Rabbi Levin's Blog

By Rabbi Yosef Levin |   Do you celebrate getting a haircut?  I guess on some level it is a nice event, especially during the pandemic, but it’s not exactly a celebration.  Nevertheless tomorrow, this Friday, having a haircut is part of a celebration.  This is because beginning on Pesach, we were forbidden from having haircuts during the period known as “Sefirat Haomer,” the counting of the Omer.  We count 49 days from Pesach to Shavuot, recreating what our ancestors did when they left Egypt in anticipation of the Receiving of the Torah at Sinai.  Many years later, a great calamity befell the 24,000 students of the great sage Rabbi Akiva, and they all died during this period.  They stopped dying on the 33rd day of the Omer.  This day, known as Lag Baomer (the Hebrew letters lamed gimel have the numerical value of 33), therefore is celebrated as a holiday after the preceding period of mourning, and one of the expressions of the end of mourning...

By Rabbi Yosef Levin | Love your fellow as yourself – perhaps the most famous words in the Torah.  We read them in the Torah this Shabbat.  A great ideal that I think every group and religion espouses, at least officially.  But what does it mean really?  How is it possible to truly love a stranger as we love ourselves?  For some of us the question is:  how can we love our acquaintances or some family members as we love ourselves?  They are after all not me!  The Torah is not a book of suggestions or lofty poetic concepts.  The Torah – literally translated as teaching - is our guide to life on earth as is expected of us by our Creator, the “user manual for the world,” so to speak.  So this means that the commandment to love our fellow is real and expected of each of us. We can gain some insight into the answer by understanding the story the Talmud tells about the great sage Hillel.  A person came to him and asked him to teach him the...

 Rabbi Yosef Levin |  “The Ethics of Our Fathers” (in Hebrew Pirkei Avot) is a tractate of Mishna with six chapters full of fascinating advice and insights into living an ethical life.  It is customary to study this tractate on Shabbat between Pesach and Shavuot, one chapter for each of the six Shabbats.  In fact, the original Mishna has five chapters, and the sages of the Talmud added a sixth chapter – as they write “in the language of the Mishna” – in order to fill all of the six weeks. There are several reasons given for this study.  One is to prepare for the Giving of the Torah on Shavuot.  Our Sages taught that “derech eretz kadma Latorah” – ethical behavior comes before Torah. Therefore in the weeks leading up to receiving the Torah, we study ethics.  Another explanation is that as the world warms up in the spring and summer, our emotions blossom and we tend to be drawn to behavior that may not be so ethical, so we study Pirkei Avot to remind us ...