Vayakhel – The Muddle of Our Motives
A miscalculation made by the Nesi’im, or tribal leaders, during the collections made in the desert for the building of the Mishkan resulted in the word “Nesi’im” being written in a diminished form –...
A miscalculation made by the Nesi’im, or tribal leaders, during the collections made in the desert for the building of the Mishkan resulted in the word “Nesi’im” being written in a diminished form –...
Talk about tone-deaf. A teaser for an “investigative” article by “The Journal News,” which serves several New York counties and whose online moniker is “Lohud,” consisted of the image of a clenched puppetmaster’s hand...
Beginning with Hashem’s name stated twice, the “thirteen middos” (“aspects” or “attributes”) of Hashem’s compassion and love are sourced in our parsha. The formula was taught to Moshe Rabbeinu by Hashem Himself after the...
One of the two places in the Torah that mandate the offering of an olas tamid twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, is in our parsha (Shemos 29:39)....
The building of the Mishkan, according to a beraisa in Middos and the Sefer Habahir, mirrors the creation of the world. Both accounts in the Torah, in fact, evidence parallel wordings. Much noted by...
What an abrupt transition, from the miracles and wonders of the earlier parshios of Sefer Shemos to this week’s list of prosaic, painstaking laws. But, just as every letter in the Torah is necessary...
Last week, I offered the idea, based on the three Hebrew words, shiluach, yetziah and geirush, used to describe both the exodus account and a marriage’s dissolution, of Yetzias Mitzrayim as Klal Yisrael’s “divorce”...
The push to balkanize the Kotel Maaravi is, as its proponents readily admit, intended as a step toward legitimizing American-style “Jewish religious pluralism” in Israel. That would be a disaster, not only because of...
Shalach, the root of the word of the parshah’s title, is used elsewhere regarding the exodus from Mitzrayim (e.g. shalach es ami). So are the words yetziah (e.g. Shemos, 20:2) and geirush (e.g. ibid...
When the Torah (Shemos, 12:26) recounts the question the Haggadah attributes to the “wicked son,” it states that, when our ancestors heard it, they responded by bowing down in thanksgiving. What were they thankful...
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