Jewish Life: The Three Weeks: A Primer

For the three weeks spanning from the fast of the 17th of Tammuz until the fast of Tisha B’av (9th of Av), the Jewish nation practices collective mourning. This mourning is the result of a collection of calamitous things that has happened to our ancestors during these inauspicious times. What is the background of these days and what can we learn today from commemorating events that happened thousands of years ago?

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Parsha: Parshas Pinchas (Rebroadcast)

Pinchas was a man of action, a zealot who avenged God’s vengeance and was handsomely rewarded for it. In this parsha we read about his reward, Moses’ succession plan, the methods through which the Land will be divided, and another census is done.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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Parsha: Balak – Some Men Are From Mars

Our parsha contains an attempted genocide. Bilaam, the prophet of the idolaters, a man of prodigious ability an skill, dedicates himself with tenacity and persistence to curse and destroy the people. Although his three attempts at cursing the nation backfire when he is compelled by God to bless the nation instead, the parsha ends with the implementation of his advice to get the nation to sin and indeed a large contingency of the people fall prey to his plan. In this podcast, we propose a novel understanding of Bilaam’s character and demonstrate a way that things could have gone very differently.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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Ethics: Defanged Demons (5:8)

In the final installment of the series of Tens, our Mishnah reveals to us the ten things that were created at twilight of Friday during the week of Genesis. What is the deeper meaning of twilight? What is unique about these seemingly random mix of things that were created then? In this very interesting Mishnah we learn about an ironclad principle of what people today call, “The law of conservation of mass.”

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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Parsha: Parshas Balak (Rebroadcast)

After the Jewish nation trounced the mighty kingdoms of Sichon and Og in last week’s parsha, the comparatively smaller and weaker kingdom of Moab resorted to unconventional warfare to attack the nation by hiring the prophet of the nations, a wily and devious character named Bilaam, to curse the Jews. It did not work out as planned.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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Parsha: Chukas – Inglorious Origins

The red cow is the Torah’s most mysterious mitzvah. We are told to take a completely red cow and slaughter it, and burn it’s body together with a concoction of other ingredients, the ashes of which become the potion to purify people who have come into contact with dead people. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I can hereby comfort you that you are not alone. Aside from Moshe, no human in history has ever fully grasped this mitzvah. Although we are precluded from fully understanding this mitzvah, the Midrash reveals to us the mechanism at play in this process. What is reveals it quite stunning and very broadly applicable to us.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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TORAH 101: The Immutability of Torah

In Principle #8 of the 13 Principles of faith, we learned that the Torah is divine. In our exploration of that Principle, we probed many aspects of the idea of the Divinity of Torah, ranging from the history of Torah, to the components of Torah, to Oral Torah, to Rabbinic law, and culminating with the imperative of Torah study. The study of Principle #8 was the subject of the last 17 episodes of the TORAH 101 podcast. In this episode, we cover Principle #9, namely that the Torah is immutable and unchangeable, in one session. What does this mean? How do we reconcile a fixed and immutable Torah with the vast corpus of rabbinic law and edicts? What are the scriptural and logical proofs that the Torah was given only once? And we also explore the ramifications of this principle vis-à-vis other religions that claim otherwise.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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TORAH 101

Parsha: Parshas Chukas (Rebroadcast)

In this week’s parsha, we read about a highly unusual mitzvah: The Red Heifer, when an entirely red cow is burned together with a motley concoction of ingredients, and the resultant ashes are used to sprinkle on people that came into contact with dead people in order to purify them from their spiritual contamination. We also learn about the passing of Miriam and Aaron, and the multiple battles that the nation participated in on the Eastern bank of the Jordan, and we puzzle over the sin that condemned Moses and Aaron to die before entering the Land.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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TORAH 101

Parsha: Korach – Demoted For Good

Korach was a very talented man with a sterling pedigree. He was wise and clever and even had a degree of prophetic clairvoyance. Yet he blundered egregiously by launching a revolt on Moshe and Aaron. When we study what triggered this rebellion we find that Korach has a seemingly legitimate grievance. He believed – and honest assessors of the situation would agree – that he was mistreated by not being promoted to a post that he deserved. Why indeed was Korach passed over for this promotion? How should Korach have processed this insult? What is the proper way to respond to such slights? In this exceptional podcast episode, we share a potentially life-changing approach to this subject.

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Sponsorship: Please consider sponsoring a podcast by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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The Anatomy of a Tzadik II with Rabbi Aryeh and Yitzi Wolbe

Fulfilling the Torah is Simple but not Easy.

In summary Torah is telling us the following:

  1. Our purpose in this world is to pursue ultimate pleasure.
  2. The ultimate pleasure we are pursuing is closeness to Hashem.
  3. The way we ascend closer to Hashem is through aligning our thoughts, words, and actions with Him.
  4. The way we learn how to align ourselves with Him is through His Torah.
  5. His ways are ways of giving.
  6. While we all have unique challenges, tailored to our unique curriculum for growth, they all have something in common and that is our Yetzer Hara is continually trying to convince us that the source of pleasure is taking, not giving.

In this episode I bring on Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe and his 7-year-old son, Yitzi, to inspire us, by sharing stories of Tzadikim who have excelled in this lofty and simple, but not easy task.