Rabbi Levin's Blog

  What did Moshe do wrong?  Miriam complained to Aaaron about something Moshe did, and they got punished by Hashem for speaking against Moshe. Aaron was stricken with leprosy for a moment (Rashi) and Miriam for a week. What exactly was it that Moshe did, why did they talk about it and what was their mistake?  This story, which is recounted at the end of this week’s Parsha, is one of those perplexing passages that cannot be properly understood without the Oral Torah’s explanations.  A simple translation of the first two verses of chapter 12 reads: 1 Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses regarding the Cushite woman he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman. 2 They said, "Has Hashem spoken only to Moses? Hasn't He spoken to us too?" And  Hashem heard. What could be wrong with a Cushite woman?  When they married, the Torah had not been given, and there was no real concept of intermarriage, because all the Jews “converted” at Mount Sinai. In fact, the wa...

  “Rabbi, no matter how strong and courageous a person feels, no matter how much faith, when you hear that explosion in the sky, and the entire building shakes, your heart leaps out of your chest.”  This is a direct quote from a friend in Israel, during our conversation yesterday.  He was smiling when he said this, and also when he told me that they grab the kids and run into the bomb shelter on a regular basis.  There is cognitive dissonance when we see the press stories and headlines, and when we talk to real people, peace-loving ordinary Jews trying to go about their day.  I stay away from discussions of politics and global hot-button issues, but it’s hard to swallow the clear, open anti-Semitism that we are facing every day.  I have many friends and relatives in Israel, and I hear the stories first hand.  The Rebbe warned us that we are in a double exile, and he explained that this means that not only is it dark, but people think the darkness is li...

By Rabbi Yosef Levin | Last year there was nothing we could do. The great holiday of Shavuot was coming, a time when historically every Jew, man, woman and child, including infants, attends the reading of the Torah. Just as when Hashem gave us the Torah at Mount Sinai 3,333 years ago everyone was present, we recreate that every year. But there was grave danger to life in the streets; the deadly COVID virus closed the Synagogues and prohibited gatherings. In Torah human life takes precedence to almost anything else, so we stayed home to protect life. Here we are a year later and once again our people are facing a grave danger. The virus threat is subsiding and gatherings are happening again, but a different type of threat has reared its ugly head. Once again the enemies of the Jewish people are trying their utmost to destroy Israel, and their friends around the world are spewing their venom unabashedly in the streets of civilized countries. Obviously any direct action has to be left...

  There is always a lot more than meets the eye in the Torah.  Beyond the simple meaning, word usage reveals many hidden secrets, and these have been recorded in the Oral Torah.  An example is the beginning of the second Parsha of this week’s double Parsha reading: “If you walk in My commandments… ( Im bechukotai telechu)” What follows is a list of the many blessings that Hashem promises.  Commandments are not optional.  Throughout the Torah we see words like “command the Jewish people,’ or “tell the Jewish people that they shall…” etc.  While in context perhaps it makes sense to say that the reward is conditional, so the simple meaning is that if we walk in the commandments we will receive the reward, nevertheless there is something to learn from the opening “If you walk in my commandments.”  Perhaps the wording could have been “Walk in my commandments and I will give…”  The term “walk in” My commandments is also a little strange.   In the ...