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Friday, June 24th 2011
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 Central Air Conditioning installation and repair Where really nice live people answer the phone to help 24/7. This Week's Amazing Dvrei Torah
#1 OU Dvar Torah From: Rabbi Sir Jonathon Sacks
Taking It Personally
Britain's Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
Korach - 25 June 2011 - 23 Sivan 5771
When we read the story of Korach, our attention tends to be focused on the rebels. We don't give as much reflection as we might to the response of Moses. Was it right? Was it wrong?
It's a complex story. As Ramban explains, it is no accident that the Korach rebellion happened in the aftermath of the story of the spies. So long as the people expected to enter the Promised Land, they stood to lose more than gain by challenging Moses' leadership. He had successfully negotiated all obstacles in the past. He was their best hope. But as a result of the spies, that whole generation was condemned to die in the wilderness. Now they had nothing to lose. When people have nothing to lose, rebellions happen.
Next, the rebels themselves. It's clear from the narrative that they were not a uniform or unified group. Malbim explains that there were three different groups, each with their own grievance and agenda.
First was Korach himself. Moses was the child of Kehat's eldest son, Amram. As the child of Kehat's second son, Yitzhar, Korach felt entitled to the second leadership role, that of high priest.
Second were Datan and Aviram, who felt that they were entitled to leadership positions as descendants of Reuben, Jacob's firstborn.
Third were the 250 others, described by the Torah as "princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown." Either they felt that they had earned the right to be leaders on meritocratic grounds, or - Ibn Ezra's suggestion - they were firstborn who resented the fact that the role of ministering to G-d was taken from the firstborn and given to the Levites after the sin of the golden calf.
A coalition of the differently discontented: that is how rebellions tend to start.
What was Moses' reaction? His first response is to propose a simple, decisive test: Let everyone bring an offering of incense and let G-d decide whose to accept. But the derisive, insolent response of Datan and Aviram seems to unnerve him. He turns to G-d and says:
"Do not accept their offering. I have not taken so much as a donkey from them, nor have I wronged any of them." (Num. 16: 15)
But they had not said that he had. That is the first discordant note. G-d then threatens to punish the whole congregation. Moses and Aaron intercede on their behalf. G-d tells Moses to separate the community from the rebels so that they will not be caught up in the punishment, which Moses does. But he then does something unprecedented. He says: "This is how you will know that the Lord has sent me to do all these things and that it was not my idea: If these men die a natural death and suffer the fate of all mankind, then the Lord has not sent me. But if the Lord brings about something totally new, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them, with everything that belongs to them, and they go down alive into the realm of the dead, then you will know that these men have treated the Lord with contempt." (Num. 16: 28-30) This is the only time Moses asked G-d to punish someone, and the only time he challenged Him to perform a miracle. G-d does as Moses asks. Naturally we expect that this will end the rebellion: G-d had sent an unmistakable sign that Moses was right, the rebels wrong. But it doesn't. Far from ending the rebellion, it made it worse: The next day the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. "You have killed the Lord's people," they said. (Num. 16: 41) The people gather around Moses and Aaron as if about to attack them. G-d starts smiting the people with a plague. Moses tells Aaron to make atonement, and eventually the plague stops. But some 14,700 people have died. Not until a quite different demonstration takes place - Moses takes twelve rods representing the twelve tribes, and Aaron's buds and blossoms and bears fruit -- does the rebellion finally end. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Moses' intervention, challenging G-d to make the earth swallow his opponents, was a tragic mistake. If so, what kind of mistake was it? The Harvard leadership expert, Ronald Heifetz, makes the point that it is essential for a leader to distinguish between role and self. A role is a position we hold. The self is who we are. Leadership is a role. It is not an identity. It is not who we are. Therefore a leader should never take an attack on his leadership personally: It's a common ploy to personalise the debate over issues as a strategy for taking you out of action . . . You want to respond when you are attacked . . . You want to leap into the fray when you are mischaracterised . . . When people attack you personally, the reflexive reaction is to take it personally . . . But being criticised by people you care about is almost always a part of exercising leadership . . . When you take personal attacks personally, you unwittingly conspire in one of the common ways you can be taken out of action - you make yourself the issue.