Rabbi Shaanan Gelman

Parshat Bereishit – 5780  Rabbi Shaanan Gelman Cleaning Up Well One of the most incredible individuals I have known, was Rabanit Avigail Rock z”tl.      I first met Avigail over 13 years ago when she and her husband, Rabbi Yehuda Rock joined the Boca Raton community Kollel.   Rabbi Rock, an outstanding and erudite Talmid chacham served as Rosh Kollel, and Avigail was the founding director of the women’s division of the Kollel. Her shiurim and lectures were widely attended, and she remained a frequent guest lecturer there and around the country long after they returned to their lives in the Gush.     You might remember her from several years ago, when she served as a Scholar in Residence at our shul.   She became a role model to Tziporah and me during the short window in which we overlapped at the Kollel.   Every interaction with her was a teaching opportunity, one which proved transformative and memorable for us.   I distinctly recall a story she shared during a somewhat casu

Shemini Atzeret-Simchat Torah - 5780 Snap Out of It ! Rabbi Shaanan Gelman and Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky On October 14, 1663, Commander of the Royal Navy, member of British Parliament and noted diarist Samuel Pepys visited Congregation Shaar HaShamayim, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of London. It is safe to say he was wholly unprepared for the sight he witnessed: But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this. As you might have guessed, the day he came to visit was Simchat Torah, and one can only imagine the mischief and hijinks he encountered. Perhaps it involved the tying of taleisim together, spraying the Chazzan with water during mashiv haruach and hiding the shoes of the