"Shabbat Shalom from Bangkok"

If I were to ask you—what is your favorite mitzvah? Which one speaks to you, uplifts you, comes naturally?

And then, on the other hand, which mitzvah do you find most challenging?

Take a quiet moment with that question. 

Over the years I have had the privilege of learning with young men and preparing them for their barmitzvah. I posed this very question to them. Most of my students responded that their favorite mitzvah is helping others. One of them chose wearing tzitzit.

And what about the most difficult? 

Their answers were very relatable. The struggle is mostly with refraining from eating non-kosher food items that are readily available. 

They know what Hashem asks of them, and mostly they do refrain from eating blatantly unkosher food, but they admitted that it requires effort.

There is something deeply moving about this natural tendency to want to help others.

Even at such a young age, the instinct to help another comes naturally and brings genuine joy. 

One does not need to be a wealthy person or have vast fortunes in order to feel the beauty of giving. Even children, with limited abilities and resources, experience the profound satisfaction of helping someone else according to their level.

That desire to help others, I believe, never diminishes. But as life becomes more complex, so too does the implementation.

Part of my life’s calling is to help people strengthen their relationship with Hashem, including guiding them in the mitzvah of tzedakah. 

The Torah speaks clearly: to give ten percent of one’s earnings, and even more beautifully, to aspire to twenty percent.

And yet, even those who feel deeply positive about giving can find it challenging when it comes to actual practice.

There is a debate about what is easier when it comes to tithing for tzedakah. Is it easier to give ten dollars out of a hundred, or one hundred thousand out of a million? 

I cannot say with certainty—but my strong sense is that those who train early, when the amounts are small, carry that strength with them as the numbers grow.

Let us return to the question we began with—your favorite mitzvah, and your most difficult one.

This was not merely an exercise. Each of these categories holds a unique and powerful quality.

When you perform a mitzvah that you love, you do so with joy, enthusiasm, and often with impressive attention to detail. There is something deeply precious about serving Hashem in that way. Joyful mitzvot are radiant—they elevate both the person and the moment.

But what about the mitzvah that feels difficult?

In a way they are even more special.

For the only reason you do it is because it is the will of Hashem. 

It may be that you do it (initially) without the same joy. You may even undergo some twinge of inner resistance, and yet, it precisely in that experience that something even deeper is revealed.

When a person fulfills a mitzvah that does not come naturally, solely because Hashem asked, that is a moment of profound connection. 

A connection not based on inspiration or excitement, but on faithful commitment. 

It is based not on passion and emotion, but on commitment and truth.

How do you know what is right?

To truly know what is objectively right, one must turn to the Torah, our eternal guide. And, when needed, seek the counsel of a teacher grounded in its wisdom.

When a person sets aside their own inclination and follows Hashem’s will not because it feels right, but because it is right, this creates a relationship with Hashem that is real, deep, and enduring.

As we approach Shavuot—the time when we recommit ourselves to the entire Torah—I would suggest something practical and personal.

Return to those two mitzvot you identified: the one you love, and the one you find challenging.

Strengthen your observance in them both.

Enhance the one you love—bring even more joy, more care, more beauty into its observance.

And with conviction and faith strengthen your commitment to the one that challenges you - because it is there that your deepest connection lies.

In doing so, you will hold both gifts: the joy of inspired mitzvot, and the depth of committed ones.

Wishing you a Chag Sameach and a Shabbat Shalom 

Rabbi Yosef Kantor

I think that this is a record-breaking week for Jewish life in Thailand.

On Sunday a Pidyon Haben – redeeming ceremony for first born son at thirty days old.

On Monday a Bar Mitzvah.

A Brit Milah on Tuesday.

The grand finale for the week was on Thursday night. A wedding (held in Israel) of two young Jews who were raised from infancy in Bangkok. Dvir and Danielle were students of ours since they were little children, and today they represent the future of our community. It was a wonderful nachas to officiate at their wedding.

In one week, the gamut of Jewish lifecycle events.

Mazel Tov!

It feels like the Thailand Jewish community has come of age.

The USA embassy met with me last week to ask about antisemitism in Thailand. 

I shared with them the way it used to be.

My beard caught people’s attention.

People giggled and called out ‘Bin Laden’ when they saw me in the street after the 9/11 attacks on the twin tower. 

Kids laughingly pointed at me at shopping malls in December calling me ‘Santa’. 

Most of the local population was clueless about the Jewish religion. 

You cannot have antisemitism if no one knows what Jews are.

Today that is not the case.

I would not be telling the truth if I didn’t say that the growth and deepening of Jewish life in Thailand is taking place against a backdrop of increasing anti-semitism (for PC purposes presented as anti-Israelism).

Thank G-d the Royal Thai Government is doing an admirable job in upholding the safety and security of the Jewish community in Thailand. We are grateful and thankful to live in this truly amazing kingdom. 

The fomenting of bigotry and scapegoating seems to be sponsored by agitators from the headquarters of antisemitism, Iran and its proxies. 

