David Cardozo Academy

As we enter the three weeks of mourning for the catastrophes that led us into exile, I offer a prayer for our current reality.

PRAYER FOR OUR SOLDIERS
Nathan Lopes Cardozo

Lord of the Universe
We, the People of Israel
Come to You in humility
And pray for your help

Once more, our soldiers are asked to defend our
People and
Our Holy Land
Against cruel enemies

We ask You to have mercy on them and
Help them to watch over our people
With clean hands
And with a heart filled with mercy

Let our people have the strength to
Remain in good spirits
To live in unity and walk in Your ways,
The ways of Justice and Truth.

Bring home our sisters, brothers, and children
who have been taken hostage.
Do not leave them any longer in the hands of our barbaric enemies.
Let us find the hiding places of these evil people and bring them to justice.

Return all the citizens in the North and the South to their homes
Give them the strength to rebuild their communities
And their lives
Give peace of mind to their families.

Remove the evil spirit from our enemies
Let them realize the wickedness of their actions
Stop the manipulation of their children
Who are taught hate for us in their schoolbooks

O God,
We are the children of Avraham, your servant,
Who prayed for the evil people of Sedom
With the hope that they repent and live a decent life
So, we beg you
Let our enemies repent
Force them to understand that
We wish only to live in peace with
All our neighbors

O Lord,
You have commanded us to live in a land
That is little more
Than an island in a sea of chaos,

You have commanded us to send Your holy Word
to all the corners of the world
But we are surrounded by nations
That deny us the right to live in even the smallest corner of the world
Who wish only our deaths

Give the Arab nations leaders
Who are men of justice, who care for their people
Who do not wish to bring their own brothers to despair
And unbearable pain
With the intention of harming us.

Now, after thousands of years exile, tortures, pogroms,
Expulsions and Holocausts
We have finally found our way back to our small homeland
Which You promised to our forefathers
But once more our dreams of peace
Have gone up in smoke.

We wish for our Arab neighbors
To live their own lives.
We were prepared to make sacrifices
For their welfare as no other people ever did,
Offering them land, peace, prosperity.
But once more we pay the price for our belief in peace.
Once more we feel betrayed by our hopes.

Oh Lord,
Help us to counter the evil intentions
Of those who distort the truth
And to portray us throughout the world as evil
In order to deny Your existence and Your ethical demands.

We hate war as no other nation,
We abhor the need to bear weapons
We shudder at the sound of our own artillery
The roar of warplanes and tanks.

We are the people of the Book
The Book which demands holiness,
Kindness and integrity
Our heroes are not the generals or the marshals
But our prophets and our sages
Men of righteousness

God, our soldiers have been fighting
for months and months and many of them are exhausted
Give them the strength to continue to fight for our nation
Until peace will be accomplished

Let us sanctify Your name in life,
Not in death.
Heal all our soldiers
Who have been wounded
And bring comfort to the families of those we have lost.

Give us the chance once more to teach Your ways
To all those who seek You.
Let the blessing which You gave to Avraham come true,
"And through you all the families of the earth will be blessed"
For this is our hope.

As Pesach approaches, there is something very important that we must understand. It is that the wicked son in the Haggada is in fact the wisest and most honest of the four sons. Why? Because he is the one who is asking the most important question of all!

The Wisdom of the Wicked Son - David Cardozo Academy The wicked son in the Haggada is in fact the wisest of the four sons. Why? Because he is the one who is asking the most important question of all!

God has made two unconditional promises to the Jewish people: one that we are eternal, that we will not disappear; and the second that He will ultimately redeem us. Unfortunately, He has also warned us that a certain kind of irrational hatred will be our lot throughout the generations.

Parashat Tetzaveh - Amalek and Modern Antisemitism - David Cardozo Academy God has made two unconditional promises to the Jewish people. But he has also warned us that we will be hated by the nations throughout the generations.

This week's Thought to Ponder is by Yael Shahar, a member of our Think Tank and our Writer's Guild. May we see better days ahead!

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This coming Shabbat we will read Parashat Noah. Our sages see in this parashah the beginning of human legislation.

To see exactly what happens when a society is built on lawlessness, we need look no farther than Gaza. Honor killings, abuse of women and g**s, and the persecution of Christians and other minorities are not just tolerated there, but actively encouraged by the Hamas regime. From sanctifying violence as a means to rid the Middle East of Jews, Hamas has moved to sanctifying violence for its own sake.

Once the market for violence has been created, one must continue to produce the product or go bankrupt. If one group is no longer providing the level of violence for which they have built a “market”, other—even more radical—groups will step in to fill the void. And so we see with last night’s tragic “own goal” by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in which a rocket fired at Israel fell on a local hospital, killing innocents.

This is the state of society that our Torah warns us against. Ironically, the Hebrew term is חָמָֽס – hamas – meaning violent lawlessness. Hamas, in both senses of the word, is the antithesis of what the Torah asks of us. This applies in times of war as well as in times of peace.

The war now facing the State of Israel poses the greatest challenge that a modern state ever has to face, and that is to hold on to high moral standards in horrific circumstances – the challenge of not becoming the very thing that we are fighting against.

I have no doubt whatsoever that we will rise to the challenge!

The Gaza War and the Challenges of Statehood - David Cardozo Academy The war now facing the State of Israel requires us to hold on to the high moral standards that have sustained us since Israel’s founding.