Articles

Question: A person is an essential member of a United States governmental committee to resolve the current economic crisis.Of concern, Is whether the crisis is deemed a form of Pikuach Nefesh(a danger to life) This classification grants one permission to violate the Shabbat in order to extricate oneself (or a group of people)from this dangerous status.
Response:The following actual case took place.

People familiar with the Sabbath laws know that the Torah does not list the activities prohibited on the Sabbath. However, rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 49a, state that the Torah hints at the activities that are banned.
These hints are based on two rabbinical teachings that are applied by the rabbis at times: (1) When facts or incidents are placed near one another in the Bible, one can derive a lesson from the juxtaposition. (2) A halakhah can be learned from such things as counting the number of times an item appears in the Torah.
Thus the rabbis stated:

Question: The Talmud contends that "from the day that the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed, the gates of prayer were locked...but the gates of tears were never sealed". (Bava Metzia 59a-Berakhot 32b) The implication is that tears have an impact upon prayers. Or better yet, tearful prayers are always in order. How are tearful prayers more significant or potent than simple prayers without tears?

Many Jews in our day, like many of our brethren of other tribes, are seeking
to mend the fractures that divide us from ourselves and from others, and to
find ways to heal the wounds that afflict us only six decades after the
Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel. Amid these efforts, an idealistic,
scholarly nineteenth-century rabbi from Livorno seems,
to some, to provide a beacon of hope and humanity.