Chabad of Malibu

B"H This week, the Torah presents us with something unexpected: a law about going to war. You’d assume the Torah would only concern itself with lofty spiritual ideals or ritual, not the gritty details of survival in a battlefield. Yet it insists: even in war, when you are far from home, you must carry with you not just a sword, but a shovel. Why? To ensure the purity of your camp. To literally cover what needs to be buried. On the surface, it seems trivial, why does something so small get so much attention, when lives hang in the balance? Indeed, this is the point. The Torah is revealing something radical: the environment you create reflects who you are. Your dignity isn’t found in your furniture, your status, or even in your victories. It is found in the choices you make when no one is watching, in the quiet details, in the discipline to respect the space you occupy. This is about consciousness. Carrying a weapon without a shovel makes you powerful but not whole. The shovel is t...

 B"H Adopted from the Arizal on Parshas Ki Teitze "When you will go out to war against your enemies, and Hashem your Lord will deliver them into your hand, and you will capture its captivity… (Deut. 21:10-13) When you go out to war against your enemies, you’re not simply entering a battlefield outside of yourself, this was is also addressing when you step into the confrontation with your own inner world. In this war, the enemies are not people, they are the forces within you that pull you away from alignment: the addictions, the defensive patterns, the attachments, the voices of fear. The Torah passage is describing a process that mirrors the human journey of shadow work. You come face-to-face with the parts of yourself that have been held captive. These are the pieces of your soul that were once innocent but have been dressed in the garments of survival: distorted beliefs, unhealthy coping strategies, and ways of living that disconnect you from your authenticity. The “beauti...

  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...

B”H Av 5 5758 Today is the Yahrtzeit of the holy Arizal. It’s amazing how Divine Providence works. Over 27 years ago, a man (and now dear friend)  named Jim Damavandi walked through our doors for the very first time. We were still finding our way as a shul in Malibu, trying to figure out how to serve this beautiful, unique community. And then Jim showed up. Jim and I at the Wall in 2003 Jim wasn’t your typical shul guy. He came with, well, let’s just say, a mission, even if he didn’t call it that. If you were around in those days, you remember. He’d listen to my sermon… then call out, “Corruption!” (Yes, really!:-) ), and follow it up by quoting… the Arizal. Now, who was the Arizal? Rabbi Yitzchak Luria was more than just a brilliant rabbi, he was a spiritual revolutionary. He opened up the deepest, most mystical teachings of Torah. He showed us the inner wiring of reality itself, the Divine blueprint of heaven and earth. But let’s be honest: these teachings are no walk in the ...

B"H The ancient wisdom of Proverbs whispers to us: “For a Mitzvah is a candle, the Torah is light; and ethical admonishment the path of life.” These words invite us into a deep, spacious mystery, one that calls us to pause and ponder: What is this “path of life”? Is it distinct from the Torah and its mitzvot, or is it their very flowering within us? And why this tender imagery—a Mitzvah as a candle, Torah as light? Let us sit with these questions, allowing them to unfold in the quiet of our hearts. In the Jewish tradition, the sages offer us a lens: a Mitzvah, they say, is like a single candle, its flame flickering, offering protection for a moment. A Mitzvah is a sacred act, a gesture of love that lights up the darkness but fades in time. Torah, however, is light itself—boundless, eternal, like the dawn breaking over the horizon, illuminating all things forever. The Shaloh, a mystical voice, speaks of Torah as a great bonfire, fierce and uncontained, while the sages evoke the ste...

  B"H “And you shall know today, and take it to heart, that the Lord (Havayah) is G‑d (E-lohim)… there is nothing else.” This is not merely a statement of theology. It is a summons to awakening. It is the realization that what we have called “God,” in all our names and metaphors, is not divided. The infinite and the finite, the revealed and the hidden, the thunder and the silence—are all held together in one Living Unity. We often imagine the Divine as operating in two different modes: one radiant and merciful, endlessly pouring out light (Havayah); the other just and restrained, placing boundaries and laws (E-lohim). And yet, the mystics declare: these two are not two. They are One. Not one after the other, not one balancing the other—but One within the Other. One being the Other. The boundless Love that creates the world is the same Love that shapes it. The same Love that withdraws to make space is the Love that fills that space with meaning. Limitation, then, is not the absence...