The return of my column, “Sephardic Torah from the Holy Land.”

The train in Israel is a magical place, and Am Yisrael – jeans and black coats together – are a magical people.

My new Israeli synagogue is made up of Jews from all ethnic backgrounds.

In the Israel of 2024, Rav Uziel’s grand vision for rabbis remains as powerfully compelling as it was in 1936. 

This systematic study of the Torah’s 613 commandments was written as a gift from a father to his son.

This week marks the first global International Holocaust Remembrance Day observed in the shadow of the October 7 massacres.

"Enough with our constantly having to defend ourselves in the court of public opinion. It’s time for us Jews to launch a legal case against our libelous accusers."

It’s been over three months since I’ve written something for the Jewish Journal. My last column was written in another era, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away – a week before October 7, 2023. I wrote that column as Peni and I prepared to board a plane to Israel, to celebrate Sukkot and then spend a few weeks with our son Ilan and his wife Kayla. They got married in Israel in February 2023, are both IDF veterans, live in Herzliya, and had just returned home to Israel from a honeymoon trip in Thailand a few days before Sukkot. Ilan was scheduled to start his second year of law school at Reichman University, and Kayla her Mechina year at Bar Ilan. Peni and I planned to stay in Israel for about a month, including for meetings and events in Jerusalem with my organization, the Sephardic Educational Center.

There was a custom in Damascus in the 17^th century, that for the purposes of tax assessment, the properties of the wealthy were evaluated up to 3000 grushim (the currency at that time), thereby creating a situation that any properties or financial holdings above 3000 grushim were tax exempt. In modern economic terms: a tax ceiling. The rationale for this was that if they collected taxes on the wealthy beyond this amount, the wealthy would hide their properties and financial holdings. This was accepted in the community for many years.

“Jacob left Beer-Sheba, and set out for Haran. He came upon a certain place and stopped there for the night, for the sun had set” (Genesis 28:10-11). On his journey towards Haran, Jacob encounters darkness in a place that the Torah simply calls “a certain place.” What was this “certain place”?

Prayer from the Heart (Parashat Toledot – Genesis 25:19 – 28:9) Parashat Toledot presents us the Torah’s second incident of a barren woman. Like Sarah in the previous generation, we are now told that the current matriarch – Rebecca – is unable to bear children. With Sarah, the temporary solution was for her husband Abraham to father a child with Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant. Although Sarah eventually gave birth to a son (Isaac), the episode with Hagar and Ishmael (the son Abraham fathered with Hagar) created painful circumstances resulting in the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael from Abraham’s household.

On November 26, 1936, Rav Ben Zion Meir Hai Uziel delivered a lecture to a large gathering of rabbis in Jerusalem. Titled “The Seat of the Rabbinate,” Rav Uziel’s words were delivered as an introduction to that day’s elections for the Council of the Chief Rabbinate of the Land of Israel. Speaking to rabbis who would potentially join him as part of the Land of Israel’s national rabbinic leadership, Rav Uziel articulated a vision for what he felt were the priorities of the rabbinate in the Yishuv in Erets Yisrael (which eventually became the modern-day State of Israel):

The day God pronounced two simple words — lech lecha — Abraham and Sarah’s lives changed forever. God instructs Abraham to leave his homeland, his birthplace and his father’s home, “to the land that I will show you, and there I will make of you a great nation” (Genesis 12:1-2). “Lech lecha,” go forth — and thus the long journey began.