Torah Thought

Our sages tell of a wise old man who sits at a crossroads and warns travelers, "There's a road whose beginning is rocky and its end is smooth, and there's a second road whose beginning is smooth and the end is rocky." The wise man is relating a fact of life that applies both to material and spiritual endeavors, as we learn in the following thought-provoking parable.

Is there a contradiction between Divine Direction and free will? If Hashem directs everything, like we learn in the first principle of emuna, what's left for us? We find our answer in a most unlikely place. The frogs come to enlighten us.
 

Sometimes, two people see an identical situation. There is no change in reality. Yet one person is happy and the other person is miserable. That's the difference between looking at Hashem and looking at causes, or catalysts that trigger events.
"Looking at Hashem" means viewing life's occurrences within the framework of Divine Providence. A person who attributes success and failure, happiness and grief to catalysts – human or otherwise – will never find inner peace.
By ignoring Hashem and attributing one's fate to catalysts, events seem random, senseless and frequently cruel. That not the hand of a loving Father in Heaven, as we see in today's Emuna Hour lesson.

In one of the most dramatic episodes of the Torah, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. At this very moment, Joseph makes a monumental discovery. He suddenly sees the Divine hand of providence involved in every detail of his life. This is a lesson for each one of us, for posterity.
 

Our sages tell us that we don't have to learn how to hate - that comes natural to a person because of innate egotism. Loving someone else, on the other hand, is something we all must learn to insure our emotional and physical health.

Learning the Ten Commandments in depth is a wonderful preparation for the holiday of Shavuos; today, we have the opportunity to learn them and to learn how the entire order of creation depends on them. 

Where do we learn the concept of "friends and lovers" from? What is love according to Judaism? It certainly is not lust and infatuation...

Rabbi Lazer Brody with a special message for the Omer period from the Western Wall remnant of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

Today, an olive best categorizes the American Jew. We'll learn how and why in today's emuna-oriented analysis of current events in the USA.

Welcome to Emuna News, where you find out what's really happening in the world. Today's news update and message is, "Avalanche or Birth?" It sounds weird, but it's an exact description of current events right, where we find out the connection between COVID 19, wildfires, BLM and Yom Kippur.

If you don't think that our Talmudic sages saw far into the future with their crystal-clear spiritual vision, then hear today's podcast, which shows just how the holy Raba bar Bar Chana saw what would happen in our generation in general, and with the upheaval of COVID-19 in particular.

Here's today's emuna news: the preoccupation with Coronavirus has taken the focus away from Israel's northern border, where an acute threat of hundreds of thousands of Hizbolla and Iranian missiles are aimed at us right now. Moses saw all this in this week's Torah portion...