The 12th Annual Roberto Kassin Dinner

-Honoring-

Sharon and Miriam Sharaby

Ronnie and Rebeca Steinberg

and

Steve Berkowitz

Tuesday, June 11th

6:30 in the Evening

L’Chaim Steakhouse and Asian Cuisine

If you would like to complete an AdCopy for this event, please e-mail LJonas@gmail.com or call (954) 989-2474.

*Catered by Gourmet Chef Shaike

Tuesday Night, May 14th 2012

Dinner: 8:30 pm

Classes begin: 10:15 pm

At The Aish Center

4010 North 46th Ave.

Hollywood, FL 33021

Cost: $25 Adults | $18 College Students

$12 Kids (up to age 12)

Registration for dinner is a MUST. Please RSVP by Thursday, May 9th.

Parshat Bamidbar

May 10/11, 2013 Sivan, 2 5773

This week’s purple sheet is in honour of Dror Kfir for his generosity and kindness. Visit his store Boss Connection at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

Shavuot – When We Were Young

Can we climb this mountain?

I don’t know
Higher now than ever before
I know we can make it if we take it slow
Let’s take it easy
Easy now
Watch it go

                              -The Killers

Shavuot, the holiday of the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, begins this coming Tuesday night. Unfortunately, despite its great importance, Shavuot has become the orphan of Jewish holidays. Chanukah, a relatively minor holiday, gets much more attention. How can you compete against what many perceive as the Jewish Christmas with all those great presents and parties? Pesach?… great family time. High Holidays?… have to go to synagogue and expunge those sins and get written in the book of life for another year. But Shavuot – that’s for the frummies, the real religious. Nothing too exciting about this holiday, no fun in the sun, I mean shade, of Sukkot here.

And this is sad, because there is probably no more important holiday when it comes to defining who we Jews are and what we have taught Mankind. After all, it was this document, this constitution that created most of the greatest concepts that have shaped, changed and altered world history. It is from our Torah where the world is first introduced to the idea that all humans are created in the image of God and hence have innate worth irrespective of their religion, creed or accident of birth. The king has no greater merit than the slave and all are equal in the eyes of God. “Love your neighbour as yourself” does not apply only to important people or those born into a higher class, but to every human on the face of the earth.

Peace on earth, universal education, liberty and freedom for all, do not murder, do not steal, take care of the orphan, widow and the less fortunate – all of these crucial notions that nations still grapple with, began in our Torah in an age when the world was a lot more barbaric than it is today.

But just as the holiday of Shavuot is forgotten by most of the Jewish people, so too the message of Shavuot is often lost. We forget how we got here, what our purpose is; we get caught up in the meaningless of daily activity and lose sight of why we are chosen as a nation. The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God laments, “Go and proclaim in the ear of Jerusalem as follows: Thus says the Lord, ‘I fondly recall the kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days, how you ran after Me in the desert, in a desolate land.’”

The Almighty misses those days when the Jewish people were freed from slavery, were about to build a future and ran after Him to a place without any creature comforts, completely uncertain of where they were heading, but only driven by a love and passion for the dreams and visions of a brighter future bound up in their purpose and destiny.

But then the slow insidious process of meaninglessness took over. We got comfortable. We forgot our dreams, our visions, our passion and our origins. We forget why we married, why we committed to one another. We got caught up with mortgage, car payments, rebates, figuring out which cable or smart phone is the best and the other thousands of details that distract us.

And our Jewish life gets reduced to issues like fretting about Trader Joe’s changed recipe of pareve chocolate chips, as was reported last year. People went on hoarding sprees and emptied shelves with the hope and prayer that having enough of the non-diary chocolate chips will make their chocolate-chip cookie eating experience after steak an eternal option. It will provide meaning and happiness as if this is the “it” that we have been searching for all our lives. Torah gets reduced to such issues making the front pages of newspapers, as if this is what being a Jew is all about today.

Shavuot is a bare bones holiday for a reason. It is about Torah, plain and simple, nothing more and nothing less. No Pesach cleaning to distract you, nor any specifics of how much matza to eat to fulfill the mitzvah and is the minimum obligation of wine 3.3 oz or 4?; no finding a flawless lulav and etrog; no perfect Chanukah gift; no getting to shul early so you get a good seat for Yom Kippur and “how dare this guy sit in my chair and I cannot believe this synagogue that I have donated so much money to gave me such a lousy seat”.

No none of this, just a return to the very essence of who and what we are, why we are here and what our greater obligation is to the world to make it a better place with the fundamental truths that we have given it. This is the purpose of Torah. This is why God brought us to Sinai.

Now go and study for the rest is mere commentary.

We’re burning down the highway skyline 

On the back of a hurricane  

That started turning 

When you were young 

When you were young

Rabbi Tzvi Nightingale

Aish South Florida

Tuesday Nights
Rabbi Salid of P.A.T.H
8:30 pm @ Aish Center

Wednesday Nights
Rabbi Botton – For Men & Women “Give me the reason! The why behind the mitzvot”
9:00 pm.  Please call Aish for location

Rabbi Yachnes
9:45 pm @ Aish Center

Thursday Nights
Rabbi Botton – For Men “Choshen Mishpat Business Laws: Become an arm chair Dayan”
8:00 pm @ Nahar Shalom/Aish North 3489 Griffin Road

Rabbi Singer
8:50 pm @ Aish Center