Chabad of Malibu

  B"H Elul: Returning to the Beloved Within Translated freely from a lesson by Rabbi Asher Farkash There are moments when the energy in the air shifts. The month of Elul is one of those times. The Kabbalists tell us, in Elul the atmosphere is no longer the same ,  it becomes charged with the frequency of return. It becomes saturated with the energy of Elul. Elul is not just a time on the calendar. It is a state of consciousness. The Sages gave us a key: The acronym of Ani l’dodi v’dodi li ,  “I am to my Beloved, and my Beloved is to me.” is Elul. What they are really saying is: this month is not about fear, or shame, or punishment. This month is about intimacy. About the rediscovery of love. When you begin to examine your life, when you do a soul accounting, your first reflex is often shame. You see where you fell short. You see the moments when you betrayed yourself. You see the gap between who you were and who you wanted to be. And normally, that realization hurts. It ...

B"H A few days ago, I crossed paths with an old Malibu friend. He looked at me with a heaviness in his eyes and asked, “Rabbi… how can you possibly stand to see the pictures of the genocide?” I took a breath. I looked back at him and said, “Really? You too? Let me ask you, how can you be so certain of what you believe, when your information is coming from a machine engineered for one purpose: to bypass your critical thinking, to hijack your empathy, to make good people like you rage at a false story ? A story that is nothing more than a modern blood libel against our people.” The Rebbe often warned: keep politics out of conversation. The Rebbe cautioned how political discussions can easily be a corridor that leads directly into “the depths of evil.” But this, what we are seeing now, is not politics. This is the primal war between truth and illusion. Between light and shadow. And yet, here we are, watching countless of our own brothers and sisters drink the poison without questio...