Rabbi Shimon Kessin
Every generation in our history is covered in blood. Why?That is the question Rabbi Shimon Kessin sets out to answer. The usual answer - that we suffer for our sins - cannot be the whole truth, and he shows why in a few sentences: the generation of King Achav sinned grievously with idolatry and suffered little, while other generations sinned far less and suffered far more. So something else is at work.His answer is that Hashem connected the mouth of the accusing angel to our own mouths. When Jews speak against one another, they hand the prosecution its evidence. When they guard their speech and stand up for one another, that prosecution has nothing to say. In the author’s presentation this is not a metaphor but a mechanism, built into creation, which places the lever of Jewish history in our own hands. It is also why the sin that destroyed the second Beis Hamikdash was sinas chinam, and why the third has not yet been built.Written in the two weeks after the expulsion from Gush Katif in 2005, when a large part of Israel’s population was in a palpable state of depression, this work was authored anonymously, lishma, and given away by the hundreds of thousands. It is arranged as a thirty day program. Each day is a short, self-contained reading, and the nineteen chapters move in three deliberate stages: why Lashon Hara carries consequences out of all proportion to its apparent severity, what the halachos actually are and how to keep them, and finally the power of prayer offered by one Jew for another.Part Two is the practical core - a working summary of the laws of Lashon Hara and Rechilus, including the situations in which speaking is permitted or even required, how to stop believing what you are told, and how to do teshuva for words already spoken. Part Three turns to the obligation to pray for Jews who are in danger, including those who know nothing of Torah, and argues that a community which does this is the most powerful Jewish community of all.The book closes with the Achdus Prayer in both English and Hebrew, and with a full apparatus of sources so that every claim can be checked against Chazal.Published BeSiyata Dishmaya by PowerJews.com. Get Inspired and Inspire Others.
