This past week's community email.

Parshas Shoftim Shalom, This past week, the two Rabbis, Eli and Yakov travelled up to Todos Santos and La Paz, where they spent time searching and connecting with Jews who are living there. Besides for discovering several handfuls of Jewish residents in both TS and La Paz, they also got to spend lots of time with each one. It was so exciting each time I received a phone call from them with more good news of another Jewish guy who was located and plugged in to his Jewish roots and heritage. Tonight, the Rabbis will grace our Shabbat meal with some interesting stories and experiences that they had this week. I'm excited and if you can make it to services tonight, I'm sure you'll thoroughly enjoy the stories and entertainment as well. *** In the news this week, I read about some fellow who is a suspected serial killer and was arrested several days ago, while he tried to board a flight to Tel Aviv. A murderer was trying to escape to Israel! How interesting that is. In this exact week's Torah portion we read about the Arei Miklat - the Cities of Refuge that we established around Israel, in order to protect mistaken murderers. If someone were to accidentally kill someone else, he would flee to any of these cities, where he would remain 'safe' from revenge of the victim's relatives. He would need to wait there until the Kohen Gadol - the sitting high Priest would pass away, and then he would be allowed to leave and live elsewhere. However if someone murdered somebody on purpose, then these cities would not keep him safe. The judges would determine judgement on his crime and it would be carried out, ignoring his citizenship in the City of Refuge. What a perfect week for someone to try and escape to Israel, his supposed City of Refuge... But thank G-d he was arrested in time. (I'm in no way advocating innocence. I'm merely pointing out the perfect timing to his attempted escape.) However the Torah is giving us all a timeless, incredible lesson. While we don't have a physical City of Refuge nowadays, we all have one located somewhere deep inside the Israel of our conscience. In the 'Holy land' of every soul, there is a City of safety against death. Sin is comparable to death. For every act of negativity, selfishness or evil, we defile the G-dly energies that fill up our world, it is thus comparable to a spiritual death. The lesson we can take from this portion of the Torah is especially pertinent during the month of Elul, where we take an accounting of our entire previous year, preparing for Rosh Hashana, the day of judgement. This month is therefore dedicated to repentance. We need to accept that while we may stumble in our journey to become closer to G-d, thus mistakenly encountering spiritual death, we always have a City of Refuge. We need to flee our physical constraints and travel to our City of Refuge, our spiritual, more refined psyche's... We need to head over to Synagogue, put on Tefillin one more time during the week, light Shabbat candles, begin another Torah class with the Rabbi and commit to another Mitzvah. It is our only guarantee to be safe against the spiritual death that surrounds us. With all the blessings, Shabbat Shalom, Benny