David Cardozo Academy

As we enter the three weeks of mourning for the catastrophes that led us into exile, I offer a prayer for our current reality.

PRAYER FOR OUR SOLDIERS
Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Lord of the Universe
We, the People of Israel
Come to You in humility
And pray for your help

Once more, our soldiers are asked to defend our
People and
Our Holy Land
Against cruel enemies

We ask You to have mercy on them and
Help them to watch over our people
With clean hands
And with a heart filled with mercy

Let our people have the strength to
Remain in good spirits
To live in unity and walk in Your ways,
The ways of Justice and Truth.

Bring home our sisters, brothers, and children
who have been taken hostage.
Do not leave them any longer in the hands of our barbaric enemies.
Let us find the hiding places of these evil people and bring them to justice.

Return all the citizens in the North and the South to their homes
Give them the strength to rebuild their communities
And their lives
Give peace of mind to their families.

Remove the evil spirit from our enemies
Let them realize the wickedness of their actions
Stop the manipulation of their children
Who are taught hate for us in their schoolbooks

O God,
We are the children of Avraham, your servant,
Who prayed for the evil people of Sedom
With the hope that they repent and live a decent life
So, we beg you
Let our enemies repent
Force them to understand that
We wish only to live in peace with
All our neighbors

O Lord,
You have commanded us to live in a land
That is little more
Than an island in a sea of chaos,

You have commanded us to send Your holy Word
to all the corners of the world
But we are surrounded by nations
That deny us the right to live in even the smallest corner of the world
Who wish only our deaths

Give the Arab nations leaders
Who are men of justice, who care for their people
Who do not wish to bring their own brothers to despair
And unbearable pain
With the intention of harming us.

Now, after thousands of years exile, tortures, pogroms,
Expulsions and Holocausts
We have finally found our way back to our small homeland
Which You promised to our forefathers
But once more our dreams of peace
Have gone up in smoke.

We wish for our Arab neighbors
To live their own lives.
We were prepared to make sacrifices
For their welfare as no other people ever did,
Offering them land, peace, prosperity.
But once more we pay the price for our belief in peace.
Once more we feel betrayed by our hopes.

Oh Lord,
Help us to counter the evil intentions
Of those who distort the truth
And to portray us throughout the world as evil
In order to deny Your existence and Your ethical demands.

We hate war as no other nation,
We abhor the need to bear weapons
We shudder at the sound of our own artillery
The roar of warplanes and tanks.

We are the people of the Book
The Book which demands holiness,
Kindness and integrity
Our heroes are not the generals or the marshals
But our prophets and our sages
Men of righteousness

God, our soldiers have been fighting
for months and months and many of them are exhausted
Give them the strength to continue to fight for our nation
Until peace will be accomplished

Let us sanctify Your name in life,
Not in death.
Heal all our soldiers
Who have been wounded
And bring comfort to the families of those we have lost.

Give us the chance once more to teach Your ways
To all those who seek You.
Let the blessing which You gave to Avraham come true,
"And through you all the families of the earth will be blessed"
For this is our hope.

Some thoughts on Shavuot.

Shavuot is one of the three Pilgrimage Holidays mandated by the Torah, and yet the text tells us very little about the holiday or how it is to be observed. Even the date on which it is celebrated is left undefined, leading to intense debate among rival factions during the Second Temple era.

In fact, this controversy was part of a much larger debate which threatened to split the Jewish nation along sectarian lines. The split hinged on a major difference of opinion over the nature of Jewish society and its foundation texts: Is the Torah a fixed text, unchangeable for all time, or is it a living document meant to be reinterpreted in the light of changing circumstances?

Full text below!

The Day after the Shabbat - What an ancient controversy teaches us about nation-building - David Cardozo Academy Shavout is an enigma among Jewish holidays. Its transformation from harvest festival to commemoration of the Giving of the Torah is a lesson in nation-building.

Imagine that civilization was going to be destroyed within five years, and that you were tasked with deciding what literary treasures to preserve? That is the background of the Tanakh that we have today. The Talmud records the bare bones of discussions where scholars fought for the inclusion of those writings that were dear to them, often against ferocious opposition from their colleagues. Amazingly, of all the possible things to include, the famous Rabbi Akiva chose a collection of b***y wedding songs! What lay behind such an odd choice?

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This week's parashah tells us of the giving of the Laws to Moshe on Mt. Sinai, and it's aftermath. But what exactly is Divine Law? And do human beings have any say in what the Law is to be? An incident much later in the Torah hints at the dynamic relationship between the Children of Israel and the Laws of God.

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This week's Thought to Ponder is by Calev Ben-Dor. In it, he explains how Moshe Rabbenu's inability to countenance injustice ultimately led to the greatest tragedy of his life.

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The sudden rediscovery of Jewish identity in Israel since the start of the war has led me to understand a verse in the Torah that I never really understood before. In this verse, God promises peace in our borders under certain conditions.

Due to all that we have experienced in the last weeks—the trauma of the attacks and then the incredible new awakening to what it means to be a Jew—perhaps we need to reconsider this verse.

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This week's Thought to Ponder is by Calev Ben-Dor.

We have come to believe that for Jews, the diaspora was a place of danger while Israel of safety. But the fact the biggest murder of Jews in one day since the Holocaust took place in Israel is simply unfathomable.

We are still trying to come to terms with this tragedy, still struggling to create order out of chaos. Where was the army? Where was—or is—the government? Where was God?

In this week’s parsha, L**h L**ha, God speaks to Abraham and tells him to leave his birthplace on the long walk to freedom towards the Land of Israel.
But why Abraham? What was so special about him? Why did he merit to be the father of a nation?

The Midrash Rabbah brings an interesting answer to this question: Avraham saw the chaos in the world and asked “can it be that there is no one guiding the world?”

Judaism begins in dissonance. It begins with questions, with confusion.

We—Israel’s citizens and Jews around the world—are riven with cognitive dissonance as to how such a tragedy could have happened.

And yet, it is precisely through our anger and confusion that the divine-human interaction takes place. God’s response provides the strength for the individual to continue despite the destruction they have witnessed. It provides him with resilience amongst the pain and grief.

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This week's Thought to Ponder is by Yael Shahar, a member of our Think Tank and our Writer's Guild. May we see better days ahead!

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This coming Shabbat we will read Parashat Noah. Our sages see in this parashah the beginning of human legislation.

To see exactly what happens when a society is built on lawlessness, we need look no farther than Gaza. Honor killings, abuse of women and g**s, and the persecution of Christians and other minorities are not just tolerated there, but actively encouraged by the Hamas regime. From sanctifying violence as a means to rid the Middle East of Jews, Hamas has moved to sanctifying violence for its own sake.

Once the market for violence has been created, one must continue to produce the product or go bankrupt. If one group is no longer providing the level of violence for which they have built a “market”, other—even more radical—groups will step in to fill the void. And so we see with last night’s tragic “own goal” by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in which a rocket fired at Israel fell on a local hospital, killing innocents.

This is the state of society that our Torah warns us against. Ironically, the Hebrew term is חָמָֽס – hamas – meaning violent lawlessness. Hamas, in both senses of the word, is the antithesis of what the Torah asks of us. This applies in times of war as well as in times of peace.

The war now facing the State of Israel poses the greatest challenge that a modern state ever has to face, and that is to hold on to high moral standards in horrific circumstances – the challenge of not becoming the very thing that we are fighting against.

I have no doubt whatsoever that we will rise to the challenge!

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