A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME…. “He [the angel] said to him: What is your name? He said: Yaakov. He [the angel] said: No more shall Yaakov be said to be your name; rather Yisrael; for you have striven with God and with men, and you...

THE SEVEN BLESSINGS “And it was, in the morning, that behold it was Leah! So he [Yaakov] said to Lavan: “What is this you have done to me? Was it not for Rachel that I worked for you? Why have you deceived me?” Lavan said, “Such...

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE “Esau was forty years old and he took as a wife Yehudit, daughter of Be’eri the Hittite, and Basmat, daughter of Eilon the Hittite.” (Bereishit 26:34) When Esau reached his fourth decade, he married two women from the Hittite tribe. The Torah discloses...

BUILDING A FAMILY The central theme of parshat Chayei Sarah is the finding of a wife for Yitzchak. Almost the entire portion is dedicated to this, with the exception of a few verses at the end. The Talmud (Shabbat 31a), basing itself on a verse from the...

EAT TOGETHER, STAY TOGETHER The dramatic events described in parshat Vayeira – the visit of the angels to Avraham and Sarah; the destruction of Sodom; the abduction of Sarah by Abimelech; the birth of Yitzchak; the expulsion of Ishmael; the covenant with Abimelech at Beer Sheva...

ANCIENT BATTLES, NEW WARS A major event in the life of our father Avraham was the war of the four kings and the five kings. In the Torah, this episode occupies an entire chapter (Bereishit 14) of twenty-four verses. When one reads this section, one can...

WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE Noach is a very wet parsha. The words geshem, rain; mayim, water; mabul, flood; maayanot, springs; tehom, depths; and anan, cloud, appear multiple times. Mayim, water, appears no less than twenty-one times! For an entire solar year, the world was covered by the...

THE FAMILIAR AND THE FOREIGN Even though on Simchat Torah we complete the annual reading of the Torah and immediately start the new cycle with only a short pause in between, the two readings could not be more different. The Torah concludes with parshat V’zot Haberacha,...

THE SONG History is a fascinating subject, although I did not feel this way at first. At school I found history profoundly boring and I made sure to drop it as a matric subject as soon as I could. Later, I began to take an interest...

THE FESTIVAL OF OUR REJOICING Sukkot, also known as Chag Ha’asif, the Festival of Ingathering and Zman Simchateinu, the Season of our Rejoicing, recalls the miraculous way God provided for and protected our ancestors for forty years in the wilderness. This supernatural protection was mainly in...