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Only when we negate our egos and acknowledge that the goodness and beracha in our lives comes not from our own independent efforts but from Hashem, can we then receive more beracha.

In this passage, three different words are used for “rope” or “string”: chevel, tikvah, and chut. This essay attempts to trace the etymology of those words, seeking to clarify exactly how they relate to one another.

He continued with his barrage of insults, which The Jewish Press surely would find unfit to print, and this was in front of the whole congregation. Thousands of men became silent, trying to understand what Reb Chaim did to deserve such treatment.

Once we understand the concept of time, and the distinct opportunity and importance of tapping into the unique theme of each point of time in the systematic process of ascension, we must delve into the specific theme that Shavuos presents.

As franchisees of Shell Oil, the Raffs had to sell a certain amount of fuel to be eligible for loans and other company benefits. Alas, a filling station that cannot pump gas is what rain is to a garden wedding.

We do not need to prove ourselves in order to receive a blessing from G-d. All we need to know is that His face is turned toward us.

The Three Days of Preparation and the Festival of the Giving of our Torah indeed come once a year, but there is a small-scale version of this preparation and of Matan Torah every day.

Various prohibitions in the Torah use the word lo when mentioning a proscribed act while the rabbis instead use the word bal.

My childhood was filled with a tremendous amount of stress and abuse. By the time I was three years old, that stress had manifested in a physical illness, Crohn’s disease.

The Jews reckoned that the giving of the Torah, the fiftieth level, was so sublime and beyond their reach that the best preparation would be to sleep and thus enable the soul to be unfettered by the physical body.

Although we likely take it for granted that berachos are a pillar of our daily lives, they have not always existed as they do now. Until the Second Temple era, there was no standard set of berachos or prayer.

The service of the Priests in the Temple was accompanied by silence. The Levites sang in the courtyard, but the Priests – unlike their counterparts in other ancient religions – neither sang nor spoke while offering the sacrifices.

The word midbar appears approximately 270 times in the Bible and is often attached to a proper place-name, like Midbar Sinai, Midbar Sin, Midbar Paran, Midbar Shur, Midbar Kadesh, Midbar Damesek, Midbar Ein-Gedi, and Midbar Yehuda.

His oldest daughter, aka my granddaughter, had given the bright orange rubber bracelet to him several days earlier, and not wishing to insult her, he was still wearing it. It had been distributed by Hatzalah and their number was printed prominently on it.

The Previous Rebbe explained that “Pesach Sheni teaches us that Nito Kein Farfallen – Nothing is ever lost: it’s never too late!

If someone were to ask you to prove that you exist, you would seriously struggle to do so. One’s own existence simply cannot be rationally proven.

Where families are strong, a sense of altruism exists that can be extended outward, from family to friends to neighbors to community and from there to the nation as a whole.

As mentioned last week, the Bible actually uses both regimah and sekilah in the case of Achan (Joshua 7:25). Rashi explains that this is because Achan himself was subjected to regimah, while the animals he took as booty were subjected to sekilah (see also Targum and Radak there).

While, it’s very sad that so many people have to wait so long for their bashert, predominantly, it isn’t their fault. We try to find reasons why people aren’t married and tell them if only they tried this segulah, that event, that matchmaker, this person… they would be married.

Even with night school, Avraham remained only nominally educated, but he was high on motivation. So high that he taught himself to become a CPA and then returned to the very office where he had started, at the very lowest rung.

When everyone studies the same thing on the same day, their learning is united across continents.

Philosophy and logic are useful, often necessary, tools for approaching spiritual truths.

The account in Deuteronomy is about society. Moses at the end of his life told the next generation where they had come from, where they were going to, and the kind of society they were to construct.

The term sekilah appears in two instances of men who were stoned to death: Achan, who illegally took the spoils of war from Jericho (Joshua 7:25); and Naboth, against whom Jezebel and Ahab conspired to take his vineyard (I Kings 23:10-15).

The Mishneh Torah was not written only for great Torah scholars. The Rambam writes that he composed it in a clear, unambiguous style for all Jews – k’katan k’gadol – for the small as for the great.

The concept of seven refers to that which connects all the pieces together into a single unit. This is the unifying center, the unifying force that creates a physical form and vessel from the six disparate parts.

Moses’ intercession with G-d did not, in and of itself, induce a penitential mood among the people. Yes, he performed a series of dramatic acts to demonstrate to the people their guilt. But we have no evidence that they internalized it.

Although the word shein usually means “tooth,” sometimes it refers to things made out of ivory, which is a material made out of teeth.

Iyar represents the return to the mundane – going back to work after Yom Tov. At this point, it becomes difficult to infuse our Torah learning and mitzvah doing with warmth in a cold and mundane world.

What was the connection between the internal Jewish struggle and the Christian burning of Jewish books?