tenth of tevet special announcement

LazerBeams has an important post:

"This Monday night, 21 Dec., 2015, is the eve of the Tenth of Teveth. This is a fast day that commemorates the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem, which ended in the destruction of our Holy Temple seven months later on the ninth day of Av, or "Tisha B'Av".

"My esteemed and beloved teacher Rabbi Shalom Arush quotes the Chattam Sofer osb"m and explains that the Tenth of Teveth was the day that the Heavenly Court decreed that the Temple would be destroyed. Rabbi Arush explains further in the clip below, which I haven't had time to dub with English subtitles, that every generation who doesn't rebuild the Holy Temple is in effect guilty of destroying it.

"As such, each year, the decree is renewed in the Heavenly Court that the Holy Temple should remain destroyed. Therefore, the eve of the Tenth of Teveth is the opportune time to beg Hashem to reverse the decree, and rather than having the Temple remain destroyed for another year, it should be built this year. To invoke Divine compassion, Rav Arush is calling for a worldwide simultaneous recitation of the Shema prayer on Monday night, 21 Dec., 2015 at 9PM Israel time, which is 7PM London, 2PM NYC, 1PM Chicago, 12 noon Denver and 11AM Los Angeles. Please join us.

To further invoke Divine compassion, as Rav Shalom explains, we all must pray for four things:

That the Kingdom of Heaven should rule on earth;
That King David should rule in Israel;
That the Holy Temple should be rebuilt forthright;
That we should all return to Hashem in complete teshuva.

Rav Arush shlit'a stresses that this is a critical time and conducive for the Geula, the full redemption of our people.

view the video at LAZERBEAMS

Why the Shema? And why now?

Jewish Virtual Library: The Shema is an affirmation of Judaism and a declaration of faith in one God. The obligation to recite the Shema is separate from the obligation to pray and a Jew is obligated to say Shema in the morning and at night (Deut. 6:7).

Aish HaTorah: "Events in our world may seem to mask the idea that God is One. One day we wake up and everything goes well. The next day everything goes poorly. What happened?! Is it possible that the same God who gives us so much goodness one day, can make everything go wrong the next? We know that God is good, so how could there be so much pain? Is it just "bad luck"?

"The Shema is a declaration that all events are from the One, the only One. The confusion stems from our limited perception of reality. One way of understanding God's oneness is to imagine light shining through a prism. Even though we see many colors of the spectrum, they really emanate from one light. So too, even though it seems that certain events are not caused by God, rather by some other force or bad luck, they in fact all come from the One God. In the grand eternal plan, all is "good," for God knows best."