יום שני, י״א אלול תשפ״וMonday, August 24, 2026
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Human nature is fragile, and our avodat Hashem can falter. Living a commanded life does not mean that we always succeed. It means that we accept all of Hashem’s mitzvot, without selectively embracing those we prefer and discarding those we resist.
On the evidence of his writings, Philo was almost certainly a Torah-observant Jew who believed in the Divinity of the Torah and the uniqueness of Moshe’s prophecy.
We can make the startling conclusion that the entire event of Purim, the intended genocide of the Jewish people and the miraculous reversal that led to the downfall of Haman and the Amalekis, all hinged on the slander and the snitching of the noblemen at the king’s gate.
In assessing the potential of every Jew, Rabbeinu Yonah writes that even an individual who does not show great promise can achieve exalted heights and become a tzaddik. The simplest and most humble person can merit the Divine presence.
The message of the Aron’s inclusion of three half-measures is that on its own, it is incomplete. We, the Jewish People partner with it (so to speak) and become whole.
We are also told that when we lend money, we may not charge interest. What? The whole banking system and world economy runs on interest. Why should someone else profit from my money free of charge?
The Torah’s language about the ger, the yatom, and the almanah is not sentimental; it is structural. These identities are not about eliciting pity but about embedding protection into the very framework of halacha.
In addition to all the riches that each member of Am Yisrael carried out of Egypt on 90 Libyan donkeys, Am Yisrael started adding another layer of loot on the donkeys from the spoils from the Red Sea. The purpose of all this material wealth was to develop a lust for money within Am Yisrael, which they would later redirect into a lust to study Torah.
It’s overwhelming, in the best sense. How do you even sum it up? And what does it mean for ordinary people like us, who aren’t heading out this morning to rescue Israeli backpackers lost somewhere in the Far East, but are simply trying to manage the morning rush at home and at work?
Because Mishpatim is the Torah code designed for living in the Land of Israel. Courts, damages, property law, social responsibility – these are not abstract ethics. They assume land, sovereignty, and society
The Torah deliberately places civil law alongside the drama of revelation. At the very moment when heaven meets earth – amid thunder, lightning, and awe – the Torah turns our attention toward human responsibility: how society is ordered, how power is restrained, and how justice is preserved.
Mystical Insights into the Redemptive Powers of the Half-Shekel.
The Medrash says that water is unique among beverages in that it is only beneficial if one is thirsty. With other drinks, we might enjoy them even if we’re not thirsty, such as a soda or juice. But water only has value when we are thirsty.
When a person is belittled and disparaged, his spirit is broken. He loses any hope of being able to atone for his wrongdoings.
Mishpatim-Sh’kalim-M’vorchim occurs in five of the seven Shana P’shuta year-types, with a frequency of 55.53% – by far, the most common situation for Parshat Mishpatim and Parshat Sh’kalim.
The Jewish people did thank Hashem, but they waited. They waited for the sea to split, for the danger to pass, for the story to reach its resolution. And only then, in a powerful, collective, composed moment, they sang. It was magnificent. It was holy. It was exactly right.
It is an important call for individuals and humanity as a whole to exercise self-control, restrain impulses, and manage a world that has boundaries and red lines.
The Israelites have survived slavery, survived the plagues, survived the waters closing behind them. But survival is not the same as readiness. Freedom does not erase the patterns that oppression carves into the mind and heart. The Torah does not rush past this truth; it lingers in it.
Yisro saw that the Jews were attacked by Amalek from behind, when they were weak and exhausted. The natural course of events should have resulted in their total defeat. But he witnessed G-d’s prescription for salvation.
I would like to explore the character that was R' Eliezer ben Horkenos, also known as R' Eliezer HaGadol, because of the important lessons we learn from him about Matan Torah.
Would it not have been more striking to open the section of Yitro with the thunder and fire of revelation itself? More iconic, more symbolic, to move directly into the moment when Hashem speaks?
Until Israel had accepted our collective purpose and come to embody the Will of the Creator to have a nation among nations to perform His commandments and act on His behalf, there were only tribes and families.
Why do the Ten Commandments not include the most important of all mitzvos, the study of Torah?
Alexander was a man of integrity and a proud Jew. He loved the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.
There’s a reason the man arrives before the Aseres HaDibros. A people who have only known extraction cannot receive law until they first learn sufficiency.
