Category: Parasha
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Korach 5786: Arguments Worth Having
In the 1950s my teacher Rabbi Yehudah Amital was a faculty member at a yeshiva in Rehovot where he worked alongside his cousin-by-marriage Rabbi Elazer Menachem Schach. The two teachers argued incessantly about all the hot…
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Baha’alotcha 5786: Purity & Solidarity
There is a phrase, made popular on the Internet but used often enough in conversation too, to describe someone who fails at what is ostensibly a simple task: You had one job. Several memorable examples come…
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Naso 5786: Circles of Blessing
Circles of Blessing Every community contains conflict. Whenever people gather, and try to live together, there will be differences of opinion and personalities that clash. I once lived in a community with a kohen who had…
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Behar Behukotai 5786: Fractal Sanctity
Fractals are geometric shapes, which can appear in nature, or can be generated by computer graphics, in which a self-repeating pattern can be seen at any scale of magnification. A snail’s spiral, the coil of an…
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Acharei Mot Kedoshim 5786: For This Reason We Recite it Standing
In the 1948 Arab – Israeli War, my teacher, Rav Yehuda Amital z’l, then a refugee, survivor, and young immigrant found himself serving in a unit alongside a ragtag group of soldiers from across the world.…
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Shimini 5786: Seeing Without Taking
This past Pesach my family joined thousands of other Jews in a modern, but widespread, Pesach tradition, and went to the zoo. If we didn’t comprise a majority, I suspect Yiddish was the most spoken language…
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Ki Tissa 5786: Aaron’s Complicity
In recent months I have been haunted by the image of Aharon without his crowns. The Gemara in Shabbat (88a) teaches that when the Jewish people chanted “Na’aseh v’Nishmah” at Har Sinai, committing to perform all…
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Mishpatim 5786: Serious Judaism for a Fragile Society
I am so happy to be here with all of you this morning and I want to begin by thanking the community for the chance to have spent the past two weeks in Israel. I am…
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Va’era 5786: Fervor without Fundamentalsim
One of the greatest scandals for Jewish philosophy is the way that Pharaoh loses his freedom over the course of the exodus as his hardened heart numbs him to the suffering of his own people and…
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 