Yehuda Lave, Spiritual Advisor and Counselor

Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works  with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money,  and spiritual engagement

Love Yehuda Lave

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Michelangelo

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Andy Warhol

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die. Isaac Asimov

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Maimonides

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?   Rabbi Hillel  

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.

Abraham Lincoln

10 Posts That Prove the Difference Between Men and Women Edited By: Boris Joukov

Men are from Mars and women are from Venus' - how many times have we heard THAT phrase. But there is no denying that the two sexes have noticeable differences between them, and we're not just talking about looks! We sometimes think different, experience different emotional reactions, remember things differently, behave differently and judge others in a completely different way. Below are 10 studies and articles that dive into the real differences between the sexes, asking the meaningful questions and looking at real data.

https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=34751

Love is one of life's greatest blessings, and cherishing this precious gem of an emotion is equally important and challenging, no wonder some of the world's greatest minds made a point in sharing their piece of mind regarding the art of love. We hope you'll get inspired by this collection of 11 heartfelt quotes about love and relationships, and find something that will spark a newfound appreciation of your partner. Consider sharing these quotes with the one you love, too, as sometimes, a simple gesture like this is exactly the thing you need to strengthen and enliven your relationship.

Don't try to be something to everyone. Be everything to someone." — Anonymous

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."
— Mignon McLaughlin

“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”
— Audrey Hepburn

For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home."
— Stephanie Perkins

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time."
— Maya Angelou

“At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.”
— Plato

Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it."
— Karl Menninger

"Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
— Marcel Proust

The Story Of Josef Trumpeldor And ‘The Lion Of Tel Chai’ By Saul Jay Singer

Joseph Trumpeldor (1880-1920) is known for his efforts in forming a Jewish military force to liberate and defend Eretz Yisrael and for founding the Zion Mule Corps and the Jewish Legion, but he is probably best known for his legendary defense of Tel Chai when he uttered the immortal dying words, “Ein davar, tov lamut be’ad artzeinu” (“Never mind, it’s good to die for our country”).

That expression has become as renowned in Israel as Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” declaration is in the United States.

Trumpeldor’s name has become a metaphor for the dedicated military defense of Eretz Yisrael, and he remains to this day one of Israel’s greatest military heroes. The northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona – literally, “Town of the Eight” – was so named to honor the eight who died at Tel Chai (including two Americans), and “Tel Chai Day” (on the 11th of Adar) is Israel’s only distinct national memorial day besides Yom HaZikaron, the official memorial day for Israeli soldiers.

Perhaps uniquely in the annals of Zionism, Trumpeldor is venerated across the entire political spectrum, from the Revisionists on the right – who named their youth movement Betar (an acronym for “Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor”) in his honor – to arch leftists, who revere him as the defender of the kibbutzim.

Although the czar conscripted Trumpeldor’s father, Zev Vladimir, into the Russian army (he served for 25 years), he remained a loyal, though non-practicing, Jew who successfully transmitted his love of Judaism to his son. Joseph attended a religious elementary school, although, as we will see below, his knowledge of Hebrew was poor. Like his father, he was always proud to be a Jew, but he was more Russian than traditionally Jewish. Early in his life, during an age of rampant and vicious Russian pogroms, he adapted Tolstoy’s ideas about collective communes to develop his own concept of Zionism, which amounted to establishing agricultural communes in Eretz Yisrael and defending them with force when necessary.

Trumpeldor served with great heroism in the Russian army and distinguished himself by volunteering for dangerous missions in the Russo-Japanese War (1904), during which he sustained an injury that led to the amputation of his left arm. Despite the injury, he rushed back to active duty and, after the fall of Port Arthur in Manchuria, was transferred to a prisoner of war camp in Japan, where he published the first Jewish newspaper in Japan and organized Jewish soldiers for settlement in Eretz Yisrael.

 Mini-collection, Trumpeldor stamps and cards: “It is good to die for our country.”

As part of that effort, and though he was himself a thoroughly assimilated Jew, he managed to obtain the backing of his Japanese captors and dedicated himself to meeting all the religious needs of his Jewish comrades, including regular prayer services, holiday observations, and even matzah for Passover, all of which earned him great respect, even from his fellow prisoners who were not religious.

Upon his repatriation to Russia (1906), he became the most decorated Jewish soldier in the Russian army and the first Jew to be offered an officer’s commission.

