How do people KNOW things? Last night we saw my favorite opera, “The Medium,”  where the fake medium may have had a real communication from beyond.  And I could not help but compare the extreme opinions I heard about submitting to God’s plan  (like the holocaust happened because of the jewish ‘enlightenment’) and some of the crazy news about Israel as racist.  And I keep thinking that the whole idea of knowing, knowing truth, is so crazy.  You know what you can experience.  That’s it.   I don’t see racism here – i see the way Arabs and Jews in Israel are increasingly dependent upon each other and increasingly becoming friends and helping each other.  I see the people in Gaza suffering under Hamas – not getting any of the benefit of the billions of dollars funnelled through hamas, whose entire purpose is to destroy Israel. 

But I see only a corner of my reality.  How do I know?

I once asked my rebbe in the middle of a lesson what if we are spending all this time studying torah and there is no God.  He thought long and hard and finally answered, “Where there is a God or not, a Jew has to study Torah.”  The fact that he didn’t slap me over the face for that kind of question has only recently came to me as a shock.  But maybe whether you know or not, you have to act on the basis of some kind of knowledge….