Category: Ki Tissa
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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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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 