This week’s portion begins with Sarah’s passing at age 127. The Torah reports that her years were all equally righteous and that Sarah lived a perfect life. Now it became Avraham’s responsibility to bury her in an appropriate place. It…
Pet peeves. We all have them, and we can’t really explain why we have them. They are the little things that could go unnoticed by most people, but seem to be particularly outsized grievances to us. People who walk slowly…
This week’s Parsha ends with Avraham’s last and most difficult test: the binding of Yitzchak, the Akeida. Hashem told Avraham (Genesis 22:2): ב) וַיֹּאמֶר קַח נָא אֶת בִּנְךָ אֶת יְחִידְךָ אֲשֶׁר אָהַבְתָּ אֶת יִצְחָק וְלֶךְ לְךָ אֶל אֶרֶץ הַמֹּרִיָּה וְהַעֲלֵהוּ…
There’s a dial somewhere, that spans the continuum from None to Enough. It describes how much people work out, and 99.9% of the populations gets dialed in somewhere in the middle. But there are select individuals who break the dial…
This week’s portion introduces us to our Forefather Avraham. Maimonides (Laws of Idol Worship 1:3) tells us of Avraham’s beginning and his greatness. ג) כיון שנגמל איתן זה התחיל לשוטט בדעתו והוא קטן והתחיל לחשוב ביום ובלילה והיה תמיה…
When I think of jellyfish, I think of the bright colorful gummy candies I used to eat as a kid. But when I think of swimming in the ocean, I think of the living jellyfish. As a matter of fact,…
In this week’s portion, Noach, we learn about the first two of the three famous “generations” spoken about by our Sages. They are (1) theדור המבול - the “Generation of the Flood,” and (2) the דור הפלגה, the - “Generation…
The year 1888 was not an uneventful year. The National Geographic Society was founded, and began telling a hungry public about the wonders of people and places all over the world. De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. was founded in South…
Parshat Vayechi תשפד When thumbing through the pages of the Chumash, have you ever wondered what the פפפ or ססס at the end of almost every parsha in the Torah mean? The פ stands for פתוחה, an open paragraph,…
Sixteen years ago, I visited China for the first and so far only time. The purpose of the trip was to attend the dedication celebration of a Torah scroll a friend of mine had purchased for the Chabad of Pudong…