Category: VaYetzei
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VaYetzei 5786: Gratitude & Ambition
There is something absurd about the American “holiday season” for an observant Jew. What is so hard about hosting a Thanksgiving meal? You can turn your oven on and off and cook on Thanksgiving. You can…
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VaYetzei 5784: “Gratitude”
One who has been held captive and been released, and also someone who has recovered from a dangerous illness and also one who has completed a dangerous journey, whether by land or by sea, should recite…
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VaYetzei 5780: “A Stairway Set on the Ground; Its Top Reached the Heavens”
The brief presidency of John F. Kennedy is sometimes credited with destroying the American hat industry. According to this legend, the glamorous young president’s decision to appear at his inauguration without a hat led millions of…
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VaYetzei 5777: “Barbarians!”
“Over thousands of years, they wandered from their homeland in the Middle East to Europe and finally traveled to North America, bound by a shared history and rigid dietary restrictions. But these nomads do not keep kosher. They…
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VaYetzei 5776: “My Father Was a Syrian Refugee”
“Many of those who seek entrance into this country have little concept of our form of government. Many of them come from lands where [a dangerous ideology] had its first growth and dominates the political thought…
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VaYetzei 5775: “God Was in This Place and I Did Not Know It”
“Har HaBayit B’Yadeinu – the Temple Mount is in our Hands” that cry, by IDF Col. Motta Gur remains one of the most dramatic moments in Modern Jewish history, a climactic memory of the Six Day…
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VaYetzei 5774: “Prayer for the Government”
In 1872, the British scientist, Fancis Galton, formulated a clever way to test the efficacy of prayer. The British royal family, and Queen Victoria in particular, was the beneficiary of the prayers of millions of subjects of…
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 