Mendel Bluming | Blogger

The ‘bless you’ response to a sneeze was enacted by one of the popes during the bubonic plague. So it definitely has a non-Jewish whiff about it. But long before that, Jews blessed each other upon sneezing. The Talmud records that in the earlier generations, people didn't get sick before they died. They simply sneezed and their souls left their bodies. So it was customary to wish a sneezer "To Life!" for fear that their sneeze was a herald of death. Things changed in the times of our forefather Jacob. He prayed that one should rather get sick some time before dying, in order to have a little warning and time to prepare for leaving this world. His request was granted, and so sneezing alone was no longer a sure sign of impending death. But it still could be a symptom of illness, so the custom arose to wish a sneezer good health - Assuta in Aramaic, Tzu gezunt in Yiddish, or Labriyut in Hebrew. Interestingly, one source says that after being blessed with health, the sn...

The new pictures from the James Webb telescope are nothing short of incredible. We understand so little of the vast universe before us. With all the unprecedented scientific and medical knowledge and even with this incredible ability to see crisp pictures from a telescope placed 1 million miles away, we are still left in the dark. Do we know why there are 925,000 species of insects on earth? Why these billions of stars and galaxies exist in the vast universe? For me the lesson is humility. I know and understand so little of the vast universe before us and therefore for me to become conceited or arrogant is so out of place. Mendel (Menachem) Bluming

Nope. It was never meant to be. In the Torah in Numbers chapter 19, the Torah says, “this is the statute of the Torah” and then it teaches about the red heifer. When the Torah refers to a statute it is speaking of a mitzvah that has no logical understanding. Rather than saying this is the statute of the red heifer, as the Torah does about Passover: this is the statute of Passover, instead it says this is the statute of the Torah. This teaches us that the entire Torah is predicated on its being a statute, a law that cannot be logically understood. We are encouraged and commanded to engage our minds in the study of Torah so that logic too can be a part of the process but yet the Torah itself never becomes logical. Even laws that make a lot of sense have details that defy logic. So what is the Torah? Pure Godliness. Yes, sometimes it is enclosed in emotion or in logic but it always remains way beyond our understanding. The opportunity to study Torah is an invitation to connect with ...

I have heard many people say that if G-d would only do a miracle they would believe. After all in the Torah we read of many miracles that G-d did on a regular basis. Why don't we see these miracles these days? The Lubavitcher Rebbe once addressed a similar question from a skeptic. If you look at his response with an open mind, it could change your perspective. In a letter from 1956, the Rebbe wrote the following. This  to someone who said that if G-d would show me a miracle I would then believe: “Take a good look at your own past, and you will recognize that you have already witnessed miracles and wonders. Do you really want to test G-d? Do you really want to be brought again into a place of mortal danger and have to be saved? You know very well the trauma that is experienced by being in danger, because you have been there. It is just the evil inclination’s voice inside you trying to come up with an excuse to avoid observing G-d's commandments.” May we all notice the mi...