Parashat Ha Shavua Commentaries

According to a popular Talmudic tale, a stranger once approached Hillel and Shammai, the great sages of the first century, with a request: "Teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot." First, he brought the request to Shammai. According to the Talmud, Shammai picked up a builder's rule, smacked him alongside his head and dismissed him. So he came to Hillel. "Teach me the Torah on one foot." Hillel taught him: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. Read more...

But the King of Egypt said to them: "Moses and Aaron, why do you distract the people from their tasks? Get to your labors!" (Exodus 5:4) Moses and Aaron asked Pharoah to let the Israelites go a distance of three days into the wilderness to worship God, and Pharoah would hear none of it. He may have been worried that they would not come back, and he would thus lose many slaves. The concern he voices here, though, is that the work would not be done. Read more...

Parashat Vayigash , our Torah portion for this week, opens with a still disguised Joseph playing yet another trick on his bewildered brothers who have shown up in Egypt looking to purchase food many years after having sold him off as a slave to a caravan of Egypt bound merchants. While Joseph, now viceroy of the mighty Egyptian Empire, immediately recognized his long lost brothers, they fail – time and again – to recognize this tyrant who insists on torturing them with his absurd requests. Read more...

Question: What is the most dangerous object a person can bring to the Kotel, the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem? If that person is female, then apparently the answer is ritual objects: a tallit, a Torah scroll, and most recently, a Hanukah menorah. Read more...

Pity Esau. One moment of weakness, one momentary impulse, and his birthright is gone. He rushes to fulfill his father's dying wish for a savory meal, and while he's out hunting, his mother and brother conspire to rob him of his blessing. Returning to his father with the feast, expecting at last to gain his due, he is met with his father's empty excuses. And so he cries: "Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!" And Esau wept aloud (Genesis 27:38); tears of betrayal, of pain, of rage, of broken dreams. Read more...