Heaven on Earth

The Land of Israel is heaven on earth.  Every Jew is חלק אלוה ממעל, a part of God from above (Job 31:2). So does it not stand to reason that the greater the number of Jews that surround you, the closer to God above you will be? And where you are surrounded by millions of Jews, can each moment be anything other than heavenly? The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote: “Hell is other people.” Had he visited the Land of Israel, he would have been compelled to retract that statement.

I have a neighbor who learned ten languages by reading the first chapters of the Torah in those languages. We all know the words written in the Torah's opening chapters, more or less, and if we forget some of them, we only need to open the account of creation in the Book of Genesis and there they are. My neighbor travels to the Galilee twice a week due to his job and he increases his foreign language comprehension by passing his time at tunein.com during these trips. Through this site, at no charge, you can access radio stations in every country. Radio vocabulary is repetitive and so you will soon be proficient in the language heard by listeners in the country of your choice.

The Yidden in the desert complained:  מי יתן ... בארץ מצרים בשבתנו על סיר הבשר באכלנו לחם לשובע  "If only we were in Mitzrayim, where we sat by the pot of meat, and we ate bread to satiation." (Shemot 16:3) The Chasam Sofer zt'l explains that they were reminiscing how it was in Mitzrayim, when they sat alongside the non-Jews who were cooking a pot of meat. They smelled it, they desired it, but they passed the test, and they didn’t eat it because it wasn't kosher. They only ate the bread/matzah, which was kosher. That is the good memory they wished they could have again, because they understood the value of tests in avodas Hashem. (Torah Wellsprings, Beha'alotecha, 5782)

A yungerman came to Reb Shlomo Zalman with a shalom bayis problem. He told Reb Shlomo Zalman that as a bachur, he departed from the traditional Yerushalmi garb (where even bachurim wear a streimel), choosing to wear European-style clothing. But when he began shidduchim, he understood that he won’t find a regular shidduch dressed as he did, so he put back on the Yerushalmi clothes. Nevertheless, he continued to go without a streimel. He got married, lived a Jewish life in Yerushalayim, but still didn’t wear a streimel. One day, he came home with a $2,000 shtreimel. He thought his wife would be pleased, but she wasn’t. She said, “I am used to you without a shtreimel. I don’t need the shtreimel.” “But I paid two thousand dollars for it!” Two thousand dollars was a lot of money for them, and he was upset that he spent so much on a  streimel that he didn’t need. Their shalom bayis began to waver over the shtreimel, and this is the reason he came to Reb Shlomo Zalman Auerbach zt’l for ad...