When an American man defamed the president on the radio over the proprosed health care bill, he was asked if he had read the bill. He said he had not, but he was sure he was right because he heard the bad news that he was spreading from someone else. This is what goes on all the time. And it spreads distrust.

You want to convert to Judaism. That is a big commitment. In fact, it is so big that rabbis are supposed to turn prospective converts away at least twice before agreeing to teach them anything. You really have to want it. I know of a rabbi who does quicky conversions in nine months. His converts do not know how to read a Hebrew text or study a page of Talmud or critique a page of Torah from the Hebrew. They are certified to be Jews, but they know so little compared to what a Jew growing up in Torah knows.

A person who grows up with Torah knows about kashrus, knows her prayers and the liturgy and has a Jewish value system based on the Torah. She knows so much by the age of six, by the age of twelve and by the age of twenty when she is expected to
start thinking of marriage and building a family. She will have spent countless hours every day of her school years from the first grade studying the Torah and the midrashim, the laws of shabbos and the yomtovim. Before her marriage, she will learn how to be a wife and prepare for motherhood. How do you fit all that into nine months? No matter how smart you are and how much you study, you cannot learn it all in nine months or eighteen. So do all you can, as much as you can in the time ahead, and when you have learned it all and understand the obligations and responsibilities of Judaism, then you will be in a position to convert, should you still decide to do that. And if your boyfriend is really your soulmate, he will wait for you to get married.

Many of these people come to America or live in Europe. They come from Palestine, from Iran, from Iraq and from other places. They continue their cultural practices and show no respect for other religions or the people who follow them. They are on our college campuses and they live in our cities.

Of the two major religions besides Judaism, Judaism considers Islam closest. Islam sees Allah as the spiritual promised land, a place to reach in one’s spiritual growth. The way to get to him is shown in the other religions by their prophets. Of these prophets, Islam reveres both Jesus and Muhammet, but even these men are seen as guides, not deities. Islam is not a religion of idolatry as is Christianity which arose first from a group of Jews who revered their teacher and leader as the Messiah and decided that he rose alive to heaven and never died. Actually, other people in the Torah are thought to have risen alive to heaven. One was Enoch. Another was Elijah, the prophet.

For Christians, Jesus/Yeshua is still alive. The new Christological movement within Lubavitch Judaism is doing the same thing. For now, these people are still Jews, but one day, they may have a new name, just as those who followed the gospels of Jesus were and are still called Christians.

Jews have often believed that someone in some generation was a messiah. For a while it was Bar Kochba. He died. There was Shabbetai Tzvi. He converted to Islam taking along with him many of his following. There were four or five named Yeshu (Jesus), and no one is sure which one of them the Christians portray in their gospels.

Messianism of this kind is nothing new to Judaism. You are still a Jew although I will venture a guess that you were never an Orthodox Jew. After some generations (I think it is four or five of a line of women), your children will no longer be able to claim to be Jewish.

The Torah teaches us that we must restrain our anger. The first example is that of Cain who murders his brother Abel. Like any child who lashes out, he did not use his words to negotiate what he wanted or thought he needed.

This is the sin of those who throw stones at other people on the holy day. Jerusalem does not belong to them alone, and while one can sympathize with them over seeing others desecrate the Sabbath, they have no right to do it themselves and to commit acts of violence in order to make their point. If they were to kill someone in a spree of rock throwing, that would be murder.

Consider that when some bad things happen to people, others step in to help. We may be very good at relieving suffering, but we can all be very careless about causing it. The man or woman who hits a pedestrian isn’t thinking if the person is good or bad.

Viruses do not know or care if a person is good or bad. The hurricane, the earthquake and the tornado don’t think at all, either. So bad things do happen. As Jews, we hope that there is a plan of which all these things are parts. We trust that Hashem knows what is happening to us, and we just keep on living and fighting to live, no matter what happens to us.

We humans were never meant to refrain from experiencing and enjoying our sexuality. The first commandment given to Adam is to be fruitful and multiply.

In Judaism, it is not a sin to stay single, but one is considered to have been “punished” if he has no children. No children are the consequence of not having a mate with whom to be sexual.

Priests in Christianity have traditionally been celibate, a state that has disturbed Jews, because it is considered a defiance of God’s charge to Adam and Eve to have children. Being sexual is part of our nature. To be celibate might appear to some to be an objection to nature.

