Rabbi Levin's Blog

What’s the story with the rainbow?  After the Great Flood, Hashem made a covenant with Noach and all his descendants to never again bring a flood that would destroy all humankind in the world. The covenant included that the seasons would never cease.  As a sign of the covenant, Hashem said (Bereshit 9:12,13): “This is the sign of the covenant, which I am placing between Me and between you, and between every living soul that is with you, for everlasting generations.  My rainbow I have placed in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Myself and the earth.”   For many years I wondered about this.  What happened before the flood?  A rainbow is a natural phenomenon that happens when the sun’s rays are refracted by the clouds.  In Bereshit we learned that Hashem created the universe together with all of the laws of nature.  So what happened when the sun’s rays shone through the clouds before the Great Flood?  Did Hashem ch...

“Where are you?”  What a strange question for the omniscient G-d!  Adam and Chava (Eve) had sinned and eaten the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.  Having ingested this fruit, they now had an awareness of the potential for evil and the feeling of shame.  As the verse states (Bereshit 3:7): “And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and made themselves girdles. And they heard the voice of the L-rd G-d going in the garden to the direction of the sun, and the man and his wife hid from before the L-rd G-d in the midst of the trees of the garden.” Then Hashem’s voice calls out: “Ayeka - where are you?”  Then the story continues with the dialogue between Hashem and Adam, and eventually Adam and Chava being expelled from Gan Eden.  The obvious question is, did Hashem not know where they were?   There are various answers to this question.  Rashi, who consolidates the Talmudic a...

  I start with a wish for a “Gut Moed,” a good and joyous holiday.  This is a greeting that many write at the top of any correspondence during Chol Hamoed, the intermediate days of a holiday, to acknowledge that we limit our work during this time, and even limit what we write, as laid out in the Code of Jewish Law.  I am writing these lines on Wednesday, under the influence of the news of the miraculous salvation of many Jews on the Flydubai flight.  I imagine that by the time you read this we will know many more details of the whys and hows, but one thing seems to be sure:  We have witnessed an open miracle.  Miracles don;t have to be splitting the sea.  There are many examples of Hashem tweaking nature in a way that seems natural.  But as we say in the story of Purim, when Mordechai and Esther each “happened to be” in the right place at the right time, and so many other great miracles, everything just “happened to fit” and people and things happ...