Redeeming Relevance / Rabbi Francis Nataf

How important are failed plans and plots, such that the Torah needs to mention any of them at all?

When God gets angry at the people, all Moshe can do is fall on his face in grief at his own responsibility about what was happening-- But Moshe doesn’t stay on his face for long.

Being a real hero is not just about what we do, it is also about when we do it.

One may then raise the question of why should Moshe have gotten married to begin with

The Kohen is the one who will accompany these three alienated individuals and, by so doing, become their connection to the rest of society.

Judging from the sources in the Talmud, there is more than a tinge of ambivalence about the non-Jews being left out of Matan Torah....

Since historical events like these have the potential to challenge our faith, they create a religious imperative to search for God’s loving hand even in the face of tragedy and sorrow. That is an important part of R. Akiva’s legacy as well as that of R. Shimon’s.

As we continue to speak less, we will continue to have less room for defilement… and for sanctity

It is well known that one of the causes for tzara’at is evil speech... However, the far more powerful example of the power of speech is the Torah’s conditioning the legal existence of tzara’at upon the priest’s declaration.

it seems hard to understand how the rabbis could come right back with the conclusion that Nadav and Avihu were greater than Moshe and Aharon

Peshat vs. Drash

Dressing up

Exposure to evil prevents us from an illusion of pleasant stability--and stability is the very thing that prevents the good from getting better.

The incense that burned on this altar has always attracted special interest for its unusual life-giving properties

The measure of things...

I believe that the Torah is telling us something more nuanced. I think it is telling us that God wants the people to listen to Moshe even when he is wrong!

Throughout history, the Jews have not had many friends Faced with a hostile world, when they came across a truly righteous gentile, it was a...

Leading by example must be calculatedly visible, not only from a point of view of where it is done, but even when and how it is done. Doing something privately is not an act of leadership.

The experience of the generation that came out of Egypt shows us that the clarity we think we so much want from God would actually hurt us more than it would help us.

Moshe’s complaint to God is that even though he would have the best human understanding of the Divine will, he had difficulty bringing it down to regular people.

Shabbat Shalom

While there is an important place for reflecting about past mistakes, that is only with regards to preparing ourselves to do better in the future.

Neither Yosef nor Yehudah panicked. They did not know how the next parsha would begin, but they did know that the larger story had to have a happy ending.

Do "clothes make the woman"?

Ya'akov's youth resembles that of his passive and isolated[…] father, his adult life resembles the trials and tribulations of Abraham among the nations.

If we are constantly looking for the ideal, we may never find it, but if we start doing the possible, we may find that the ideal is just down the road

I am convinced that meeting Yitzchak was a much more intense experience than meeting Avraham.

We should remember that though Avraham was the first Jew, Yitzchak was the first born Jew. In other words, a certain paradigm of Jewish existence is created by Yitzchak’s birth, a birth in total contradiction to the physical reality of other men.

Shabbat Shalom

What does this have to do Yom Kippur?