Rabbi Master Stuart Rosenberg's | Spirituality | Judaism | Torah | Self Defense | Sinmoo Hapkido| Philadelphia | New Jersey » Spirituality

The Rambo Rabbis Interview with Stuart Rosenberg

Master Rosenberg — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:37:38 +0000

The Rambo Rabbis Interview with Stuart Rosenberg, member of the Tzedek Task Force on Counter Terrorism Air Date: December 3, 2009 @8pm eastern Also Available On Demand @ www.crimeprevention101.com

Crime Prevention 101

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Guard yourself & Caring for your body!

Master Rosenberg — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:07:35 +0000

© AZAMRA INSTITUTE 5766 – 2006

Guard yourself!
The mitzva of caring for body and soul

Our sages teach us that the true purpose for which we enter this world is to come closer to God through study of the Torah and fulfillment of its commandments. Through this our souls are elevated, attaining good in this world and forever.

The soul can only enter the physical world in the garb of the physical body. The body is the soul’s instrument to attain its purpose in this world. Only through the body can we carry out the practical mitzvos of the Torah, which relate to things of this world.

In order to survive in the physical world we are obliged to provide the body with what it needs, such as food and drink. Enjoyment of the material world has a legitimate place in our service of God when it assists us in linking the physical with the spiritual. But when satisfaction of our material inclinations goes beyond the proper bounds, this can cause damage to the soul and the body. The soul’s mission is to take control of these inclinations, directing the body to its true purpose.

To ensure that the body will be a fitting instrument with which to perform the mitzvos, God has commanded us to protect and guard our bodies. : “Guard yourself and guard your soul very carefully” (Deuteronomy 4:9-10).

This commandment is so important that our rabbis taught that it is part of the commandment not to forget the Giving of the Torah: “Guard yourself and guard your soul very much lest you forget. the day when you stood before HaShem Your God at Horev” (Deuteronomy 4:9-10). The classic commentator Kli Yakar explains: “‘Guard yourself’ means taking care of the body.”

Bodily health is the foundation for keeping all the commandments of the Torah since in most cases they are bound up with physical action of some kind. When the body is unfit and unhealthy, this detracts from proper fulfillment of the commandments.

In the words of Rambam (Maimonides): “Bodily health and wellbeing are part of the path to God, for it is impossible to understand or have any knowledge of the Creator when one is sick. Therefore one must avoid anything that may harm the body and one must cultivate healthful habits” (Hilchos De’os 4:1).

Man’s use of the world for his own needs should be circumscribed by the limits imposed by God’s Will and should not include anything forbidden by God. It should be motivated by the need to best maintain his health and preserve his life, and not merely to satisfy his physical urges and superfluous desires. One’s motivation in maintaining his body should furthermore be so that the soul should be able to use it to serve its Creator, without being hampered by the body’s weakness and incapability. When man makes use of the world in this manner, this itself becomes an act of perfection, and through it one can attain the same virtue as in keeping the other commandments. Indeed, one of the commandments requires that we keep our bodies fit so that we can serve God, and that we derive our needs from the environment to achieve this goal. In this manner, we elevate ourselves even through such activities. The world itself is also elevated, since it is then also helping man to serve God.

– Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Derech Hashem 1:4:7.

Our health is in our hands

“Everything is in the hands of heaven except chills and fevers (which sometimes come though negligence)”. (Babylonian Talmud, Kesuvos 30a and Rashi.)

The time, place and circumstances in which each soul is born into this world are decreed by God. Each person has his or her own unique body and constitution. Not everyone is born with the gift of a healthy body. When we are born with this precious gift, we must be grateful to God for His kindness and do everything in our power to cherish and protect it.

Our health and the length and quality of our lives are to a large extent in our own hands. The body grows older every day and must eventually die. Yet proper attention to its needs and avoidance of harmful habits can increase the length and quality of our lives, saving us from many illnesses, accidents and other troubles that can strike through neglect and abuse.

