This little boy dressed up as a kohen gadol (high priest) for Purim. Instead of dressing up and pretending to be a ghost or demon, he dressed up like the spiritual leader of the Jewish people. This is a much better message to send our children!

Halloween is upon us and many Jews are probably asking, can I or should I (and my children) celebrate Halloween?  I remember being a kid and celebrating Halloween and loving dressing up and collecting pillowcases full of candy by running from house to house in our neighborhood.  Could there be any harm in this fun pasttime?

Actually, yes, there could be.  There are actually many, many problems with celebrating Halloween.  Here are some of them:

1. Halloween is a pagan holiday.  Halloween comes from the Celtic holiday of Samhain, still celebrated by some pagans in the world.  It is an actively practiced pagan holiday, just as X-mas and Easter are actively celebrated Christian holidays.  Judaism teaches that we cannot participate in something that is part of a pagan ritual or celebration, for any reason.  And this cannot be justified by saying that Halloween as it is celebrated today is not the same as the traditional celebration – it is actually very similar.  The ancient Celts believed that on October 31st, the worlds of the living and the dead would mix.  They believed that by dressing up as evil spirits, they could fool the real evil spirits.  They also lit bonfires that attracted bats.  And the tradition of going door-to-door collecting goodies was a way to merge Samhain with the November 1st holiday of Hallowmas, where beggars went door-to-door collecting food in exchange for praying for the dead on the November 2nd All Saint’s Day.  And although this was a Christian holiday, not a Celtic one, it still isn’t ok for Jews to observe it. It isn’t Jewish!
2. Halloween teaches children the wrong morals and values.  Halloween is a holiday about getting.  It’s a holiday where children go door-to-door demanding candies.  If no “treat” is given, then a “trick” could be played on the poor house owner.  This is still done today, with children and teens wreaking havoc in neighborhoods by playing “tricks” such as covering a house in toilet paper or throwing eggs at it.  To teach your children to demand things of others is contrary to Jewish values, as is the act of threatening or seeking vengeance on someone who doesn’t give you what you want.  Furthermore, Halloween focuses on dressing up like “scary” things, like demons, ghosts, or zombies.  None of these are things we should want our children to emulate.  We should never glorify scaring others and we should never glorify anything contrary to service to Hashem, such as demons.
3. We simply don’t need Halloween – we have Purim instead! Purim, a holiday occurring in or around the month of March/April, is a holiday where we celebrate the Jewish people’s deliverance from the hand of the evil Haman who wanted to destroy us.  We celebrate by dressing up in costumes as heroes and by having parties.  We take our children to visit others, to bring them gifts of food and to cheer them up and make them happy.  We make donations of money to the poor.  And there is plenty of wine for the adults.  A good time is always had by all.  In contrast to Halloween, Purim is a holiday focused on giving.  We give gifts of money, food, and happiness to others and expect nothing in return.  We use Purim as an opportunity to make peace with old enemies by giving them gifts (peace offerings, if you will) without any fear of embarrassment.  We can use Purim to teach our children good values and to allow them to emulate their favorite heros, such as Mordechai or Esther (the heroes of the Purim story), or to dress up as princes and princesses or doctors and nurses.  We do not need Halloween as an excuse to have a costume party when we have our own party planned in just a few months’ time.

This little girl chose to dress up as a princess for Purim. From her smile, you can tell she is really enjoying herself. She doesn't need Halloween - she has Purim instead!

If you are worried that your child might not understand why he/she cannot participate in Halloween when all their neighbors and non-Jewish friends are, you can use it as an opportunity to talk to them.  You can explain to them what it means to be a leader.  Help them learn to stand up against peer pressure.  (After all, if a bag of candy is all the persuasion it takes to succumb to peer pressure now, imagine what will happen when their peers are trying alcohol and drugs! It is much better to talk to them now.)  Teach your children to be leaders and show them the reasons why they should love their Judaism and soon you will find they are proud not to be celebrating holidays like Halloween, X-mas, and Easter!

Rabbi Ben meets a tzaddik in the streets of Jerusalem, Israel, where good role models are everywhere.

There are places in the world where you can expect to find good role models.  Places like Israel, where holy tzaddikim (righteous people) walk the streets all the time.  But then there are other places where you do not expect to find good role models.  There are places like Los Angeles and Miami, where body and celebrity worship is all the rage; there are places like India, where the struggle just to survive is so fierce that it becomes each man for himself.