They needed another forty years during which time G-d would show them more indisputable miracles like splitting the sea, extracting water from a rock and raining manna from heaven.
There are different streams in the Torah world today regarding the Beit HaMikdash. The common denominator between them all is that they all want the third Beit HaMikdash to be rebuilt. The only question is how and when.
At the splitting of the sea, we learn that Hashem is willing and able to overturn the laws of nature as He sees fit to intervene on behalf of His chosen people.
This was measure for measure for the lachatzeinu, intense pressure, that the Egyptian taskmasters inflicted upon Bnei Yisrael nonstop.
One who finds it difficult to daven all the tefillos in the morning – from the berachos through Aleinu – if he can manage to recite the Shema that would be sufficient. If he cannot say all of the Shema, even the recitation of the first paragraph would be good, or at least the first two lines of the Shema could still be powerful.
Unlike Moshe’s previous meetings with Pharaoh in which he was instructed by G-d to ask Pharaoh to release the Jews and threaten him with plagues in the hope that he would comply, in the opening scene of Parshas Bo, G-d gave Moshe no such instructions.
What has always struck me is that the Torah does not erase the plagues. It does not soften them. It does not pretend that the suffering did not occur. Instead, it asks us to hold the full truth...
The two chapters he dedicates to Parshat HaChodesh, which is found in this week’s parsha, contain profound and beautiful insights into the nature of the Nation of Israel and our unique relationship to the moon.
Rabbi Yeruchom Levovitz (1873–1936) of the Mir Yeshiva in Belarus told his students: Woe to the one who does not know his weaknesses, for he does not know what to fix.
An integral component of the exile from Egypt included an unmatched zeal and enthusiasm to flee, so much so that there was not sufficient time for the dough to rise. So too must eagerness and ardor be essential elements in our fulfillment of Torah and mitzvos.
As we familiarize ourselves with the concept of middah k’neged middah, it should be an incentive for us to adopt certain behaviors and inhibitions to avoid other behaviors.
The mitzvah is to create a Jewish Calendar which is based on sanctifying each month by Sanhedrin’s declaration of kedusha of the first day of each month, and the periodic decision of Sanhedrin to intercalate the year (with an extra Adar) in order to adjust the years so that Pesach will always be in the spring season (and Sukkot in the fall).
When slavery began, we were cast as a threat to society. Pharaoh could only sell his genocidal policy to the broader public of Mitzrayim by turning us into a symbol of danger.
Ran went out to confront absolute evil. And it is the same evil we see today, asserting itself in Iran against its own people and elsewhere against anyone who stands for freedom and truth. We pray that this too will fall, that another hateful regime, another Jew-hating empire, will be thrown onto history’s scrap heap, just as others before it.
The plague of hail involved two opposing forces, water and fire. Under normal circumstances these forces cannot coexist peacefully, they are diametric opposites of each other. HaKadosh Baruch Hu miraculously made peace between them and unleashed them upon Egypt.
Geulah is not an escape; it is a return. It is the moment when a person remembers who they are and who they were meant to be.
But the people were overworked and under pressure and they had no time for seemingly empty promises... It was hard for them to believe in a vacuum. They needed to see some concrete results.
The danger of not listening is not limited to kings, tyrants, or political leaders intoxicated by success. It confronts all of us.
One of the key characteristics we see of Moshe that make him uniquely qualified for prophecy is his attention to detail in the face of the unusual.
In general, Klal Yisrael chooses its great people very differently than does the other nations. Rav Aharon Leib Shteinman, zt”l, zy”a, never ran for office. Rav Pam, zt”l, zy”a, never strutted his credentials. To the contrary, they ran from honor and it was that very humility that knighted them to be the leaders of our people.
A person who can feel the pain of others is more suited to be a leader. For that reason, Hashem first tested Moshe to verify that he had the sensitivity to be able to share in the distress of his brethren.
The cry of Bnei Yisrael is the first act of geulah. No armies, no influence, and still the world turns. The cry pierces the heavens, awakens, and sets redemption in motion.
According to Kabbalistic teachings, there are four levels in Creation: mineral, vegetable, animal and human. In one of our Mitchadshot workshops, Rabbi Michi Yosefi applied these four categories to the dynamics in a marriage.
