Category: Ki Tissa
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Ki Tissa 5784: “Counting and Not Counting”
If you’ve ever seen someone trying to count by saying, “Not one, not two, not three…not four…” then you know that there is a practice to avoid counting in a direct way even when we are…
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Ki Tissa 5779: “To Be or Not to Be”
To be or not to be; that is the question. הושִׁיעָה אֶת עַמֶָ ובָרְ אֶת נַחֲלָתֶָ ורעֵם וְנַשְּׂאֵם עַד הָעולָם Old McDonald had a farm; ee ei, ee ei, oh. What do these three sentences have…
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Ki Tissa 5778: “Building Jerusalem: In Those Days at This Time”
Today is an auspicious day on the Jewish calendar. It is the 16th day of Adar, the anniversary of a very important event in Jewish history. According to Megilat Ta’anit, an ancient list of important dates…
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Ki Tissa 5777: “The Velveteen Rabbit and the Golden Calf”
In one of the first pages of his first published collection of teshuvot, halakhic responsa, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein describes and offers a judgment concerning a terrible dilemma. A Jewish man had contracted a highly contagious disease, perhaps tuberculosis,…
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Ki Tissa 5776: “Legal Creativity”
When Sara and I were newlyweds we moved into our first apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was in the process of furnishing that small apartment that I discovered a latent talent, a gift, if you will. We purchased…
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Ki Tissa 5775: “My Trip to Washington”
My father-in law taught me to remember all of the public fast days on the Jewish calendar by this simple mnemonic: The black and the white, the long and the short, the man and the woman. The…
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Ki Tissa 5774
The Septuagint, the ancient translation of the Torah into Greek, was written by 70 scholars who were locked into 70 different rooms and told to produce a translation of the Torah. Miraculously, they produced the identical…
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 