The truth is, that in every place we can choose to find good role models and to become good role models ourselves.  And the truth is, in most cases, we don’t have to look so hard to find ordinary heroes in our everyday lives.  In Buenos Aires, Argentina, you find synagogues holding Friday night kiddush so that poor people in the community will be able to have a kosher Shabbat dinner without any shame or embarrassment.  In India, you can find a kind local willing to give you a ride to the train station so you don’t have to walk or pay for a taxi.  In Australia, if you fall down, people rush to help you up.  These are everyday people going about their business, yet doing kind deeds for others with no fanfare or fuss.

But there was a time when there truly were no good role models.  In the time of Noach, there really were no good role models.  Noach had nobody to look up to.  So what did he do? He looked straight to G-d, the ultimate role model.  And from that, he learned to be a good role model himself.  G-d taught him compassion and sensitivity.  We see that it took Noach 120 years to build his ark.  This is not because he was lazy or incompetent.  This was because G-d, in His infinite mercy, was waiting, hoping that someone would see what Noach was up to, ask what he was doing, hear the warnings, and repent.  But Nineveh this was not.  Still, when nobody repented and the floods came, Noach was reminded by G-d to take his sons onto the ark with him, and then his wife and daughters-in-law, to teach that the men and women would have to stay separated for the duration of the journey.  Noach was a role model: he could not enjoy pleasure with his spouse while the world was being destroyed.  Every single one of G-d’s creatures, however off the Torah path, is precious.

Rebbetzin Devorah Eisenbach of the Aish HaTorah Jewel Program in Jerusalem, Israel is a true role model. Compare this smiling, holy woman with the likes of Britney Spears and Ke$ha and you will see she is worlds above them. Yet for some reason, many people, even religious Jews, find it hard today to tell who the true role models are.

Sometimes it’s tempting to be swept up in the modern culture of adoring exactly the wrong role models.  In America, we glorify singers and stars like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, whose behavior is, from a Torah perspective, truly disgusting.  In Australia, the unofficial national anthem is Waltzing Matilda, a song about a man who steals a sheep and then commits suicide: two sad and terrible Torah violations.  And we don’t need to look very far in the Arab world to find idolized villains, like Ahmadinejad.  It’s so easy to be swept up in the fad, in the fashion of admiring the wrong thing. Yet, we must always remember not to admire and try to be like the wrong people.  If we cannot find a tzaddik around us to emulate, then we must follow Noach’s example and look directly to G-d himself.

Even if we are in the most remote parts of the world, we have to remember that it is our job as Jews to be a light unto the nations.  It is our job to be the role models.  We must become like Noach, we must become like Avraham.   Even in a place where there are no good role models for us, we must still be good role models for others.

Shabbat shalom.

If Noah were building an ark today he’d probably have some modern devices like GPS and satellites. The boat would be made mostly of metal and have an engine.

Here is a guy in the Netherlands who’s built a replica of Noah’s ark. I’d like to go there someday and see this ark. Click here to read the full story.

I think the greatest lesson to learn from Noah is that he spent 120 years building the ark. People thought he was crazy yet he kept on doing what he knew was the right thing to do and kept building for 120 years until the floods came. 120 years is the maximum life span of modern man. This means that we should be prepared to spend our entire life doing something we know is right regardless of if the world says we’re crazy.

Life is not a trial like on this movie they were filming in Rajasthan India. They kept shooting the same scenes over until they got it right. With life we only have one chance to get it right.

‘Today is my birthday,’ or better I should say ‘today is my Jewish (Hebrew) birthday.’ As Jewish people we follow the lunar calendar and all the dates of our festivals are set according to this. The same is true of our birthdays.

Yom Kippur this year was on October 8^th, next year Yom Kippur will be on September 26th. Why the change? Why can’t we just have Yom Kippur on October 8^th every year?

The reason is that all holidays need to be on a specific date because this is when their energy is aligned in the spiritual realms. Having Yom Kippur on the wrong day would be like showing up to the courthouse for your case on a Sunday morning and there is no one there. Simply, it is the wrong day.

