Category: Vayera
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Vayera 5786: Friends and Allies
At least one time in my life I accepted rebuke. When I was eighteen or nineteen years old and in my first year in yeshiva, a group of us went somewhere together, had an interaction with…
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Vayera 5780: “Open Rebuke & Concealed Love”
Sometimes a story can be so familiar that we don’t realize that we don’t truly know it at all. After many years of childless marriage, Avraham fathers a child, Yishmael. Yishmael was the answer to Avraham’s…
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Vayera 5779: “This Was the Sin of Your Sister Sodom”
When Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev was appointed the rabbi of Berditchev, he sat down with the communal leaders to work out the terms by which they would guide the community. The communal leaders, wishing to protect their…
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Vayera 5776: “The Courage of Our Convictions”
In the years of hosting guests at my Shabbat and yom tov table, my greatest regret is that I never kicked anyone out of my house. Allow me to explain. I first enrolled as a student at…
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Vayera 5775: “For I Know That He Will Command His Children”
Large volumes of Talmud on the shelf of my childhood home set our family’s home apart from the homes of every one of my friends. Relics from my father’s own past as a yeshiva student, they…
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Vayera 5774: “Religious Humanism”
I received a fantastic email the other week: a list of 50 “intellectual jokes.” Apparently, I’m not such an intellectual because I didn’t understand all of the jokes. But I really liked this one: A linguist…
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 