Land of Israel

During the height of Roman occupation and persecution of Jews in the Land of Israel, Torah was in danger of being forgotten, for the Romans outlawed Torah learning. Poverty and deprivation prevailed among our people. Rebbe Hiyya the Great, at this most difficult time, took his wife Yehudit, his two twin sons Yehuda and Chizkiya, his two daughters and his two nephews Rav and Raba bar Bar Chana and made aliya to the Land of Israel. When he saw the terrible material and spiritual deprivation, he planted flax seeds. When he harvested the flax, he made nets to capture wild deer. He used the venison meat to feed starving orphans and used the deer hides to make parchment. On the parchment, he wrote the Five Books of Moses, which he taught to the orphans,  making a single-handed revival of Torah.
No wonder that Rebbe Hiyya's two sons and two nephews became prodigious Torah scholars and righteous men of the highest caliber.
Rabbi Lazer relates the story of Rebbe Hiyya the Great from his holy gravesite in Tiberias, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. 

Today's Emuna Beams podcast comes from the holy gravesite of Rebbe Meir Baal HaNess in Tiberias, where we learn the miraculous power of Rebbe Meir's emuna, something we can all tap into.

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Today's podcast comes from the "Ad Halom" Israel Independence War Monument Park in Ashdod. "Ad Halom" in Hebrew means, "until here", to commemorate the most northern point in Israel that the Egyptian Army reached in 1948. Had, they captured Ashdod, there would have been nothing to stop the Egyptians from capturing the entire south of Israel as far as Tel Aviv - Jaffa in the north. But even in Ashdod there was nothing to stop the entire Egyptian Army except for a single-engine Piper piloted by a South African Jew named Eddie Cohen, of sacred and martyred memory, who was dropping Molotov cocktails from the cockpit on the heads of the Egyptians. Any objective observer knows that Hashem was controlling events, not the fledgling army. It's still the same, so there's no sense in trying to be a control freak...

Today, Rabbi Lazer broadcasts from the ancient Sycamore grove in the dunes of the northern Negev Desert south of Ashdod. What's the secret of these trees and their ability to thrive in such an arid climate with winds and shifting sands? These trees are an amazing living parable about the Jewish People...