[1] Moses twice takes the rebellion personally. First, he defends himself to G-d after being insulted by Datan and Aviram. Second, he asks G-d miraculously and decisively to show that he - Moses - is G-d's chosen leader. But Moses was not the issue. He had already taken the right course of action in proposing the test of the incense offering. That would have resolved the question. As for the underlying reason that the rebellion was possible at all - the fact that the people were devastated by the knowledge that they would not live to enter the Promised Land - there was nothing Moses could do. Moses allowed himself to be provoked by Korach's claim, "Why do you set yourselves above the Lord's assembly" and by Datan and Aviram's offensive remark, "And now you want to lord it over us!" These were deeply personal attacks, but by taking them as such, Moses allowed his opponents to define the terms of engagement. As a result, the conflict was intensified instead of being defused. It is hard not to see this as the first sign of the failing that would eventually cost Moses his chance of leading the people into the land. When, almost forty years later, he says to the people who complain about the lack of drink, "Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?" (Num. 20: 10) he shows the same tendency to personalise the issue ("Must we bring you water" - but it never was about "we" but about G-d). The Torah is devastatingly honest about Moses, as it is about all its heroes. Humans are only human. Even the greatest makes mistakes. In the case of Moses, his greatest strength was also his greatest weakness. His anger at injustice singled him out as a leader in the first place. But he allowed himself to be provoked to anger by the people he led, and it was this, according to Maimonides (Eight Chapters, ch. 4), that eventually caused him to forfeit his chance of entering the land of Israel. Heifetz writes: "Receiving anger . . . is a sacred task . . . Taking the heat with grace communicates respect for the pains of change."[2] After the episode of the spies, Moses faced an almost impossible task. How do you lead a people when they know they will not reach their destination in their lifetime? In the end what stilled the rebellion was the sight of Aaron's rod, a piece of dry wood, coming to life again, bearing flowers and fruit. Perhaps this was not just about Aaron but about the Israelites themselves. Having thought of themselves as condemned to die in the desert, perhaps they now realised that they too had born fruit - their children - and it would be they who completed the journey their parents had begun. That, in the end, was their consolation. Of all the challenges of leadership, not taking criticism personally and staying calm when the people you lead are angry with you, may be the hardest of all. That may be why the Torah says what it does about Moses, the greatest leader who ever lived. It is a way of warning future generations: if at times you are pained by people's anger, take comfort. So did Moses. But remember the price Moses paid, and stay calm. Though it may seem otherwise, the anger you face has nothing to do with you as a person and everything to do with what you stand for and represent. Depersonalising attacks is the best way to deal with them. People get angry when leaders cannot magically make harsh reality disappear. Leaders in such circumstances are called on to accept that anger with grace. That truly is a sacred task. ******** 
Give your chicken fat back to the chickens Wonderful nutritionists to work with. Call Lisa or Ann. #2 Torah (dot) org, Nesivos Shalom By: Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein Nesivos ShalomParshas KorachThe Power of PeaceIt strikes us as a bit much, the drama that brought Korach down. To start with, Moshe insists upon pushing the envelope in judicial sternness. The Torah has no problem dealing with appropriate harshness against the worst perpetrators of evil. Worshippers of idols, murderers, and sexual profligates are all executed at times by the court, but without any new contrivance. They are all permitted to exit their existence by perfectly natural and predictable means. Regarding Korach, however, Moshe asks for - and receives - "a new creation"2 to dispatch him and his company to their deaths. Does this make sense? At worst, Korach violated an ordinary lo sa'aseh, an ordinary