Fair Lawn Jewish Day Camp completed another successful summer with over 300 campers and staff enjoying awesome activities and trips, Jewish pride and spirit and making friends and memories for life!
Now we prepare for the upcoming new year, Hebrew School, events, and celebrations of Jewish life.
Classes are filling up! Don't delay, register today!
Our Hebrew school offers learning and experiencing Jewish life in a
non-judgmental, interactive and warm environment. Hebrew reading, Jewish history, traditions, mitzvot, Israel and holidays come alive with creative and hands on lessons. First day of Hebrew school is Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022.
YOUR NEW COMMUNITY CALENDAR HAS BEEN SENT TO PRINT
A BISSELE HUMOR
A traveler was once stopped by a highway robber who demanded his money-bag at gunpoint. The traveler cried out, "Don't shoot! I'll gladly give you my money.”
"But I will ask a favor of you. If I come home empty handed, my wife will never believe that I was robbed, and will accuse me of having squandered our money on gambling or liquor, and she will beat me mercilessly. Please do me the favor of firing several bullets through my hat, so I can prove to her that I was held up."
The robber saw no reason not to comply. He took the money-bag and then shot the man’s hat several times.
"Thank you so much," the traveler said. "But you don't know my wife. She will say I punctured the hat and that these were not bullet holes at all. Here, take my coat and shoot several bullets through it at close range, leaving the powder marks. That will convince her for sure."
Again the robber complied and shot through the coat several times. When the traveler saw that the last pull of the trigger hit an empty chamber and that the bullets had all been used up, he promptly pounced on the robber, knocking him to the ground, retrieved his money-bag and fled.
WEEKLY eTORAH
Man does not live by bread alone. A famous line, but what does it mean?
The verse comes from this week’s Torah reading, and is a reference to the miraculous manna, which fell from heaven daily during the Jewish people’s sojourn in the wilderness. The conclusion of the verse is that “rather, by the utterance of G‑d’s mouth does man live.” Thus, it is reminding us about the true source of human sustenance.
Contrary to popular belief, it is neither our earthly toil, nor the sweat of our brow, nor all those conferences, meetings and sales seminars that ensure our success. The reality is that it is G‑d who sustains us and looks after us, in the very same way as our ancestors trekking through the desert were totally dependent on Him for their daily bread. Wealth is a G‑dly gift. At the end of the day, it is not our business acumen alone that provides our daily bread, but the blessings from Above which endow our efforts with success.
Ask anyone in sales how often their best-laid plans and pitches have come to naught, and then, out of the blue, a big order comes in with little or no effort. Of course, it’s not the rule, and we must be prepared to put in effort if we are to succeed. But when it does happen, it reminds us that there are higher forces, beyond our control, at work.
But there’s another meaning to this verse as well. Man does not live by bread alone. The human spirit is such that we crave more than bread. Human beings are never satisfied with money or materialism alone.
Money is important, but we cannot live by money exclusively. For satisfaction to be lasting, it must be more than material; it must be spiritual. We need more than bread and money; we need stimulation and a sense of meaningful achievement. We need to know that our lives have purpose, and that somehow we have made a difference. We want to be assured that our work is productive and will have lasting value.
They tell the story of a prisoner in a Russian labor camp whose job it was to turn a heavy wheel attached to a wall. For twenty-five years the prisoner worked at his backbreaking labor. He assumed that this wheel must be attached to a mill on the other side of the wall; perhaps he was milling grain, or pumping water that irrigated many fields. In his mind’s eye he saw the plentiful crops and the sacks of milled grain feeding thousands of people. After twenty-five years of hard labor, when he was about to be released, the prisoner asked to be shown the apparatus behind the prison wall. There was nothing there! The wheel was just a wheel—all his “work” had served no useful purpose. The man collapsed in a dead faint, absolutely devastated. His life’s work had been in vain.
We have a deep-seated need to know that our life’s work is purposeful, physically and spiritually. When we understand that every good deed is attached to a complex spiritual apparatus, that our every action meshes with a systematic structure of cosmic significance, then our lives become endowed with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
We desperately need to know that, in some way, our work is helping others—that we are making a contribution to society beyond our own selfish needs. Then, we live. Then we are happy.
Man does not live by bread alone. We simply cannot.
