The Maharal explains that the spiritual world of the after-life is not available to us in this world because it is beyond our senses and we have no way to represent it to ourselves or to perceive it's reality.

Similarly Rav Yisrael Salanter emphasized that we do not have any direct acces

In Deuteronomy chapter 21, we are told that the parents of a wayward child can have the child stoned to death if “he does not listen to the voice of his father or his mother and does not obey them.” Much earlier, in Exodus chapter 24, when god and Moses give the children of Israel the

If you think about it logically Yom Kippur should come first. First we should do teshuva say viduy, fast, etc (all the things we do on YK) and then we would be prepared to be judged, namely Rosh Hashana.

The answer is as follows. For a person to do teshuva they need to understand th

Since my youth the color and the flavor of Anglo and, indeed, world Jewry has changed. I was brought up in a world in which the vast majority of Jews desperately longed to be accepted by the non-Jews, and as a result relegated their Jewishness to the margins of their lives. In Brit

We have now entered the Jewish month of Elul. We say "goodbye" to the "lazy hazy crazy days of summer", as the song goes. Pleasure is over; back to business. The religious academies reopen. We blow the shofar every morning and say an extra Psalm as we start preparing for the h

As the leaves on the trees begin to turn, local Jews, as well as Jews all over the world begin the process of t'shuvah, a Hebrew word meaning repentance which comes from the root "to turn or return." For them, autumn ushers in the High Holy Days, during which they turn their attention a

Welcome to the new month of Shevat. This month is a transitional one. It's the month in which the first signs of spring appear. Trees are waking up from their slumber and beginning to sprout new growth. The earth is beginning to thaw and all that seemed dead is showing the first signs of life.