In today’s uber-connected world, there are no borders. One can be sitting on one side of the world and creating hatred on the other side of the world. And with google translate and ChatGPT it's not hard to import and adapt hatred from one language and culture to another.

If it is that way with negativity, how much more so when it comes to positivity.

You can push a few buttons and do kindness and charity in all four corners of the earth. You can study and teach Torah across all borders.

We don’t like antisemitism. That is an understatement. We detest it and decry it and do anything in our power to rid the world of any form of racism and intolerance. 

On the other hand, we don’t back down, get disillusioned or G-d forbid run away from our Judaism. 

On the contrary. G-d blessed the Jews in Egypt, ‘as much as they afflicted them, so they multiplied and exceeded all expectations’.

In contemporary times we too are witnessing a strengthening and deepening of Jewish resurgence far outpacing the hateful voices, vibes and violent actions.

We are not strangers to being singled out for hate.

The Haggadah says that in every generation there are those who wish to annihilate us. Hashem saves us from their hands.

We are still here. G-d has promised that we will be here forever. For we are G-d’s people who He loves like a young child – unconditionally. 

As I stood under the Chupa in the holy land of Israel wedding two Jewish souls, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and shed tears of joy. Dvir and Danielle are children of families with combined histories that survived the Holocaust, the perils of living in Islamic regions and more recently the strong pull of assimilation so pervasive in our open societies.

Standing under the open sky, enveloped under the traditional canopy of the Chupa, dedicating themselves to build a Jewish home together, the eternity of the Jewish People was highlighted and celebrated.

I am epically optimistic about our future. 

In Israel of course. And anywhere that we create pockets of Jewish life – spiritual Israels.

The hate? 

Yes, it is still here. We thought it was stamped out. But like a bushfire that was almost extinguished only to start raging again from some lingering smoldering trees, so it is with the fires of antisemitism. They were receding and dying down when whoosh, in the most irrational way they flare up. 

Our unique role in the world started when G-d gave us the Torah 3338 years ago at Mount Sinai.

Ironically, this was also the same time that the hatred toward the Jewish people intensified. 

Who even noticed though. 

Imagine you were just named the administrator of all the diamond mines in the world, do you think you would not have opposers? 

It wouldn’t matter what you did. Even if you intended to let everyone have their fair share of the business there would be those who could not bear to see you receive this special appointment. 

Would you turn away or repeal this epic gift because there are some jealous disgruntled haters?

The gift we received by Almighty G-d conferring His great and holy name on to us makes anything and everything else immaterial and of no real consequence. 

This is why as painfully and agonizingly torturous our history has been, Jews have continued to be Jewish and follow Hashem’s path of Torah and Mitzvot, defiantly and more importantly joyfully 

As we come to the anniversary of our becoming a people by receiving the Torah at Sinai it is a great time to reflect on what a gift it is to be a Jew.

There is something else we should take to heart when facing so many voices who seek to delegitimize us.

Our strength is in our unity. We have differences to be sure, but we are ONE people at our core.

At that time, when G-d gave us the Torah just after liberating us from Egypt, there was one main preparation that the Jewish people made which made them ready and worthy to receive the Torah.

The Jewish people camped at the foot of Mt. Sinai ‘like one man with one heart’.

That pristine unity was the final act of preparation that sealed the deal and positioned the Jewish people to receive the Torah a few days later.

In our times too. 

As we prepare to receive the Torah on Shavuot this coming Friday, let us prepare by being united.

Feeling united and acting united. 

Get together with fellow Jews who you may not usually associate with.

Reach out to say hi to fellow Jews you may have had a falling out with.

And meditate on this simple metaphor: one twig can be easily broken. Multiple twigs bundled tightly together cannot be broken.

AM YISRAEL CHAI. 

One people connected to the One G-d who gave us His One (and only) Torah.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yosef Kantor

Computers are so prevalent that it’s hard to remember life before them. And for many younger people it’s impossible to imagine life without them.

Recently, when I asked a bar mitzvah student who looked tired, ‘how did you sleep last night’ he looked down at his watch and pressed a button. He proceeded to give me a rundown. He was in bed for nine hours. Of those hours there was some better sleep, some less quality sleep, his heart rate was steady, all of these myriad details measured by the small watch he wears. Incredible.

I took a stroll down memory lane to my bar mitzvah. When I celebrated my bar mitzvah (besides for the Sifrei Kodesh – holy books that I received and still use to this day), the most memorable tech gift I got was a calculator watch. Tiny buttons, a small screen, hard to use, but a full-on calculator. It was the coolest thing you could imagine.

Once down memory lane I reminisced about our arrival to Thailand in 1993. When we first got to Thailand Mrs Myra Borisute bought us three very memorable and expensive items. A top quality, full-size American oven and stovetop for Nechama. A mobile phone ‘so we can reach you when needed, a rabbi needs to be reachable’ and a computer for making flyers and writing newsletters. 

With these ‘tools’ Nechama and I were able to start our work with full power.

Nechama’s oven and stove produced challas, cakes, chicken soups and all of the other goodies that builds family and communal life.

I started to get my ‘feet wet’ in (pre-internet) computer usage and started to use it for community programing. 