“The wise person has his eyes in his head” (Koheles 2:14) — “He sees what is ahead” (Avot 2:9). Good health is a precious gift, and the wise person does everything necessary to protect it from possible hazards by taking proper care of the body.

On the other hand, “The fool looses everything he is given” (Chagiga 4a). Our sages teach us that when a doctor heals the sick, the doctor is performing the mitzva of returning lost property: “And you shall return it to him” (Deuteronomy 22:2) – “This refers to the loss of the person’s body, i.e. his health” (Sanhedrin 73a; see Rambam’s Commentary on Mishneh Nedarim 4:4).

It is better to guard your health than to have to try to get it back if God forbid you loose it.

How do we guard our health?

In much of the wider world, health is valued not only as a condition of productivity but also as one of the main keys to the enhancement and prolongation of life. Not only are enormous effort and resources poured into the promotion of health by governments, the public health and medical establishments, in education and the media. There is also a vast, lucrative health economy that spans everything from breakfast cereals and sports shoes to exotic herbal remedies and computerized fitness equipment. In practice, many people’s pursuit of health goes no further than swallowing a few vitamins pills or being passive sports spectators.

The Jewish goal in the pursuit of health and our path towards it are qualitatively different. For the Jew, health is valued primarily as the essential condition for serving God through following the commandments.

Keeping the commandments is itself a guarantee against illness, as promised to the Jewish People directly after leaving Egypt and crossing the Red Sea. This was at Marah, their first camp in the wilderness, even before the Giving of the Torah at Sinai: “There He laid down for him a statute and a judgment. And He said, If you will surely listen to the voice of HaShem your God and do what is right in His eyes and attend to His commandments and guard all His statutes, all the diseases that I have put upon the Egyptians, I will not put upon you, for I HaShem am your Healer” (Exodus 15:26).

Serving God draws His blessing into our very food and drink, protecting our health: “And you shall serve Hashem your God, and He will bless your bread and your water, and I will remove illness from within you” (Exodus 23:25).

We keep the Torah not only because it is the means to protect our health but more essentially because this is what God has commanded us. Yet the true Torah life is the proven golden path to health of soul and body as God promises.

“Guard yourself and guard your soul very much” (Deuteronomy 4:9). “The repetition of the word ‘guard’ alludes to the positive and negative commandments, which protect the limbs and channels which make up the mortal house [the body]. For our rabbis stated (Zohar, Vayishlach 170b) that the 248 positive commandments correspond to the 248 limbs of the body, while the 365 prohibitions correspond to the connecting sinews, arteries and channels” (Kli Yakar on Deuteronomy 4:9).

Our part

Of all the 613 mitzvos that make up the pathway to a healthy life, the mitzvah of guarding bodily health has special importance since this is where we have to put in effort to properly maintain and protect the instrument with which we perform all the other mitzvos. The body is physical and functions according to the natural laws God has fixed. Our part is to provide the body with everything necessary for it to function at its best in accordance with its nature.

As stated by Rambam: “A person must avoid anything that may harm the body, and must cultivate healthy habits” (Hilchos Deos 4:1). In other words, the mitzvah of self-care has two sides: avoiding all risks to the body and acquiring good health habits.

In the words of the Shulchan Aruch, the binding Code of Jewish Law: “It is a positive duty to take all due precautions and avoid anything that may endanger life, as it is written: ‘Take care of yourself, and guard your soul’. The sages prohibited many things that involve a risk to life. Anyone who violates such prohibitions, saying ‘I’m only putting myself at risk – what business is that of anybody else?’ or ‘I’m not particular about such things’ deserves a lashing, while those who are careful about such things will be blessed” (Choshen Mishpat 427, 8-10).

The details of healthy living and care of the body are not in most cases the subject of specific laws. Yet a wealth of wisdom and many different kinds of advice and guidance can be found scattered in passages throughout the Bible, Talmud, Midrash and other rabbinic literature. Outstanding Torah sages knew the importance of healthcare, and saw fit to provide practical guidance in their writings.

