Pinchas – The Dark Side of the Moon
Have you ever wondered why, in the Mussaf Amidah of a Jewish leap year (when there are two Adars), we add the phrase ulichaparas posha, “and for atonement for sin”? It is a 13th...
Have you ever wondered why, in the Mussaf Amidah of a Jewish leap year (when there are two Adars), we add the phrase ulichaparas posha, “and for atonement for sin”? It is a 13th...
Moshe Rabbeinu couldn’t recall the halacha about the proper course of action when encountering a Jewish man engaging intimately with a non-Jewish woman (Sanhedrin 82a). Pinchas had to remind him that Moshe himself had...
Our ancestors were divinely commanded to gaze at a copper representation of a snake. In order to end a plague of snakebites born of their complaint about the mon (Bamidbar 21:8). Chazal explain that...
His “eye,” not his “eyes.” That’s what Chazal point to with regard to how a pikei’ach (perceptive person) like Korach could undertake a shtus, a “stupidity” like fomenting a rebellion against Moshe Rabbeinu. The...
In their declaration that the conquest of Cna’an will proceed successfully, Yehoshua and Calev employ an odd metaphor: The idolatrous residents of the land, they say, will be vanquished because “they are our bread”...
Mishpacha Magazine asked me to contribute, as part of a symposium, a short essay on the topic of a lesson I would want my children to internalize. The symposium was recently published, and my...
Rashi, quoting the Gemara, understands the nation’s “weeping about its family” (Bamidbar 11:10) as referring to ‘matters of family’ – to the fact that relatives who were once permitted to be joined in marriage...
Haftaros always have some connection to something in the parsha, but few are as explicitly related to what was read from the Torah as the haftarah of parshas Naso, which haftarah , like part...
We read parshas Bamidbar (Bimidbar, if one wants to be didactic) on the Shabbos before Shavuos. The meaning of that juxtaposition might lie in the word by which the parsha is known ((however one...
There are a number of common English aphorisms that parallel (or are sourced in) Talmudic statements. What Chazal said in Avos (1:15), “Say little and do much” echoes in “Actions speak louder than words.”...
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