Rabbi Levin's Blog

There are always questions that come up when we study Torah.  Every word of Torah, including the stories, teaches us how to live as Jews and fulfill our mission on earth.  There are many layers of meaning to each word, and asking questions is an important part of learning.  There are some questions that I like to call head-scratchers.  We read something and wonder what on earth it means, what the purpose is and what we can learn from it.  Or we read a story and scratch our heads and wonder why the story happened and what it is teaching us.  One such example is the story of Avraham in relation to the city of Sedom.    The people of Sedom and the surrounding four cities were so wicked and corrupt that Hashem decided to destroy them.  There are many stories told about the cruelty of those people, the way they mistreated any visitor and their horribly corrupt system of “justice.”  The last straw, the Torah teaches us, was when they caught a ...

I’m thinking about how lonely Avraham and Sarah must have been. It’s always hard to come to a new place where you know nobody and nobody knows you, all the more so at an advanced age. This is true today, when we are able to keep in touch with our friends and family, and we can do research in advance about the place we are going to and the people there. Let’s imagine what things were like for Avraham and Sarah. Avraham was 75 and Sarah was 65. They had a large following where they lived in Charan. Hashem tells them to leave their home and go to “a place that I will show you,” not even telling them where they would end up. Now it’s true that initially they did have many of their students come along with them, but then when they got to Canaan there was a famine and they were forced to move once again to Egypt. (This was one of the ten tests of faith that Hashem gave Avraham and Sarah. As soon as they came to the place where Hashem led them, they were forced to leave.). Now they go to anot...

There are facts and there are interpretations of facts. We often confuse the two.  And the truth is that we interpret facts based on our own feelings.  The Torah teaches us a powerful message about this relating to the Great Flood.  Hashem decides to destroy the world with the exception of a family and one or seven pairs of each living species.  Then after the flood, when Noach brings offerings in gratitude to Hashem, He makes a covenant never again to destroy the entire world.  What is uncanny is that the reason that Hashem used to destroy, is the same reason He made a covenant to never again destroy. The words in each case are almost identical.   (Genesis 6): 5 The Lord saw that the evil of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of his heart was only evil all the time. Then in chapter 8, after the flood, Hashem states in the covenant:   21 And the Lord smelled the pleasant aroma, and the Lord said to Himself, "I will no longer curse the ...