I suspect that her mother didn’t teach her about theft, because twice, in my house, her mother took something of mine without asking me and gave it to someone else. She didn’t think she was wrong, because she didn’t see any value to the things she gave away. That they were mine meant nothing to her.

I once watched as a Lubavitch woman picked up some money on the street. The man who had lost it was coming towards her, not seeing her but counting the money he was holding, clearly upset to be missing something. She put the money into her pocket and did not give it to him. These women were both unschooled in Judaism.  One would never be schooled and the Lubavitch woman was new to Torah Judaism.

As for words, not only can words hurt, they can kill. They have killed and even resulted in suicide; and in fact, we have recently had teen suicides in the news as a result of cyber bullying. One of those bullies turned out to be an adult, a mother–an example of how immature and dangerous some adults are. Sometimes, we say things that we think are constructive, but we hurt the people we think we are helping. We call this inappropriate use of words “lashon hara.” There are various forms of it. When our words hurt others, we call that “Ona’at devorim.”

We Jews try to learn not to be using our words this way. We are all of us sometimes guilty of using words that hurt others, hurt ourselves or cause embarrassment. We have to be careful not to repeat such mistakes. We can only do that if we keep learning and try to be the best we can be.

Speaking of values, those two lines remind me of another line: “Might is right.” That is a value that is also opposed to Judaism. Might is right is the value of the ancient Romans, the more recent Nazis and the present day radical Muslims.

In contrast, the Jewish value is Justice is right. Having a Jewish homeland could only be possible if there is always a Jewish army. That does not mean that might is right in Israel today. But rarely if at all has Israel been the aggressor. True, those who settled overnight in the territories that were the homelands of non Jews for generations have trespassed on other’s rights. For this reason, the move of the Israeli government to oust them is just.

Workaholics do this. They may do it as an escape from family and problems at home. That’s a cop out that clearly shows a weak personality. Are friends so important that you insist on using certain language, dressing a certain way and flaunting some aspect of your person? Then you are worshipping your friends and whatever it takes to look “cool.” Is it so important to drink with your friends that you party to the point of becoming ill? Then that becomes a habit that is like a serpent biting at your heels. We can overcome any of these urges which crouch at our doors. Not doing so is akin to worshipping them. We make idols of singers, of sodas, of dress styles, of Egyptian cotton, of money, of cars, of plaits or dreadlocks in our hair, of jewelry—you name it, it can become what we focus on and make more important than healthy eating, living and socializing.

I had an experience that illustrates what success means to me. I was working with a two year old boy, a beautiful child. He didn’t talk. He did what we call in Hebrew “hitkashkesh.” That would translate as “scribbled,” but in his case, it referred to his making noises instead of words. We teachers would speak to him as we might do with a six month old, teaching him to take turns speaking. We didn’t use any baby talk with him.

One day, out of the blue, he began to speak in the most perfectly intelligible sentences. All the staff went bananas. We couldn’t hear his voice enough that day or the next. It hit me that we had been having success with him every day, even though all we seemed to be celebrating on that one amazing day was a milestone he had reached in his development.

A milestone like that lets you know that you have been having successes all along. If we had been working futilely, he may not have reached that milestone so well or when he did.

Success is a process and life is a process. They are hopefully intertwined. They are like a ladder. You climb each rung, and reaching the top is a milestone, but you cannot reach it unless you are able to lift a foot and move your body upwards. Our children have successes every day that we do not always get to see. Maybe we think the day was unsuccessful because there was no visible achievement. But the milestone, even if we think of it as a product, is not the success. The child and his growth is the product, and as he learns to function like a typical child, he has to climb many rungs of a ladder, and he will not climb each rung in a day or even sometimes in a week or a month. But every rung that he climbs invisibly towards that milestone is a success.

Celebrate each day with your precious child. I did, and while it hurt to see her grow up so fast, moving from one stage into the next, I was thankful that she was growing well. In a pinch, my infant was a toddler and the day it hit me, I cried. In a snap, she grew up and is a woman. Now, I watch her in amazement as she resolves situations on her own as she makes shidduchim for others, enjoys and cares for her husband and raises her own child. I was successful in raising my child. She made that success obvious with her growth and her achievements.  I hope someday you get to celebrate your child’s successful development, too.