After earning a law degree and teaching law at the University of St. Petersburg, Trumpeldor and a group he organized made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael (1911), where he worked on several collective farms, including Deganya and Migdal, while also helping to defend Jewish settlements in the Lower Galilee. (The only existing video footage of Trumpeldor, in which he is seen briefly pushing a plough with his one hand, is a grainy video clip of Migdal in 1913 that can be seen on YouTube.) With the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and as a Russian subject in Ottoman Palestine, he became an enemy alien and was deported to Egypt.

In December 1914, he and Ze’ev Jabotinsky – who later would head the Revisionist Zionists – agreed to fight with the Allies to liberate Eretz Yisrael from the Turks and, at a March 1915 meeting, they presented a plan to the Palestine Refugees Committee to form a Jewish Legion. The British Commander in Egypt, General Maxwell, rejected the plan, but he suggested that, while he could not enlist foreign nationals as fighting troops, he could form them into a volunteer transport “Zion Mule Corps.”

Jabotinsky urged rejection of the proposal, which he considered demeaning, but Trumpeldor prevailed in urging some 700 Jewish soldiers to join the Corps and to maintain focus on the ultimate goal: to remove the Turks from Eretz Yisrael and to realize the dream of a Jewish homeland.

The major defeat sustained by the Allies at the Battle of Gallipoli (April 1915-January 1916) is of Jewish interest not only because of the number of Jewish soldiers who fought and died there, but also because of the participation of the Zion Mule Corps which, in March 1915, became the first regular Jewish fighting force to take an active part in a war since the defeat of the Bar Kochba Revolt two millennia earlier. The entire Corps was recognized for its outstanding courage at Gallipoli and, in particular, Captain Trumpeldor was cited for his heroism during the campaign, during which he was wounded in the shoulder but refused to be evacuated.

 Extremely rare handwritten stampless OAS cover showing Trumpeldor’s unit, “Zion Mule Corps/Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces.”

At the end of 1916, a unit of 120 former Zion Mule Corps soldiers was assigned to the 20th London Battalion, and Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor submitted a petition to the British government proposing the formation of a Jewish Legion for Eretz Yisrael. Initially, assurances were given that the unit would be unequivocally Jewish in character and would be provided with Jewish emblems but, primarily due to the efforts of anti-Zionist Jews, the unit was designated as the “38th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.”

In June 1918, the 38th Battalion was sent to Eretz Yisrael, where the volunteers fought 20 miles north of Jerusalem for its liberation from Ottoman rule. The Battalion also participated in the Battle of Megiddo (mid-September 1918), which is widely considered to have been one of the final and decisive victories over the Turks.

Trumpeldor meanwhile had returned to Russia to try to persuade the Provisional Russian Government to form Jewish regiments in the Russian army that could help break through to Eretz Yisrael. He was elected commissar for Jewish Soldiers’ Affairs and, after the October Revolution, he formed a Jewish regiment whose chief objective was to combat the massacre of Jews. His regiment, however, was disbanded and Jewish defense was outlawed when Soviet Russia signed a peace treaty with Germany.

Postcard sent by Trumpeldor in 1918.

In this exceptionally rare July 29, 1918 postcard written from Petrograd, Trumpeldor writes to Comrade E. Sakher:

My apologies for writing in Russian. You should know that my writing and reading in Hebrew are very bad. I did not read about Bonevich [?], because I don’t read Togblat [a Yiddish language Polish newspaper], but I will meet the comrades today and they, probably, will tell me what it said. The gardening co-operative continues its work and doing not bad at all. I talked to Tsinman regarding your arrival to our apartment directly from the railroad station. He has nothing against it. Therefore, you are welcome, come directly to our house after your arrival. Regards, Cionare [sic]. [Perhaps “sayonara,” a humorous allusion to Trumpeldor’s time as a Japanese POW.]

Last year, a scheduled auction (June 2019) of one of Trumpeldor’s very few Hebrew letters was canceled in the face of credible allegations that it had been stolen from the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. The letter concerned Binyamin Wertheimer, a deceased soldier who was a member of an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. He had initially been teased by his fellow Zion Mule Corps members for his long peyot and traditional clothing, but he proved to be a fierce fighter and died a hero at Gallipoli.

Months later, Trumpeldor received a request from Binyamin’s bereaved father for the return of his son’s tefillin. Trumpeldor sent him the tefillin along with the following words in Hebrew (since the father did not speak Russian): “Know that your son fell as a hero for the sake of the people of Israel and for the Land of Israel.”

