Smelly Justice
In this week's Torah reading, Parshas Shoftim in Deuteronomy, Israel is commanded to have judges and officers, those who maintain both justice and order. A judge in particular is required to be entirely unbiased, and not to accept 'Shochad', usually translated as...
“I’m Your Father. I’m Still Here.”
"You are children of G-d, your Master. You should not cut yourselves nor make a baldness between your eyes for the dead" (Deut. 14:1, Portion of Re'eh). No doubt that knowing we are children of G-d, that we can relate to Him as a child relates to a father, is...
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This week is Shabbos Nachamu, the "Sabbath of Consolation." Following three weeks in which the weekly Haftarah spoke about the loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple, leading up to Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of Av, we now have seven weeks during which we focus upon our...
Torah: Pure and Untouched
"The teachings of the A-lmighty are pure," "Toras Hashem Temima" (Tehillim/Psalms 19:8). The holy Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hassidic movement and many schools of Kabbalah, takes the following novel approach to this popular verse: even after one has derived all...
Leaders Who Lead
In this week's reading, Moshe (Moses) is told to appoint Yehoshua (Joshua), "a man who has the spirit within him," to lead the Nation of Israel after Moshe's passing. Rabbi Asher Zelig Rubenstein shlit"a, whose classes are available on TorahMedia almost immediately...
Sowing Division
This week's reading puts to rest the misguided notion that "there are two sides to every argument." This statement is, at its essence, a truism -- so in actual use, it is intended to convey that each side must be exaggerating, that the truth always lies somewhere in...
