With the Black Death raging throughout Switzerland, poison was reported to have been found in the wells at Zofingen. Some Jews were put to the "Dümeln" (thumbscrews) test, whereupon they "admitted" their guilt of the charges brought against them. This discovery was then communicated to the people of Basel, Zurich, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, and even Cologne.
The Jews of Basel were burned on an island in the Rhine on January 9, 1349, in wooden huts that were especially built for the occasion. Their children, who were spared, were taken and forcibly baptized.
On his way back from participating in a brit milah ceremony in Bohuslav (in what is now Ukraine), R. Aryeh Leib, known as the “Grandfather of Shpoli” was crossing over the frozen Ros River when the ice suddenly broke beneath his feet. Miraculously he was saved, and to this day his descendants mark this date with a joyous feast (Ish Hapelleh, pp. 299–301).
Daniel Pearl, an American-born Jewish reporter for The Wall Street Journal was kidnapped by terrorists in Karachi by a militant group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, which claimed that Pearl was a spy.
Nine days later, on Shevat 19 (Feb 1), Pearl was beheaded on videotape. The gruesome tape has Pearl stating that, “… My father's Jewish, my mother's Jewish, I'm Jewish. …”
People think that the instructions come first, the dos and the don’ts, thou shalts and thou shalt nots. Later comes a sense of the divine, the mystical, the transcendental.
But let’s say you encountered a Jew returning from Mount Sinai, where he shivered from the thunder, trembled from the lightning, where he heard G-d’s voice speaking to him directly, loud and clear.
And you asked, “So what did He say?”
“What did He say? The entire world disappeared for us! The heavens opened wide! We saw with our own eyes, experienced with every bone in our body, that there is truly nothing else but Him!”
That is the starting place of Torah, and the first approach of even the simplest Jew—that there is really nothing else but G-d. From there comes every mitzvah he does.
Study the inner wisdom of Torah and re-experience Mount Sinai.