Category: Parasha
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Baha’alotcha 5779: “Egyptian Cucumbers”
When I was a child I would often cry on the first day of school. It wasn’t because I hated school or didn’t like my teachers. It wasn’t because I was upset about the classmates assigned…
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Naso 5779: “One is Obligated to Teach Torah to His Daughters: From a Feminist Satire to Democratic Elitism”
Starting at age four, our children study Torah with their mother before bedtime on most evenings. Several months ago, as they learned the Mishnah of Tractate Shabbat, I overheard our twins reading a mishnah with their…
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Behukotai 5779: “Safety in Numbers”
Some of you may know that I went to a specialized math and science high school. I don’t often draw upon that element of my education but I do want to work through an arithmetic problem…
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Emor 5779: “For Stranger and Citizen Alike”
More than 800 years ago Maimonides, Rambam, penned a letter to a convert to Judaism who had taken on the name Ovadia. Ovadia had written to Rambam wondering if he could recite the same berakhot as…
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Tazria 5779: “Identity and Stigmatization”
There are two theories of tumah v’taharah. There are two ways of thinking about the vast system of purity and impurity laws that dominate so much of the middle sections of Vayikra. One position, which was…
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Tzav 5779: “Two Paths Converge”
There was once a Jew who lived and worked in Shushan HaBirah, the capital city of the vast and sprawling Persian Empire. This Jew had intimate access to the king of Persia and was an object…
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Vayikra 5779: “The Memory of the Righteous is a Blessing”
You never know what will happen when you send an email to fifty thousand people. Several times a year, Sara’s employer, the Jewish educational website, Sefaria, sends out emails, in her name, to tens of thousands…
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Pekudei 5779: “Beyond Identity”
Have you ever had the experience of thinking of the perfect comeback to an argument once it is too late to deploy that snappy comeback in real life? This happened to me several years ago when…
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Vayakhel 5779: “Six Days You Shall Work and the Seventh Shall be Shabbat”
For many years, Princeton University invited those high school seniors who had been accepted to Princeton to spend a weekend there in the spring as part of an effort to encourage them to accept the admissions offer. The…
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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…
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 