For example, one of the ways I used my computer was as follows. When Pesach came, it was up to me to figure out how many kg’s of matzah, how many bottles of wine, how many chickens and how many dishes we needed to order.

For those of you who remember the olden days, there was pen, paper, calculator and using your mind to figure things out.

Now that I was becoming computer literate, I was introduced to the Windows program called Excel. 

The beauty and power of the spreadsheet was that once I put in the formula, I just needed to update the amount of people, and all those calculations were computed automatically.

A rabbi can use spreadsheets for community events planning. 

A chef can use it for menu planning.

A business can use it for earning forecasts. 

And an army general could use it for soldier deployment planning.

If a general were planning how many soldiers would be needed to drive the invading enemy away from your borders the formula may look something like this.

If the enemy has one hundred soldiers positioned to attack; what is the number of soldiers needed to drive away the enemy.

Once that number is established, the greater the number of enemy forces, the larger the army one needs to assemble to vanquish the enemy.

In this week’s parsha the Torah says that if the people of Israel study Torah and listens and fulfils G-d’s commandments they will be blessed with peace. 

If someone tries to upset that peace, if an enemy rises against them, five Israelite soldiers will be sufficient to repel one hundred enemy troops.

That sounds like a miraculous and blessed formula.

Five ‘good guys’ are stronger than twenty ‘bad guys’.

If you take that blessed supernatural Torah formula and put that into excel as the basis of computing security need you wouldn’t be wrong if you called for five hundred troops when faced with an enemy buildup of ten thousand troops. 

If five are needed to repel one hundred, five hundred are needed to drive off ten thousand.

One hundred divided by twenty is five.

Then thousand divided by twenty is five hundred.

It’s uneven but G-d will make it work.

This is an incredibly miraculous promise in terms of the power of Jewish soldiers when armed with G-d’s blessing.

It gets much better than that.

The continuation of the verse throws this computation totally off the predicable mathematic charts.

The full verse in the Torah (Vayikra-Leviticus 26:8) reads: ‘five of your soldiers will drive away one hundred of the enemies. One hundred of your soldiers will drive away ten thousand of the enemy forces’. 

This does not compute using a mathematical formula.

The mathematical based spreadsheet would compute: five can be victorious over one hundred, one hundred can be victorious over two thousand. 

Our Sages introduce a concept that is powerful and empowering.

‘The combined power when there are ‘many’ who follow in G-d’s path yields incomparably more blessing than the power when there are but a ‘few’ who do G-d’s bidding’.

When five are jointly committed to G-d’s path, they can miraculously be victorious over one hundred enemies.

One hundred who are jointly serving G-d, are assured victory of ten thousand opponents.

This is Divine ‘compounded’ Mathematics.

This is awesomely uplifting.

Think about it.

You may say to yourself, what is the big deal if I don’t join the ranks of my fellow Jews in doing the mitzvah available to me. 

Of course, I don’t want to harm anyone, certainly not my Jewish brethren. I want to be community minded and do what is best for my people, you think to yourself. 

But sometimes one can get dispirited and think ‘how much difference will my one lone action make’?

One more or one less, how important can that be to the collective?

First of all, the power of one deed cannot be underestimated. As the Rambam summed it up as if the world is totally balanced and your one good deed can tip the scale. 

And then there is this weeks Torah portion that injects yet more power to the deeds of each and every one of us. 

The Torah teaches us that our one good deed is not just one more deed. When added to the mitzvahs that others are doing, it equals compounded and collective power that is much greater than the ‘one’ that was added. 

This reinforces in the most powerful way possible the critical importance and the immense power inherent in Jewish unity.

The divine miraculous power that Jewish unity injects into our collective journey is our ‘secret weapon’.

During these turbulent and unpredictable times, when our people are under attack in countries that one never would have imagined, we need to access and ‘power up’ our invincible weapon.

Jewish unity.

It is easy to call on ‘them’, the government, the ‘leaders’ to foster peace and unity. One can choose to point fingers and blame this one or that one for debilitating disunity among our people.

The real truth is that it needs to be a grassroots effort. You and I have the power to ‘keep our eyes on the prize’ and highlight, generate and promote our unity.

Not just that we are all equally hated by our sworn enemies.  It is true that in the eyes of an antisemite we are all one group. But that is a depressing way to think of Jewish unity.

Rather we ought to think about the things that bring us together and unite us in a positive way.

Our joint past. 

We all stood together at Mount Sinai and received the Torah united ‘as one person with one heart’.

In the present, although at the surface it may not always be obvious, at our core, we all love each other and each and every Jew, we all love the Torah and we all love G-d!

And G-d loves us all equally and unconditionally. 

And we ought to project the way it will look in the glorious Messianic future that we await.

The Prophet says in the name of Hashem, that in the future Redemption, NO JEW WILL BE LEFT BEHIND.

We, each and every one of us will be redeemed by Mashiach as a united people. 

Let us strengthen our resolve to act in a unified way, and add – even if they are small steps that we start with - in mitzvahs of loving kindness between each other and strengthening our connection to G-d.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yosef Kantor