A birthday is a very special time. On our birthdays, our ‘Mazal,’ which in some ways is our Zodiac, is aligned and we can receive great energies and blessings for the entire year. I grew up only observing my Hebrew birthday which followed the lunar calendar.

According to the Torah it is actually forbidden for a Jew to count the secular months according to the solar calendar. We can name them but it is best not to count them. Thus when I fill out forms that want a date, instead of writing in a number in the box I’ll write the three letter abbreviation for the month.

Now back to the Jewish Hebrew birthday. A birthday from A Jewish point of view is not a time for a big party. It is a serious time to reflect on the past year and to make resolutions for the coming year. Just like we do on Yom Kippur. What is special is that, on our birthday we are given extra power to achieve the goals we set for the year, if we set them on this specific day. Our power extends beyond the self. On our birthday we should bless people with what they need and they should bless us.

Last night I had a small ‘birthday farbrengen.’ A ‘farbrengen’ is a Yiddish word. It is a Chassidic concept where a group of friends come together to make a few  l’chaims and to inspire one another. A birthday farbrengen has all that a normal farbrengen would have, like singing, sharing inspirational stories, and words of wisdom, and in addition, everyone goes around the table and blesses the birthday person. The birthday person then in return goes around the table one by one and gives a blessing to each individual.

To find out your Hebrew birthday you can use this calendar here.

Life is not a dress rehearsal, it’s the real thing! When shooting a movie you can do the scene over until you get it right. In life we only get one chance to get it right.

As we travel, Rabbi Ben and I experience miracles all the time.  One of my favorites is how whenever we arrive in a new place on Friday, we immediately find the best hotel and price.  Any other day of the week, we may have to spend hours checking dozens of places, but on Friday, erev Shabbat, we always get the best and nicest deal in the first place we stop.  The first few times it happened, we couldn’t believe it and still wasted several hours hunting around, only to return to that first spot.  But now whenever we arrive somewhere erev Shabbat, I walk into the very first nice place I see and bargain a good deal and I know we are set and I can begin to prepare for the Sabbath.

But you don’t have to travel to see incredible and unusual miracles.  They happen all the time, every day.  Sometimes they are hidden miracles, like swerving the car in time to avoid a collision – maybe without even noticing we’ve done it! Sometimes they are miracles we take for granted, like our eyesight, hearing, and limbs.  Yet sometimes they are overt miracles.  Over Sukkot I heard a story about just one of these miracles.

Aliza, one of the congregants at Newtown Synagogue in Sydney, Australia, has been telling me about her journey in exploring Judaism.  One of her biggest obstacles to increasing her observance and her connection to G-d has been her job.  Her boss would not let her off on Saturdays or most holidays.  But Aliza felt that keeping the Sabbath, being one of the most important commandments in the Torah, was important to her.  On Yom Kippur, she sat down on the floor at work and read the Torah and read the commandment to keep the Sabbath… and made up her mind to do so.

Later that week, she approached her boss and told her boss that she wants Saturdays off, and that she is happy to work Sundays instead.  Her boss refused.  So Aliza quit. She quit! Right there, on the spot.  What amazing courage!  Hashem should bless her so much in the merit of this amazing thing she did just out of her love for Hashem!  And He should bless us all that we should ALL have such courage!

So Aliza left work and called her mother.  She told her mother what she’d done and only then realized that she now had no job.  Uh oh.

On her way home from work, before coming to Newtown Synagogue for Friday night Shabbat services, she got a phone call.  A previous employer she’d had was calling to offer her a job.  Not only did it include better pay, but the hours were Monday-Friday 9-5 or 10-6, giving her the flexibility to take care of her daughter and mother, AND allowing her to keep Shabbat completely!

There is only one explanation for this miraculous timing, a matter of mere hours: G-D.  G-d rewarded Aliza’s faith, love, and courage by extending His hand to her and giving her a position even better than what she had had previously.  This is proof that G-d cares for us and is involved with each of our lives individually… And it is proof that, as Rabbi Ben has mentioned previously in one of his stories, that your parnossa, your livelihood, is determined on Rosh Hashana and sealed on Yom Kippur and that cannot be changed.  The income you are meant to having coming to you will come – and keeping the Shabbat will NEVER stand in the way of this.

Kol hakavod to Aliza! You can join her on her journey, read more about her, and offer her words of encouragement at her blog, It’s a Long Road.