In 1919, Trumpeldor was elected chairman of He-Halutz, whose purpose was to prepare Russian Jews for aliyah. That same year, he returned to Eretz Yisrael and proposed to the British military that 10,000 Jewish soldiers be brought from Russia as part of the Jewish Legion. He also urged labor leaders in Eretz Yisrael to unite into a single labor federation that could facilitate the absorption of the new pioneering immigration.

On March 1, 1920, the Jewish farming village of Tel Chai in the Upper Galilee’s Hula Valley came under attack by Shiite gangs from neighboring Lebanon who were searching for French soldiers. A militia led by Trumpeldor arrived and a skirmish broke out, resulting in several casualties on both sides, including Trumpeldor, who was shot in the stomach and died uttering his famous words.

In this February 6, 1934 correspondence, the famous poet and author Chaim Nachman Bialik, as head of the Committee for Construction of a Memorial in Tel-Chai, and his fellow Committee members, write to the Jewish National Council and, in expressing their approval of the Trumpeldor memorial created by Avraham Melnikov in Kfar Giladi, provide a beautiful and detailed description of it:

Letter signed by Chaim Nachman Bialik and others regarding erecting a monument in memory of Joseph Trumpeldor.

In fulfillment of the task that you assigned to us, we visited in Kfar Giladi the monument that was erected there in memory of Joseph Trumpeldor and his comrades through the statue by Mr. A. Melnikov at the invitation of the Vaad L’Umi by means of Lord Meltzer and the arrangers of the work.

During the visits at various times between the months of Kislev and Shevat 1934 by all signatories below, amongst them architect Mr. Yosef Menor who joined them as per your request in place of Mr. Berols, a Vaad associate who passed away in the interim.

After the examination of the monument from all sides and joint negotiations in the matter, the members of the Vaad came to a unanimous decision that in all ways the statue fulfilled its purpose. The choice of the site was made with thoughtfulness and deliberation. The monument stands exposed and open in all directions; it may be seen from afar, and it is very open from the weak side. The material was taken entirely from the stones in the surrounding area, stones that tend toward yellow and slightly speckled, a look that is pleasing to the design of the lion. The housing of the monument is built with 24 large squared hewn stones arranged in four columns. Its height is 2.85 meters [about 9.35 feet] and its arch supports are 2.75 by 2.25 meters [about 9 by 7.4 feet].

The body of the lion statue is sculpted entirely from a single stone. Its height is 3.85 meters [about 12.6 feet] and its arch supports are 1.30 by 1.80 meters [about 4.3 x 5.9 feet] and the style of the work tends to the Assyrian. The intent of the statue is to maintain the memory of the heroes, those who defended Tel Chai with their lives, a monument in the form of a mighty lion who sends its shout to the ends of the earth, even to the heavens, a goal that was decidedly met. The lion sits on its rear legs, its hind legs and tail tucked beneath it, with its front legs upright and standing on two solid pillars and its entire neck and head draped in the curls of its mane, drawn upward and capped by a muzzle, shouting a great roar to the heavens. The entirety looks tremendously sturdy and the general impression is of great strength.

In the first line in large letters will appear the last sentence uttered by Trumpeldor before his death: Tov Lamut Be’ad Artzenu, followed in smaller letters by the names of Tel Chai defenders….

In 1928, Lord Melchett (Sir Alfred Mond), responding to the initiative of the Zionist Executive, agreed to arrange to finance the construction of a memorial to the heroes of Tel Chai. He engaged Melnikov, one of the founding fathers of modern Hebrew sculpture, who prepared a sketch for a memorial in the form of a roaring lion to symbolize “Gur aryeh Yehuda” (“Judah is a young lion,” Genesis 49:9) and to show the linkage between the ancient nation of Israel and the modern Jewish state in formation.

In 1930, a 22-ton block of stone from nearby quarries was moved to the site, and Melnikov began his work. Funding ultimately ran out, so the sculptor, refusing to compromise his vision, personally assumed the costs of completing the project. The memorial was officially dedicated on February 23, 1934 in the presence of Bialik, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi, Eliezer Kaplan, and leaders of the Yishuv. The “Roaring Lion,” the first ever nationalist-Zionist memorial, became one of the most recognizable and beloved sculptures in Eretz Yisrael, as Trumpeldor and the Lion became inextricably entwined in the public consciousness.

