Light a Candle for Gilad and Remember Our Shared Humanity

This Friday night, the Hebrew date of the 29th of Sivan, will mark five years since the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted by the terrorist organization Hamas. It has been five years since anyone besides Hamas, not his family, government or even international aid organizations such as the Red Cross have seen him. It is a travesty of justice that Hamas has not allowed their prisoner to be examined by, at the very least, competent medical professionals, to assess his health and well being.

To mark the five year anniversary of his capture, Rabbi Avi Weiss has called upon all Jews to light an extra candle for Gilad on Friday afternoon prior to sunset. The hope is that all these candles as Rabbi Weiss describes will help "dispel the darkness of Hamas' terrorism."

My family will be lighting a candle for Gilad this Friday afternoon but before we do it is important to reflect further on what we are doing. In a world where casualties from wars across the globe reach staggering numbers and where close to 4,000 crimes were committed for every 100,000 people in the United States in 2009, what does it mean to raise world consciousness about the fate of a lone individual? The heartbreaking stories of suffering and despair cry out from every corner of our planet, why focus in on the misfortune of one person?

The Shulchan Aruch (Y"D 251:3) lays out an order of prioritization for the giving of charity. The vast majority of us have limited funds to distribute to the needy and therefore it becomes essential to understand where to begin. First one begins with their own needs, if you are not properly taken care of you will not be able to help anyone else then the Shulchan Aruch expands to one's family, moving next to one's neighborhood then one's city and ending with the rest of the world. While this intuitively makes sense, the idea that underlies this halacha is critical in understanding what we will be doing when we light a candle for Gilad this coming Friday.

True love and care for others is possible when I truly love and care for myself. When I have a positive self-image then I can incorporate other people into my orbit of concern and love. Thus a healthy respect for one's self is essential. The people that one is most intimately connected to is one's family. A person is born into their immediate family and later in life many will make the choice to commit themselves to a single person and by doing create an entirely new branch of that family. These are people that you know better than any other people on the planet. Their faces, voices and personalities are etched into your mind in a way that no one else is.

The combination of a healthy self-respect and self-care with a genuine love and concern for one's family creates the foundation for which sustainable and long-lasting giving can be accomplished. The roots need to be firmly grounded before a tall and confident tree can emerge. It is after these roots of self and family are solidly established and continue to be nurtured that one's network of care reaches out beyond to one's community and on from there.

In other words, I can most care for the world when I care for myself and my family. My love and concern needs to be directed and focused so that when the cries of people throughout the globe reach my ears, I can hear it and respond accordingly. When my family lights a candle for Gilad Shalit this Friday we will be reaching out our hearts and souls to a single individual who is suffering and in tremendous pain. We will zoom in on his face, his name and his story out of the thousands and thousands of other stories of misfortune that cry out from all over the world. All of the numbers and the statistics of casualties of war and casualties of crime have names and identities, they have stories and personalities, they are unique lives, people created in the image of God. By lighting a small flame for one of these numbers, transforming him from a statistic to a person, we can begin to feel the humanity of all the others. Lighting a candle for Gilad this Friday is to affirm our shared humanity, which begins at home and reaches out from there.

I hope you will join us in lighting a candle for Gilad.

Marital Commitment and Social Media

By now all the syndicated news outlets are talking about a certain New York Congressman and his online behavior. They are debating his political future, his marriage and all other sorts of sundry details. In my opinion, the most interesting element of this story is the medium by which his actions were committed. As Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker pointed out this scandal is "the first to have been conducted entirely via e-mail, and online social media." 

Is an affair an affair when it is conducted entirely online? Is it cheating when a spouse engages in intimate communications with another person but never meets them in person? If this situation transpired with a Congressman then it is most likely occurring in the lives of other people as well, although their stories do not make the evening news.


It seems to me that while this is one area where traditional Judaism gets criticized, it is also the specific teachings from this aspect of Judaism that can contribute much to the conversation. The Talmudic sages understood that acts of marital indiscretion do not, for the most part, manifest spontaneously but rather are the product of emotional attachment and lustful yearning. The power of these hirhurei aveirah - passing thoughts of indiscretion, to build and gather until a person finds themselves in a scenario they would later regret is tremendous.

In fact, the rabbis argued that these thoughts can be even worse than the act itself (Yoma 29a). The reason being that these thoughts of fantasy and lust can be so utterly overpowering that they end up consuming the life of a person thereby disrupting their marital harmony and could even extend into other areas of their personal and professional life.

It is because of these concerns that Jewish tradition has taken a very cautious stance towards casual relationships between people. One should be thoughtful about the sort of friend one chooses as inevitably friends come to influence and shape each other. This caution is even more strongly adhered to when it comes to relationships between people who have the potential to be attracted to each other. While some in contemporary society may find this caution to be overdoing it, like whether one can shake the hand of a person of the opposite gender (see for example Igrot Moshe Orach Chayim 1:113 and Even HaEzer 1:56) the values that form the foundation for these practices are values that ought to be well heeded in our modern era.

The wisdom from Jewish tradition tells us that a relationship is a relationship regardless of whether or not a physical encounter occurred. Indeed, by the time one meets in person, the relationship is most likely well established and the damage to one's moral life is well under way. It behooves us to inject an element of caution, perhaps even some formality, into our societal norms, even in the arena of Twitter and Facebook.

Life Lessons From My Newborn Son

My newborn son will be two months old soon and on reflecting on the past two months I would like to share some of the things I have learned from him:

• Remember to take a nap: Most things worth doing will be done better when you are well rested so don't be afraid to take a mid-afternoon nap.
• Express yourself: Upset about something? Don't feel the need to hide it and keep it in. Let those who care about you know and together you can find a solution.
• Light fixtures are amazing: Pay attention to the small things in life. Let the ordinary amaze you and feel the wonder of our magnificent world. Even a door knob can be captivating.
• Go outside: Nothing can be as refreshing as a crisp breeze or as beautiful as the rustling of the leaves. Listen to the birds chirp and watch the ants on their march.
• Live fully in the world: Grab something. Immerse yourself in the tactile world. Feel the contours of the world around you. Don't live only in the visual and auditory to the exclusion of the tactile.