The 12 sons of Yaakov did not assimilate into the Egyptian culture. They did not change their Jewish names, shemam, they did not abandon their Hebrew language, leshonam and they did not discard their traditional attire, malbusham – which three Hebrew words form the acronym shalom, peace.
Although in the Torah some people were named directly by HaKadosh Baruch Hu (like Noach for example), in most cases it is the parents who give names to their children. How does a parent choose an appropriate name?
He was not a child crying about his own pain; he was crying for the pain of his nation.
Thinking (and reason) is inexorably bound up with our free choice and the determinations we make in our lives that shape the past, present, and future.
The image of a bush aflame yet not consumed also conveys separation. Hashem is not part of the physical system He created. The laws that govern nature – energy, decay, and limitation – do not bind Him. He transcends the world even as He governs it.
It is interesting to note that the structure of the book does not lend itself to the idea that gaining our freedom or leaving Egypt is the main point. We leave Egypt at the end of Parshat Bo, in just three weeks, at what would have been a reasonable conclusion to the book.
The Medrash teaches that if one falls off a roof and breaks every bone in his body, he will need many casts and bandages in order to be repaired. But, if one sins spiritually, and thereby injures his entire body, Hashem fashions one bandage that can cure him through and through.
Of course, Yosef wasn’t planning on Yehudah’s powerful speech bringing him to his knees and forcing him to reveal himself as their long-lost brother. Hence, he had to come up with a new plan.
I had the privilege of speaking on stage, and of speaking with these young people afterward. Their eyes shine as they talk about aliyah, about pro-Israel activism on campus, about a Jewish identity that is awakening.
Decades ago, in an eighth-grade classroom in Miami, Rabbi Sherwin Stauber taught the story of Ephraim and Menashe. Two boys sat in that room: One would become Rav Zev Leff of Moshav Matisyahu, the other Dr. David Luchins, my father-in-law. They listened to the same words, but each carried them forward in a distinct way.
Despite the travails of the past, Yaakov did not regret the hardships he experienced. They were all part of the mosaic called life without which he would never have reached this peaceful destination.
On the surface of the Gemara, it seems that Zevulun was complaining that he did not have enough material wealth in his inheritance to provide a livelihood, as opposed to the other tribes, which required HaKadosh Baruch Hu to placate him by listing the natural resources in his inheritance.
The very first thing that David did was to capture the city of Jerusalem and move his capital there.
As he prepares to bless the sons of Yosef, having established them as Shevatim the same as their uncles, Yaakov relates how Rachel passed away on the side of the road, which seems incongruous here.
They ignored the pleas for mercy from their younger brother and sold their own flesh and blood.
Our Commentators grapple with the puzzle of why the saintly Rachel deserved to die. Some say it was because she caused her father anguish by stealing his precious teraphim. However, many explain that the fault lay in the fact that she didn’t consult with her husband Yaakov and learn his opinion before stealing the teraphim.
If we want to understand what it means to join Yehudah and Yosef – two lineages, two visions of leadership – we must also look at the women who stand at their thresholds. Not only the unnamed daughters who entered Mitzrayim, but also the named women whose faith and devotion shaped the legacy and carried it forward.
We know that Yaakov never referred to Yosef as having died. He referred to Yosef in the same way as he referred to Shimon after he was imprisoned (42:36).
There were three catastrophic events precipitating the future exile of Israel. Two of these were, of course, the destruction of the First and Second Batei HaMikdash, but in between these was the exile of the northern kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel under the rulership of the descendants of Yosef.
When one commits murder, the killer realizes that he has sinned and he can do teshuvah. But when someone causes another person to be embarrassed, he often doesn’t realize he has done anything wrong. He may never do teshuvah and will die guilty of this sin.
The Chinuch, the renowned master of the mitzvos, wonders how is it possible that, if someone causes us to lose our job, disrupts a marriage or wrecks a shidduch, that we should not seek revenge or even nurse a grudge. He explains that, if we have the proper Torah hashkafa, any wrong that occurs to us can only transpire because of our own faults.
Ritual is often mistaken for routine. Something done out of habit, inherited without thought. But in times of fear, ritual becomes something else entirely. It becomes resistance. It becomes a declaration of presence.
If you ask me how it is that every empire, without exception, ended up in the trash bin of history while the Jewish people continue to flourish despite continued persecution, I think this picture explains everything.