Melnikov (1892-1960) served with the Jewish Legion (1919) and, after arriving in Eretz Yisrael, began to devote himself full-time to art, later serving as deputy to Boris Schatz, who founded and served as president of the Association of Jewish Artists. Though best known for the Trumpeldor memorial, he enjoyed great success in the mid-20th century in London as a portrait sculptor, with subjects including Churchill, Bevin, and Toscanini. He was buried at the foot of his Lion at Tel Chai.

https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/the-story-of-josef-trumpeldor-and-the-lion-of-tel-chai/2020/01/08/

Twas the night before Chanukah


T'was the night before Chanukah, boychicks and maidels

Not a sound could be heard, not even the draidels.

The Menorah was set on the chimney, alight
In the kitchen the Bubba hut gechapt a bite.
Salami, pastrami, a glassala tay
And zayerah pickles with bagels, oh vay!

Gezunt and geschmack, the kinderlach felt
While dreaming of tagelach and Chanukah gelt.
The clock on the mantelpiece away was tickin'
And Bubba was serving a schtikala chicken.

A tumult arose like a thousand brauches,
Santa had fallen and broken his tuches.
I put on my slippers, eins, tsvay, drei,

While Bubba was now on the herring and rye.
I grabbed for my bathrobe and buttoned my gotkes
While Bubba was busy devouring the latkes.
To the window I ran and to my surprise
A little red yarmulke greeted my eyes.
Then he got to the door and saw the Menorah,
"Yiddishe kinder," he said, "Kenahora.
I thought I was in a goyisha hoise,
But as long as I'm here, I'll leave a few toys."

With much geshray, I asked, "Du bist a Yid?"
"Avada, mien numen is Schloimay Claus, kid."
"Come into the kitchen, I'll get you a dish,
A guppell, a schtickala fish."

With smacks of delight, he started his fressen,
Chopped liver, knaidlach and kreplah gagessen.
Along with his meal, he had a few schnapps,
When it came to eating, this boy was the tops.
He asked for some knishes with pepper and salt,
But they were so hot, he yelled "Oy Gevalt."

Unbuttoning his haizen, he rose from the tish,
And said, "Your Kosher essen is simply delish."
As he went to the door, he said "I'll see you later,
I'll be back next Pesach, in time for the Sedar."
More rapid than eagles his prancers they came,
As he whistled and shouted and called them by name:
Now Izzy, now Morris, now Yitzak, now Sammy,
Now Irving and Maxie, and Moishe and Mannie."
He gave a geshray as he drove out of sight:
"Gooten Yomtov to all, and to all a good night.

About 7,000 years ago, a village on the Carmel Coast in northern Israel tried to build a wall to protect itself from the rising sea level caused by melting glaciers, joint research by Israeli and Australian scholars has uncovered.

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Unique-7000-year-old-wall-against-sea-level-rise-uncovered-in-Israel-611329

SHIRA B'SHEMAYIM

SHIRA B’SHEMAYIMLyrics by Evelyn Hayes,© July 24, 2014I

sing to Hashem because He is in command sing as He hurls rockets into the sand

Protecting His people in their holy land.I sing, He is exalted, Master of War.I sing to Hashem as He deflects prime-evil.I sing as He battles for wrong’s upheaval

Pressuring terrorists to tremble and cease sing; He is author and architect of peace.We’re united in song, Shira B’Shemayim No longer despair, Yes, emunah, we share.Accepting His edicts, the good He depicts. We sing to Hashem, our Father in Heaven.

He writes the song. Shira B’Shemayim , Shira B’Shemayim, His right hand is raised to make Amalek fallHis right hand is raised against violence and brawlDisabling the fighters against mankind.His right hand is keeping the predators behind. His right hand is an iron domeKnocking down evil, protecting each homeMother Rachel cries for her childrenThe nation as one prays for shalom We’re united in song,

Shira B’Shemayim No longer despair, Yes, emunah, we share.Accepting His edicts, the good He depicts. We sing to Hashem, our Father in Heaven. He writes the song. Shira B’Shemayim , Shira B’Shemayim, Sing because vengeance is HisSing because blessings are HisSing with gratitude for His miraclesHis salvation is elevation; our manifest destination.We’re united with Hashem and His highest orderUp from slavery, sacrifice, abuse, misuse, Love, not hate; Trust not fear; Law nor disorderGood not evil, Life not death. Peace not war. Heavenward.We’re united in song, Shira B’ShemayimNo longer despair, Yes, emunah, we share.Accepting His edicts, the good He depicts. We sing to Hashem, our Father in Heaven. He writes the song. Shira B’Shemayim, Shira B’Shemayim, 

To what extent can criminal trials be expected to establish the truth about historical events?

The question is a serious one, but it has been confounded by a discrepancy that exists between the legal and the popular conception of what a trial does.

