In the previous issue of The Shoemaker Report, in the article entitled The Primordial Criminal Mastermind we explored the essence of the sin of Adam ha-Rishon [אדם הראשון, Primordial Man] and discovered that he relied on his “superior” intellectual prowess to try to out-think Hashem. Instead of obeying the explicit command not to eat from...
Even though we have written about the sin of Adam ha-Rishon [אדם הראשון, Primordial Man] previously (see “Daat, Daat Everywhere and not a Drop of Truth” and “The Sweetness of Silence”), we are revisiting this topic because without a solid understanding of where we came from and what happened at the beginning of our history,...
Something came up in my life recently that caused me to ask the following: Have I ever done anything in my life that was done for someone else without any ulterior motives on my part, without even a trace of self-interest? After searching and searching, I found nothing. I couldn’t recall a single instance when...
In a recent article How Transparent is Your Aspaklaria? we explained how מידה כנגד מידה [middah k’neged middah] is a gift from the Holy One blessed be He. If we pay attention, especially to the ‘negative’ or unpleasant things that happen to us, we should be able to understand the deficiencies, shortcomings and weaknesses in...
Can you remember when tears flowed freely on Tisha b’Av or on Yom Kippur? If not, have you ever heard stories of how even just one or two generations ago almost every Jew could cry and cry on such days? To paraphrase the lyrics of an iconic Pete Seeger song, “Where have all the tears...
Upon seeing a skull floating on the water, Hillel said (Pirkei Avot 2:7): עַל דַּאֲטֵפְתְּ אַטְפוּךְ וְסוֹף מְטִיפַיִךְ יְטוּפוּן (Because you drowned others, they drowned you, and eventually those that drowned you will be drowned). He was teaching with a real-life example what the prophet Yeshaya said many years earlier (Yeshaya 3:11): אוֹי לְרָשָׁע רָע...
Describing the time in the future when Mashiach will reign, David ha-Melech expressed a beautiful thought simply and eloquently (Tehillim 149:3): יְהַלְלוּ שְׁמוֹ בְמָחוֹל בְּתֹף וְכִנּוֹר יְזַמְּרוּ־לוֹ (Let them praise His name with a circle-dance; with tambourine and with lyre let them make music to Him). Let us understand why dancing is the primary expression...
All of us are familiar with the three basic dimensions of space: length, width and height. Some of us are even aware that in some way or another (incomprehensible to most of us) Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity treats time as a dimension on par with the three dimensions of space being unified with...
In the 1980s, a team of neuroscientists at the University of California, San Francisco led by Benjamin Libet published numerous papers interpreted by many, including Libet himself, as demonstrating that our brains initiate conscious voluntary movements as well as the will to move before we are consciously aware of the will to move. As Libet...
Fake ice cream. Fake money. Fake friends. Fake free markets. Fake free speech. Fake education. Fake elections. Fake news. Even fake spirituality. Everything seems fake these days Why is this so? What happened to the real stuff? The truth is that what we are seeing in our world today is merely the revelation of the...
We live in a very noisy world. To a certain extent, we have become programmed to eschew silence. Silence has become an enemy of sorts. The moment we might come to experience a moment of silence, we grab for our cell phones, turn on a computer, listen to music, etc. The bottom line is that...
William Ernest Henley was an English poet, writer, critic and editor who lived from 1849-1903. At the age of 16, he had his left leg amputated due to complications arising from tuberculosis of the bone. When he was in his 20s, he developed major problems with his other leg and was told by the doctors...