transgression. On the hierarchy of transgressions, machlokes hardly resides at the weightier end, where the punishment escalates. (To make matters worse, the transgression is not even mentioned until our parshah, well after Korach began his offensive.) Why is it dealt with so severely? Why do young children lose their lives in this incident, in contradistinction to the Torah's firm rule that children are not to be punished for the sins of their parents? The difficulty does not end with the verses in our parshah. The contrast and comparison go on. Chazal tell us that the first Temple was destroyed because of violations of the three cardinal sins, three transgressions so serious that one must give up his life rather than violate. The seriousness of the crime appears to match the punishment. The second Temple, they tell us however, was lost because of sinas chinam, groundless enmity. Now hating another Jew is wrong, but it is an ordinary lo sa'aseh, on par with engaging in disputatious behavior. How does it become the peer of a deadly combination of the worst transgressions of the Torah? Do not think that perhaps the intentions of Korach's cohorts were particularly diabolic and ugly. The opposite is true. The Shalah HaKadosh tells us that all of Korach's two hundred and fifty coconspirators (including the nesi'im!) pursued the interests of Heaven. Earthly glory was not on their minds; they saw spiritual gold, and each wanted to be the one to mine it. They were convinced somehow that the job of Kohen Gadol was up for grabs, a spiritual plum available to whomever exerted himself more. They complained that Moshe had squeezed them out of contention through effective tefillah on behalf of his brother's candidacy. They were disappointed that Moshe used his "in" with HKBH to keep the position within his family, moving the coveted prize out of reach. Rabbi Akiva called "love your friend as yourself" the great principle of the Torah. What gives this love so much power is what it accomplishes. The mutual love of Jews for each other binds us together. It is only when we are bound together that Hashem relates to us as a Father. Only when we practice this love are we called His children. Only within unity do we merit the blessings of a bounty of His compassion and lovingkindness. The results of losing the distinction of being His children are disastrous. Machlokes tears asunder the bond that makes us special. We do not become Jewish sinners through it. We become something less than Jews, at least in the sense of no longer being members of a single vibrant entity. The Zohar typifies Korach's dispute as something divisive - divisive above, and divisive below. In other words, machlokes disrupts the elaborate connection between the Worlds that link Heaven and earth, as well as disrupting the connection between Hashem and us. Sowing chaos universally, machlokes is dealt with as the most serious shortcoming. Klal Yisrael can attach itself to the One only when they are one. (Think of matan Torah. In our finest hour we accepted a Torah spurned by the rest of the world. We accomplished this only in a moment of oneness - "like one person, with one heart." ) Devekus - the most important object of our pursuit - is possible only when we are one. Shattering the essential unity of Klal Yisrael is as insidious as the cardinal sins. Each of those severs the relationship between a Jew and his Creator. Idolatry strips Jewishness from his mind. Illicit relationships distance him through the passions of the heart. Murder turns his limbs, his organs of performance, into un-Jewish organs. The combination of all three turned us into beings so un-Jewish, that the connection with Heaven was interrupted. The Temple ceased to function. Machlokes did the same. Without strong bonds between a Jew and his friend, without an essential bond between them, they could not maintain oneness with Hashem. The second Beis Hamikdosh became irrelevant. We have arrived at precisely the point that the Torah wishes to make in our parshah. The consequences of the sin of machlokes are anomalous. They do not reflect the severity of the transgression as a rebellion against Hashem's expressed Will. Those consequences flow from realities about ourselves as a people, and how we collectively relate to Him. Just as loving others is the "great principle" of the Torah in a positive sense, machlokes is the same in the negative. We lost the Beis Hamikdosh through hatred and dissension; we will regain it only through love. The Torah makes this point best by embedding it in a story about people who were not driven by ego or petty desires. As the Shalah pointed out, their intentions were for the good. We could easily think that a noble pursuit would mitigate the effects of divisiveness. Alas, that is not the case. Whatever breeds division, for whatever the cause, will