In law, the purpose of a criminal trial is to decide, according to predetermined norms, whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty of a particular charge.

Adversary proceedings are designed to render a simple yes-or-no answer to some precise question, a question that has been drawn in as specific a manner as possible.

In the popular imagination, however, a trial performs a somewhat grander service. It is looked upon as a fact-finding operation, an occasion for the public exposure of all known information regarding a given crime. The general assumption is that, if fairly conducted, a trial will yield the whole truth; aside from meting out justice to the accused, it will provide complete information and resolve the doubts of a concerned public.

The assumption that the “truth” ineluctably emerges in a fair trial is the premise of countless mystery novels and courtroom television dramas of the Perry Mason variety.

It is a presupposition which is reinforced by the news media, a convenient tack for journalists to take since it reduces the burden of reporting the facts about a crime to the business of covering court proceedings. “Objective journalism” requires only that both sides of a story be printed—a requirement that it is fulfilled by the contrapuntal presentation of evidence by prosecution and defense; in addition, cross-examination provides an element of dramatic conflict, neatly resolved by the jury's verdict.

The rights of a defendant notwithstanding, the news media insist that a major trial be turned into a public forum. To accomplish that end, the accused must appear in open court, the prosecution must present all the evidence, cross-examination must take place, and “by no means, legal or pragmatic,” should the courtroom doors be slammed shut on the facts.

Naturally, a plea of guilty on the part of a defendant is therefore precluded, for it cuts short the issuance of facts and information. What the media do not appear to understand, however, is that a guilty plea is a defendant's legal prerogative. Nor do the media fully recognize the right of the accused not to take the stand but simply to remain mute, or the right of the defense to attack or attempt to controvert the prosecution's case without presenting its own side of the story, or the procedural rules which impose restrictions upon the sorts of evidence that may be introduced and which require that the prosecution present only such evidence as is relevant to the specific charges at hand.

There can be no provision in the law, furthermore, for differentiating between “routine” murder trials and extraordinary ones, such as “quasi-political assassination”; all must be governed by the same fixed rules, some of which necessarily impede the disclosure of information. Often the right of a defendant is precisely his right to withhold or prevent the prosecution from introducing, certain information which the public might like to know but which might prove to be prejudicial to his case.

In the United States, perhaps the trial most thoroughly scrutinized for its “fairness” has been that of Sacco and Vanzetti; for many people, this trial has become a kind of American version of the Dreyfus case. The common argument runs as follows: two Italian anarchists were arrested and convicted of murder, not because there was any substantial evidence against them, but because of a prevailing hysteria about, and prejudice against, anarchists, a prejudice shared by the court that tried them. Even though the trial was manifestly unfair, and the evidence transparently flimsy, the argument continues, the Establishment rallied to the defense of the verdict in an effort to protect the political system.

But in any event, the fact that data which may be vital to the determination of historical truth can be excluded from a trial does not necessarily mean that the trial is “unfair”—at least, not in the sense that the rules and procedures of law have been unfairly or improperly applied.

Quite the opposite may be the case: rules and procedures designed to protect the rights of the accused and facilitate the adversary process can, and often do, work to restrict the evidence that can be introduced.

Nor can a trial, no matter how “fair,” evaluate evidence that has been missed by the police investigations, which themselves may have been faulty or tendentious. Remember one of the most famous cases, OJ Simpson and the problem with the evidence.

The ability of the defense to conduct its own private investigation is limited by the resources available to it, both financial and legal, and by its purpose—to find data that support its client's side of the case. Even if the Sacco-Vanzetti trial had been a paragon of fair procedure, a true picture of the event might not have emerged in the course of it. To be sure, a fairer trial (which would have excluded more, not less, evidence) might have produced a verdict of not guilty, but that judgment would still have been made on the basis of incomplete information—for example, some of the incriminating ballistics evidence might have been disallowed for technical reasons—and there still could have been no certainty about the accuracy with which the trial had reconstructed the historic event.

A trial, then, can produce a decision of guilty or not guilty, and if the trial is assumed to have been fairly conducted, the decision will be generally accepted, but a trial cannot be counted on to yield large historic truths.  But the nature of our judicial system is such that, when the investigative wherewithal of public agencies has been exhausted, the responsibility for providing the public with a full rendering of the event ultimately rests not with the courts, but with concerned historians.

See you Sunday bli neder Shabbat Shalom

Love Yehuda Lave

Rabbi Yehuda Lave

PO Box 7335, Rehavia Jerusalem 9107202

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