What was Yosef’s sin that deserved this punishment? Is it not a rule that one should not rely on miracles? Rather, one should try one’s best to solve the situation on one’s own and only when one has exhausted one’s human capacities will G-d take over? So, what did Yosef do wrong?
The Greeks resent the mitzvot as not rational and because they don’t understand them.
In America, there is a strong tendency to feel that bigger and brighter is always better. Upon deeper reflection, many times this is not the case, however.
This power to bring about change, that can transform an individual’s status from one minute to the next, precisely defines the energy of Chanukah as well.
Return is not nostalgia. It is vigilance. It is the courage to live unsettled, to consecrate absence without being consumed by it, to insist that responsibility matters even when rest is denied.
The dreams which Yosef repeated, which he should have kept to himself, in which he lorded it over his brothers, so enraged them that they decided to preemptively kill Yosef, before he killed them. How do you kill a brother? You try to forget he is a brother. You estrange him.
The number four is noteworthy, and the Maharal explains that four represents the division of that which ought to be unified. So, in the physical world, the Divine Mercy is represented by the Name of four letters, but this is also a necessary refraction of the unified essence of the Infinite as it is experienced by us mortals here below.
Even when we are fully cognizant of this hornet’s nest brewing within us, we still need Hashem’s help to succeed.
Yaakov, from birth, was perfect - a tzaddik, who until age 77 never left the walls of the yeshiva. Yaakov was a genetic tzaddik from birth and he remained so his entire life. Eisav was born challenged and he never managed to surpass his handicaps.
We learn a very interesting principle with regard to Yiddishkeit. The reward for those who learn Torah amid difficulty and challenges is incomparably greater than one who has a relatively easy life and does not have to worry about his weekly expenses.
By taking all of these precautions, Yaakov managed to overcome the murderous designs of Eisav, to the point that Eisav dropped his lethal plans and suggested that he and Yaakov travel through life together, as one unit. Let’s travel on together (33:12).
There is a noticeable difference in the purpose and destinies of the Avot and the Imahot. The Avot are more "universal" and the Imahot are more focused specifically on "giving birth" to the Twelve Tribes, to Am Yisrael.
Just as I passed, the body of Manny Godard was returned to Israel, and only three photographs of fallen hostages remained. Many people stopped there, just as I did.
I said that I believe what this popular saying is meant to convey is that we mistakenly believe that when we make plans, we are in control. That is what Hashem is laughing about.
In a world of polarization, we are losing our grasp of nuance. We voice our opinions with absolute certainty, convinced of our own correctness while condemning, with equal certainty, the positions of political or ideological opponents. We leave little room for subtlety, little patience for complexity. We
The haftara continues the saga of the two adversaries, envisioning a final battle in which Yaakov will ultimately prevail. This vision is presented in response to the challenges of the parsha.
For us, the Children of Israel, the destruction of the Second Beit HaMikdash at the hands of Rome is still a raw memory, and we are still enduring the long exile that began on that day.
The greatest danger is not the hand of Eisav’s sword, but the hand of his friendship.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught, If you believe you can damage, believe you can repair. Owning our story means believing in repair, even when estrangement or shame feels irreparable.
Maybe each of us really should be asking ourselves that very question: Who am I, and where am I a shaliach? Because in a deeper sense, every one of us is an emissary.
Having become an expert in the laws of Choshen Mishpat, Yaakov now felt ready to duel with Lavan.
Often someone hosts a guest out of a feeling of obligation to perform a mitzvah, or out of sympathy when they see someone without food or lodging. Therefore, during the meal the guest cannot be totally certain if their host is hosting them with pure joy or because it is out of a feeling of obligation.
A theme we find pervading these parshiyot and the various commentaries upon them is the grudge that the enemies of Israel hold from past generations, as a consequence of which they are constantly seeking to torment and persecute and even exterminate us – or to dispossess us – in every generation.
The Zohar teaches that sulam (ladder) and kol (voice) share the same gematria: 136. The ladder is not just a structure; it is also a sound. The ascent is not only movement, but utterance.
Moshe Rabbeinu was exceedingly humble, and consistent with his humility he was raised to one of the highest levels that a human can reach.
My answer to this double loss is one thing: do, do, do – and then do some more. Choose life. Hold on to routine. Act. Work. Wake up each morning and take on the day’s tasks.
August 21, 2026 
