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Derasha Parshat Beha'alotcha

06/20/2025 12:00:00 AM

Jun20

We altered the fifth Aliya this morning to have it end in the paragraph before the inverted letter Nuns.  This is the suggestion of a commentator from a few hundred years ago.  The general principle is that Aliyot are supposed to end on a positive note.  The normal place we end that Aliya does not seem like a terrible moment but it does fall in a space where the commentators say things have already started to go...Read more...

Derasha Parshat Nasso

06/10/2025 12:00:00 AM

Jun10

This is the orderly part of the book of Bamidbar.  Everything is being prepared for the march away from the mountain and toward the entrance to Eretz Yisrael.  Nothing untoward has happened yet.  The trouble doesn’t start until next week.

 

The order of the preparation has a logic to it -- everyone is organized and accounted for;  everyone is placed in marching order.  The...Read more...

Derasha Parshat Emor

05/20/2025 12:00:00 AM

May20

There are lots of Amirot -- lots of acts of speaking -- in the beginning of the Parasha.  It says “Hashem spoke to Moshe,” which is normal, but then He tells him to say to the Kohanim, saying.”  Why so much “saying”?  Rashi famously says that it implores Moshe to warn the “Gedolim about the K’tanim.”  This is usually taken to mean that the adult Kohanim have to start to teach the young Kohanim...Read more...

Boris Rashkovskiy, a"h

05/18/2025 10:00:00 PM

May18

Boris was born to Berl & Ida Rashkovskiy, in Moscow in 1936.  His brother Nahum, who just passed away a few months ago, followed a few years later.  The central event of Boris’s childhood, which he repeated often, was the death of his father after Germany turned on the Russian army in Operation Barbarossa in 1941.  Although his mother ultimately re-married, and had a third child, Sima or Simcha, his father’s...Read more...

Tue, June 24 2025 28 Sivan 5785