I am presently in Israel speaking and doing all I can to impart a message of faith and chizuk (strength) to our people. I am visiting the bereaved families of those who were killed in the recent Har Nof synagogue massacre as well as the wounded survivors of that attack.
B’ezrat Hashem my regular column will return next week.
In the meantime, as I wrote last week, words of prayer are our language as Jews. Painfully, though, we have not been using it. So let us seriously commit ourselves – without delay – to heartfelt prayer, to Torah, to acts of chesed, and to joyous celebration of the third meal of Shabbos, which – because we eat it neither to satisfy our physical hunger nor to glory in our material achievements but to celebrate our spiritual attainments – is symbolic of the Messianic period, the birth pangs of which are upon us.