Rambam, a giant both in Torah and medicine, devoted an entire chapter at the beginning of the Mishneh Torah, his comprehensive compendium of Jewish law, to detailed guidance on proper diet, cleanliness, exercise, sleep and much more (Hilchos Deos Chapter 4). Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, the Concise Code of Jewish Law, also devotes a whole chapter to the subject (Chapter 32).

The enormous changes in the world in recent generations have caused drastic changes in our whole way of life and even our physical natures and powers of endurance. In contemporary life we cannot always directly apply advice from the classic sources without guidance from present-day experts. Torah law lays down that we must rely on the opinion of expert doctors such as when having to break Shabbos for a dangerously ill person or eating on Yom Kippur. So too we must turn to present-day experts for practical advice about how to maintain health that is faithful to the Torah and applicable in our lives today. In the words of Kitzur Shulchan Aruch (32:14): “Every person needs to learn from doctors what are the best foods according to his particular constitution, place and time”.

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Tikkun Olam – repairing the world

Master Rosenberg — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:56:22 +0000

This is an interesting concept in Jewish mysticism called “Tikkun olam” (”world repair”) has come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice. The phrase has origins in classical rabbinic literature and in Lurianic kabbalah, a major strand of Jewish mysticism originating with the work of the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria.

The term “mipnei tikkun ha-olam” (perhaps best translated in this context as “in the interest of public policy”) is used in the Mishnah (the body of classical rabbinic teachings codified circa 200 C.E.). There, it refers to social policy legislation providing extra protection to those potentially at a disadvantage–governing, for example, just conditions for the writing of divorce decrees and for the freeing of slaves.

In reference to individual acts of repair, the phrase “tikkun olam” figures prominently in the Lurianic account of creation and its implications: God contracted the divine self to make room for creation. Divine light became contained in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. While most of the light returned to its divine source, some light attached itself to the broken shards. These shards constitute evil and are the basis for the material world; their trapped sparks of light give them power.

The first man, Adam, was intended to restore the divine sparks through mystical exercises, but his sin interfered. As a result, good and evil remained thoroughly mixed in the created world, and human souls (previously contained within Adam’s) also became imprisoned within the shards.

The “repair,” that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.

While contemporary activists also use the term “tikkun olam” to refer to acts of repair by human beings, they do not necessarily believe in or have a familiarity with the term’s cosmological associations. Their emphasis is on acts of social responsibility, not the larger realm of sacred acts–and on fixing, not undoing, the world as we know it.

The phrase “tikkun olam” was first used to refer to social action work in the 1950s. In subsequent decades, many other organizations and thinkers have used the term to refer to social action programs;tzedakah (charitable giving) and gemilut hasadim (acts of kindness); and progressive Jewish approaches to social issues. It eventually became re-associated with kabbalah, and thus for some with deeper theological meaning.

Thus, over time tikkun olam went from being part of the religious technology of medieval mystics to a standard part of the vocabulary of contemporary North American Jews. Its goal shifted from dissolving history to advancing it.But the phrase “tikkun olam” remains connected with human responsibility for fixing what is wrong with the world. It also appears to respond to a profound sense of deep rupture in the universe, which speaks as much to the post-Holocaust era as it did in the wake of the expulsion from Spain and other medieval Jewish disasters.

Contemporary usage of the phrase shares with the rabbinic concept of “mipnei tikkun ha-olam” a concern with public policy and societal change, and with the kabbalistic notion of “tikkun” the idea that the world is profoundly broken and can be fixed only by human activity.

However, except within traditionalist Hasidic communities, the use of “tikkun olam” rarely reflects the belief that acts outside the realm of social responsibility for example, making a blessing before eating effects a cosmic repair; that tikkun repairs the Divine self. Eating Kosher food repairs the world and elevates the fallen Divine sparks that fell and are embedded in certain permitted foods, so when a Jew eats he elevates the fallen divine sparks. Also doing certain mitzvot (commandments) described in the Torah with particular physical objects (lulav for example) effects similar elevations in the different aspects of the world, earth, plant, animal and human kingdoms.

