Who has not experienced this harrowing, helpless feeling in the course of his life? Who has not felt abandoned by G-d, aimlessly adrift in a hostile world?
Think back twenty, forty, sixty or eighty years, to the day that you learned how to walk. What you sensed but could not understand then, will tell you much about what you understand but cannot sense today.
Numbers 13:1-15:41 Week of June 25 - July 1 
In this week's Parshah there are spiritual spies, weeping Jews, Quixotic mountain scalers, consecrated dough, wrongly gathered sticks and rightly tied strings; there's also a bunch of grapes, a pomegranate and a fig, and various quantities of meal, wine and oil--plus what it all means according to mystics and sages from Moses' time to today.
The other morning, I woke up to discover a little truth. At least, it seemed like a truth to me, but I wanted to make sure. I figured a good philosopher could help me with that. The philosopher held the truth in his hands and shook his head. "Doesn’t feel like a truth to me," he said. I asked him why not. He explained how this little truth just doesn’t make any sense.
One day, a most unusual idea entered the mind of Moshe the textile merchant: Moshe become possessed by the desire to experience a revelation of Elijah the Prophet. Not that he was under the illusion that he was entitled to see the Prophet because of his wealth. So he undertook a series of fasts and other forms of self-deprivation. He also started to keep company with the pious people in the community, imitating their ways. But still Elijah did not show himself.
It was merely the expectation that I would see the Rebbe again. Or, to be more precise, that he would see me. I knew that I would, at some point in the future, stand fully exposed before him, his eyes piercing through my best "look good" to see who I really am.
And though I knew that he would love me in spite of what I did or didn't do to live up to his expectations, I wanted him to love me for what I did do to live up to his expectations.
The human psyche is home to two contrasting drives: a striving for freedom, and an impulse to submit to authority. Since both are fundamental to the Judaism's vision of human potential, and since the cultivation of one will presumably mean the suppression of the other, the question arises: which should be given priority over the other?Or, to otherwise state the question: in what sort of environment would the Torah prefer to see the Jew--as a member of a free society, or as the subject of an authoritarian regime?
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 Established more than 23 years ago by Rabbi Nachman Maidanchik, the Chabad Center at the airport does a brisk business providing Jewish travelers with literature, prayers for their way, Shabbat candles, tourist information and a chance to put on Tefillin and give to charity before they fly. 
Avot: Chapter Three Advanced Study: Despair Of The Spies The desire of the spies to rest secure in G-d's miraculous protection was a wish for the intensity of religious experience. Ultimately it was self-centered... Story: The Lambskin With his heart in his boots, Moshe set out for the castle, the lambskin folded under his arm. G-Dliness In A Clay Vessel Man in Heaven.
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