 Photo by Anne Mandelbaum |
Biography
A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, Dr. Oren has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and from the British and Canadian governments. Formerly, he was the Lady Davis Fellow of Hebrew University, a Moshe Dayan Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and the Distinguished Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown.
Ambassador Oren has written extensively for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. His two most recent books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, were both New York Times bestsellers. They won the Los Angeles Times' History Book of the Year prize, a National Council of the Humanities Award, and the National Jewish Book Award.
Raised in New Jersey, where he was an activist in Zionist youth movements and a gold medal winning athlete in the Maccabia Games, Ambassador Oren moved to Israel in the 1970s. He served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, in the paratroopers in the Lebanon War, a liaison with the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the Gulf War, and an IDF spokesman during the Second Lebanon War and the Gaza operation in January 2009. He acted as an Israeli Emissary to Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet Union, as an advisor to Israel's delegation to the United Nations, and as the government's director of Inter-Religious Affairs.
Ambassador Oren is married to Sally, and they have three children-Yoav, Lia, and Noam.
http://www.israelemb.org/index.php/en/meet-the-ambassador
July 4th is, of course, a special day for Americans, and we Israelis celebrate it as well. July 4, 1776 = 17 Tammuz 5536
We celebrate with you because America’s independence is essential to Israel’s independence. Your love of liberty is the same as ours and our reverence for democracy is identical. We rejoice because your Founding Fathers were inspired by our Founding Fathers.
...most references to the concept of 'tzaddik' are usually made with Yosef HaTzaddik in mind, who, according to Kabbalah, is affiliated with the sixth sefirah, Yesod, which means "Foundation," as it says, "V'tzaddik YESOD olam - And the righteous person is the foundation of the world" (Mishlei 10:25). This is why Yosef was destined for such a primary position, from which he was able to sustain the world, spiritually and physically. Furthermore, Kabbalah teaches, another name for the sefirah, Yesod is "river." Thus, the Zohar learns that the river that watered the Garden of Eden back at the beginning of creation, on the level of the Sefiros, was in fact this sefirah. And, like this primordial river, tzaddikim such as Yosef have continued to be the source of the world's nourishment in every generation since that time.
Vayigash: A Fundamental of "Foundation" By Rabbi Pinchas Winston