The heady scent of the leafy green schach wafted towards him as Reb Yisroel entered his succah, and he surveyed the scene before him with a satisfied smile. The festively decorated walls and rafters sparkled and shone, their colors contrasting sharply with the snow-white tablecloth on the long table.

From Our Archives

Opinion and Comment The Thoughts of our Heart by Mordecai Plaut "And for the sin that we committed before You in our heart's thoughts" (behirhur haleiv). One of the sins for which we beat our breasts on Yom Kippur is for having the wrong thoughts. If the wrong thoughts flit through our minds, we ask forgiveness from Hashem. We want our minds to be places whose contents are pure and holy all the time: 24/7.

Opinion and Comment Happiness Must Bring Unity by Mordecai Plaut Succos is known as zeman simchoseinu, the time of our happiness, but modern society, and certainly modern secular, non-Jewish society, has completely lost touch with what happiness is.

Feature Who Will Bring Us Tidings of Our Redemption and How Will We Know That It Has Truly Arrived? Prepared from divrei Torah of HaRav Yosef Sholom Eliashiv, by Rav Avrohom Tzvi Yisraelsohn The mishnah in Yoma (3:1) tells us that every morning the deputy Cohen used to tell the cohanim to climb to a high vantage point and look at the sky to see whether the time had arrived for the shechitah of the daily morning tomid. When a Cohen declared that it the time had come because it was light, he would ask him whether the entire eastern sky had become light, until Chevron. The mishnah explains that this question was necessary because once, the moon's light before morning had been very bright, and they mistakenly thought the sky had become light. They then slaughtered the tomid while it was still night, rendering it invalid and ended up having to incinerate it. The reason for including Chevron in the question was in order to mention the merit of the Ovos, who are buried there.

Feature Customs and Practices from Maran HaRav Shach, ztvk'l Temporary Residence Maran was very particular that the sechach covering of his succah be very thick so as not to have any holes (air spaces) and that it remain dark to the eye from the outside, also that it be impervious to rain.

Feature Staying Jewish: The Heroic Story of HaRav Yitzchok Zilber's Life under Atheist-Communist Rule by Binyomin Y. Rabinovitz HaRav Zilber was niftar on erev Tisha B'Av this year. In a life focused on talmud Torah and shemiras mitzvos he accomplished quite a bit, even though more than half of his life was spent in Communist Russia -- the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Feature Learn From the Ant by M. Zonnenfeld FICTION Reb Aharon arrived on the afternoon of a very warm day. The sun, which had blazed since the morning, hadn't grown in the least tired, and continued to bombard the yard with heat waves.