Tikkun olam, once associated with a mystical approach to all mitzvot, now is most often used to refer to a specific category of mitzvot involving general work for the improvement of society—a usage perhaps closer to the term’s classical rabbinic origins than to its longstanding mystical connotations.

Some excerpts taken from: My Jewish Learning website

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Beautiful quote by Rav Kook

Master Rosenberg — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:02:53 +0000

Rav Kook was a great man, he was the first Chief Rabbi of Israel and was a hugh proponent of the Land, Spirituality and Health.

Rav Kook, the founder of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva said:
“-The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.

-They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.

-They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom. “

Arpilei Tohar p. 39

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Christian Jewish Security Trip to Israel

Master Rosenberg — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:40:14 +0000

Press Release

Attn: For Clergy, Lay People and Interested Martial Artists

Contact Person:

Rabbi Gary Moskowitz 917-916-4681 gavriael@aol.com

Christian Jewish Security Trip

to Israel

Rabbi Gary Moskowitz, president of the Tzedek Task Force on Counter Terrorism a not for profit organization is working diligently with Pastor Kenneth Pagano in planning the first Christian-Jewish Security Trip to Israel.

This will not be just another tourist trip to Israel. We will be meeting, observing and training with some of the top Israeli private and public security specialists to bring home a practical program in personal and community protection against would be terrorists. The tour will also serve to help strengthen the bonds of religious people from our two faiths for we have an immediate common interest facing an exigent threat from Muslim extremists.

The tour will include classes given daily by Rabbi Moskowitz, a counter terror expert and a former NYC police officer/trainer here as well as a former guest combat counter terror instructor for the Israeli anti-terror unit of the border police. Pastor Kenneth Pagano a former American marine who has been seen recently all over the American and international media including Fox TV, CNN, ABC etc will be also hosting this trip.

Our itinerary will include visiting with police, army and governmental officials who work on homeland security issues in Israel. Our group known as the “Chevra Shomrim” (Friendly Group of Guardians) will also visit settlements in the Yehuda and Shomron areas (known as the West Bank) to gain perspective on the security threat Israeli towns and communities face and how they respond. The tour will also serve as a spiritual strengthening for both groups in support of each other.

We are seeking to take at least 20 people initially and as many as 50 with the first training tour.

Some college or graduate credit may be granted for related academic studies.

Those completing the training tour will receive the initial security certification and will be part of our National Security Committee, which will meet regularly with the Department of Homeland Security’s Faith based initiatives Division. The tour will be 10 days and daily religious services will be available and the food will be kosher.

Typical day will include:

Morning Prayer and Fitness workout
Combat Shooting and Apprehension Classes
Hand – Hand and Hand to knife Combat Training
Daily visits to Police, Military, and private Training facilities
Meetings and Briefings with senior Israeli Officials
Daily interviews with Israel and International media
Trip to the Wingate Institute and visits to Settlements and their leadership
Security inspection at Israeli Schools, shopping centers and Houses of Worship

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Rabbi Master Stuart Rosenberg's | Spirituality | Judaism | Torah | Self Defense | Sinmoo Hapkido| Philadelphia | New Jersey » Spirituality

The Rambo Rabbis Interview with Stuart Rosenberg

The Rambo Rabbis Interview with Stuart Rosenberg, member of the Tzedek Task Force on Counter Terrorism *Air Date: December 3, 2009 @8pm eastern* Also Available On Demand @ www.crimeprevention101.com

Guard yourself & Caring for your body!

Guard yourself! The mitzva of caring for body and soul

Tikkun Olam – repairing the world

Beautiful quote by Rav Kook

Christian Jewish Security Trip to Israel

Press Release

The Rambo Rabbis Interview with Stuart Rosenberg, member of the Tzedek Task Force on Counter Terrorism Air Date: December 3, 2009 @8pm eastern Also Available On Demand @ www.crimeprevention101.com

Guard yourself!
The mitzva of caring for body and soul