our little Einsteins can’t crack the security codes. In Israel, the Rimon filter is very popular, but it has to be kept at a high safety level to prevent kids from getting into youtube, which is loaded with smut.

Instead of relying on your home computers to keep your kids busy, find your children things that are more constructive, like summer study programs, sleep-away religious camps, sport activities, part-time work, and the like.

Parents who don’t install an anti-porn filter are transgressing the commandment, “Do not put a stumbling block in front of the blind,” and several other prohibitions as well.

Why procrastinate? Save yourselves and your children today!     

The Land of Milk and Honey

We mentioned that to rectify the sin of the Spies, who despised the cherished Land, we have to love the Land of Israel more than anywhere else. So here’s another tribute to the Land of Milk and Honey.

The land of milk and honey - South Africa

The land of milk and honey - France

The land of milk and honey - Melbourne

The land of milk and honey - Toronto

The land of milk and honey - Brooklyn

Oops! There must be some mistake. How silly of me! But this is exactly what Korach’s followers maintained. Like the Spies, they too wanted to remain in the wilderness, protected by the miraculous Clouds of Glory, where they could learn Torah in all-year-round air-conditioned comfort, without having to meet the physical challenges and dangers of conquering and settling the Land of Israel. True, Korach and his crowd were top Torah scholars, the heads of the Sanhedrin, but they knew that a new type of leader would be needed upon entry into the Land, so they rebelled against Moshe.

Still, Moshe wanted to give them a second chance to repent before their fate was sealed, so he called them to the Mishkan for a meeting. As it says:

“And Moshe sent to call Datan and Aviram, the sons of Eliav, but they said, ‘We will not come up (lo n’aleh); is it a small thing that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, and you will make yourself a prince over us?....Lo n’aleh!’” (Bamidbar, 16:12-14)

“Lo n’aleh!” they told him. We won’t make aliyah! Not only that. They called Egypt the land flowing with milk and honey! In their craving to stay in the safety of the Clouds of Glory and hold on to their positions of leadership, they turned Egypt into the Promised Land! Gevalt!

The land of milk and honey - Egypt

Because they rejected the Land, the land swallowed them up. They were swallowed up physically, but a person can also be swallowed up culturally and morally too, by the influences of the foreign culture around him, and by personal cravings foreign to the Torah.

A friend of mine who recently returned from a short trip to New York on a family matter told me that one day, while walking along a New York City sidewalk, he heard a small voice coming from below the street. When he went over and put his ear to the manhole covering, he heard voices calling out from the depths, “Fishman told the truth! Fishman told the truth!”

"Fishman told the truth!"

What a shame they didn’t listen.       

Father’s Day

For a Jew, every day is Father’s Day. Not just once a year. One of the Ten Commandments is “Honor thy father and thy mother.” It is one of the most fundamental commandments of the Torah.

In many synagogues, a representation of the Ten Commandments, in the form of the Two Tablets of Law, can be found above the ark which houses the Torah scrolls. The five commandments on one side of the tablets concern laws between man and G-d. On the other tablet are five laws between man and his fellow man. Interestingly, the commandment of honoring one’s father and mother are on the side of the tablets dealing with commandments between man and G-d. This is because our parents are our gateway to G-d. It is they who teach us about G-d and the Torah. Therefore, honoring them and the Torah they teach us, is essential to the preservation and continuity of the Torah from father to son, generation after generation.

The full wording of the commandment is: “Honor thy father and mother that thy days may be long in the Land which the L-rd thy G-d gives thee” (Shemot, 20:12).

Not many commandments come with a clearly stated reward. Please look closely at the reward for keeping this fundamental commandment – that your days may be long in the Land of Israel. Isn’t that interesting!

What’s the connection? Well, if you honor your father and mother, you will respect what they teach you. Since Jewish fathers and mothers are obligated to teach their children the Torah, they will naturally teach their kids that a Jew is supposed to live in the Land of Israel. Part of respecting one’s parents is obeying them when they instruct their children in the ways of the Torah. Thus a child who honors his parents will live in the Land of Israel in line with the Torah’s teachings.

Though my parents were not happy when I told them that I was moving to Israel, I made aliyah anyway. While honoring one’s parents is an essential tenet of Judaism, if parents do not want a child to move to Israel, the child does not have to listen to them, since going on aliyah is a mitzvah, and parents are not allowed to prevent a child from carrying out a commandment of G-d. In my parents’ great merit, even though they strongly disagreed with my decision, they always helped me out financially through the years so that I could observe the commandment of living in Israel, which our Sages tell us is equal in weight to all of the commandments of the Torah.  

Later, when my aging parents became ill, I had the good fortune of bringing them to Israel to live adjacent to my family in Shilo and then Jerusalem. My father, of blessed memory, spent his last nine years enjoying a new life in the Holy Land. At the end of his sojourn in this world, he merited to be buried on the Mount of Olives, alongside the Prophets and great Rabbis of Israel.

How sweet it is! On the terrace in Shilo

Dad’s yahrtzeit is coming up next week. Every day this year has been Father’s Day for me, dedicated to his memory. May the Torah that I continue to learn, and the mitzvot that I and my family keep in the Land of Israel, be our way of celebrating Father’s Day the whole year round, for all of our many years to come in the Land that G-d gave to the Jewish People.

Honor Thy Father and Mother - Escorting Mom and Dad to their Melabev Senior Citizens group in Jerusaelm.

May his memory be for a blessing.