Rabbi Levin's Blog

  A talking donkey?  OK, we know that there have been great miracles, like the sea splitting and fire enclosed hail raining down over Egypt.  Each miracle had a purpose.  A principle of Torah is that Hashem wants us to live within nature and follow the laws of nature.  Miracles happen when necessary, to show that the laws of nature are in Hashem’s hands and can be changed at will, or for a specific purpose, but why the talking donkey?   You may know the story that we read in this week’s Parsha, Balak, of the anti-Semitic prophet Bilaam who was on his way to curse the Jews as they were about to enter the land of Israel.  His donkey sees an angel with a drawn sword standing in the way and turns away from the main road in fear.  Bilaam did not see the angel, and he hit his donkey.  The angel came again on a narrow pathway and the donkey, squeezing by to pass the angel, scraped Bilaam’s leg against a wall.  Bilaam hit the donkey again. ...

  One would expect a priest to be aloof, especially a High Priest.  We are talking about the Jewish High Priest, who spends almost all his time in the Temple (or the Sanctuary in the desert), a spiritual person whose entire life is devoted to holiness.  Perhaps we might think that he spent his days with other, like minded holy men, as the stereotype goes.  Yet we find that the first High Priest, Aaron, was not aloof at all.  When the Torah describes Aaron’s death in the Parsha we read this week, it states   (Bamidbar 20:29) :    The whole congregation saw that Aaron had expired, and the entire house of Israel wept for Aaron for thirty days.  Rashi comments:    the entire house of Israel: [both] the men and the women, for Aaron had pursued peace; he promoted love between disputing parties and between man and wife.   Every person in the nation was familiar with Aaron.    Aaron did not remain purely in the rari...

True leadership!  It is rare, and when we see it we marvel.  Moshe (Moses) was the consummate leader, and in the story of the rebellion of Korach that we read this week, we see how great a leader he was.  It is almost unbelievable how Moshe behaved toward two of the leaders of the rebellion that Korach instigated in the desert.  I assume you are familiar with the story.  Korach questioned Moshe’s leadership, claiming he was doing things on his own accord and not by command of Hashem.  Korach wanted to be the High Priest, and unified a  large group of leaders to join his rebellion.  Two of the instigators of the rebellion were Datan and Aviram, brothers who jumped on the bandwagon and used the opportunity to once again fight against Moshe.  I say once again, because Datan and Aviram had fought against Moshe since he was a young man.  According to our tradition, they were the ones who turned Moshe in to Pharaoh when he killed the Egyptian ...

It was a disaster the first time, so just go ahead and do it again!  One of the strangest stories in our history is the second set of spies that were sent into Israel, this time by Yehoshua (Joshua).  We all know about the first set of 12 spies that Moshe sent.  The Jewish people were in the desert preparing to capture and inherit the land of Israel, and they made a request of Moshe: "Let us send men ahead of us so that they will search out the land for us and bring us back word by which route we shall go up, and to which cities we shall come (Devarim 1:22) ."  Moshe agreed, and sent leaders of each tribe to go and scout the land.  On the long awaited day, the spies came back and gave their report to the people:  The land is good, but the people are strong and the cities are fortified. Forget it, we can’t succeed.  The people ignored all the miracles Hashem had performed for them, lost their faith and cried all night. Therefore, Hashem decreed that the...

  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...