still choke off the connection between ourselves and Heaven. We are still somewhat at a loss to understand. Why should this be? A machlokes leshem shomayim, for the sake of Heaven, is not such a bad thing.6 Inescapably, we learn that people pursuing spiritual goals does not turn their competition into a machlokes leshem shomayim! The two hundred fifty chased after their prize only because they convinced themselves that Moshe had somewhat improperly used his advantage to take a lead in the competition. Herein lies a subtle flaw, one that compromised their entire pursuit. Chazal tell us that one who second-guesses his Torah teacher is the equivalent of one who doubts G-d Himself. There was no race to run without entertaining suspicions that Moshe desired something that was not completely congruent with the wishes of his Master. A subtle fault line ran through their pursuit of what they thought was spiritual treasure. Another fault line was not so subtle. Negation of self is an important principle in spiritual striving. Yeshus - the pronounced presence of self and ego - is the root of many deficiencies. Contrary to what we might believe, yeshus is problematic not only in regard to material acquisitions and undeserved honor. It is a blight on the pursuit of ruchniyus as well. They told themselves that there is nothing improper in wanting the merit of spiritual elevation. In the race for spirituality, why not compete? If only one person could have it, it was fair game for all. But what advantage would Hashem's interests have in the selection of any one of them over another? Where was the net gain? If one could not be discovered, then the beneficiary was not the honor of Heaven, but one person's thinking of himself. The bottom line is that machlokes is fatal. Even when pursued for what seems to be a noble cause, and even when the participants are great people who should be able to detect any admixture of impropriety, the odds are against it amounting to anything positive. In the case of Korach's associates, the odds were two hundred and fifty to one - and they all lost.
Hollywood Celebrities in the Carlbach Shul??
Hollywood Celebrities roll with the Carlebach Shul
- for immediate release
The Carlebach Shul's annual dinner at the St. Regis ballroom on Monday, June 20th featured Hollywood celebrities John Goodman, John Turturro, Katherine Borowitz and Macaulay Culkin, who came together to honor their trusted and beloved accountant Abe Altman and his new bride Lisa.
The Carlebach Shul, led by Rabbi Naftali Citron, has had many celebrity visitors before, including Michael Jackson, who said, it was the best day of his life and Mattisyahu, who rediscovered his love of Judaism there. Besides sharing an accountant John Goodman (Blues Brothers, Roseanne) and John Turturro (You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Hannah and her Sisters) formed a bond while playing competing bowlers on cult movie, The Big Lebowski. Goodman played a volatile Jewish bowler and said a line that became classic: "I don't roll on Shabbos", when the bowling tournament was supposed to take place Saturday. Turturro, who played an over the top bowler didn't buy it. Goodman made good on his commitment to Shabbos by presenting his Shomer Shabbos accountant an award from The Carlebach Shul, with an entertaining and moving tribute. He said, "many years ago I partied late into the night and slept through April 15 and then he met Abe who has straightened out my financial life since then."
John Torturro had a blast at the dinner party and said, "I'm Italian, my wife Katherine is Jewish, but we've never experienced a community that functions on such a high level. We are very seriously considering a visit to the synagogue."
Rabbi Naftali Citron, spiritual leader of the Carlebach Shul honored Dr. Raphael and Chasya Kellman, and Louis and Hindy Weinger, the other honorees for their outstanding contribution to the Carlebach Shul and their friendship. The dinner was a great success: every ticket sold out.
About the Carlebach Shul: The Carlebach Shul is a renowned synagogue in Manhattan whose mission is to create an inspired Judaism inclusive to all with passionate study, soulful singing and study of mystical texts. The shul is in the forefront of infusing spirituality, not only into our own daily lives, but also into the lives of the spiritually unconnected. The Carlebach Shul, lead by Rabbi Naftali Citron, grandson of Reb Eli Chaim and great-nephew of Reb Shlomo Carlebach, is dedicated serving the needs not only of the Upper West Side congregation, but serves as the center of the worldwide Carlebach community with many inspiring programs. Further information: http://www.carlebachshul.org
Photos available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/63065059@N05/?saved=1
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