Ki Sisa – Wealth Recycles

A famous palindromic word in the Torah is venasnu, in the second pasuk in the parsha. It means “and each man must give,” in the context of contributing the machatzis hashekel, which the Torah describes as “monetary atonement for [the giver’s] life” (Shemos, 30:12). The word reads the same forward and backward.

The Baal HaTurim sees that as a hint to the Gemara’s contention that one should “tithe so that you will become wealthy” (Taanis, 9a), that giving charity will result in the giver’s benefit .

The Vilna Gaon discerned a somewhat different message in the palindrome, namely, that life plays havoc with fortunes, and therefore giving tzedakah to others will merit others’ supporting us or our descendants in our times of need. What goes around, in other words, comes around. 

He cites the Gemara in Shabbos 151b:

“Rabbi Ḥiyya said to his wife: When a poor person comes to the house, be quick to give him bread so that they will be quick to give bread to your children. She said to him: Are you cursing your children? 

He said to her: the yeshiva of Rabbi Yishmael taught that galgal hu shechozer ba’olam – it is a ‘cycle that repeats in the world’.”

In other words, wealth and destitution come and go, in individual lives and in family lines. Great fortunes are made and lost, and rags can lead to riches.

Media mogul and billionaire Oprah Winfrey was born into an impoverished family in Mississippi; she went to college on a scholarship.

Socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, who inherited billions from her art dealer husband, died dependent on $900 Social Security payments.

And those people’s descendants might find themselves in entirely different statuses from their antecedents. Wealth recycles, something to remember when approached by a beggar. 

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Tetzaveh – When Obscenity is Apt

The imperatives of civility and refined speech are strongly stressed in the Talmud and in halacha. Yet, like all ideals, even those have their limits. An exception – the only one – to the imperative to avoid verbalizing crude characterizations is when it comes to idolatry.

As Rav Nachman says (Megillah 25b): “All mocking obscenity is forbidden except with reference to idol worship.” And the examples the Gemara offers are almost all about defecation.  The characterization of all idolatry as “avodas gilulim” in various places in Tanach may also be intended as a scatalogical reference, since galal is a word for biological waste.

And then there is the specific case of  Pe’or, the major idolatry whose entire service involves hallowing the act of defecation itself.

Rav Shimon Schwab, zt”l, brings up Rav Nachman’s dictum to suggest an intriguing understanding of one of the bigdei kehunah, the “priestly garments.” Rashi points out that it seems to him that the garment is apron-like, but worn in reverse of how aprons are usually worn, tied in the front with the bib in the back.

The Gemara, Rav Schwab reminds us, assigns an atonement that is effected by each of the bigdei kehunah. The ephod atones for the sin of idolatry (Arachin 16a).

Idolatry, notes Rav Schwab, is ultimately about worship of the physical, about veneration of the base. And that is why, as per Rav Nachman’s statement, it is derided by the navi, and permitted to be derided by us, as scatalogical in its essence. 

And so, he then posits, it is fitting that the ephod, the beged kehunah that atones for the sin of idolatry, is worn, oddly, in a way that covers the wearer’s lower back, subtly recalling its particular role among the bigdei kehunah.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Terumah — Sanctifiers

The word mikdash in the pasuk “They shall make for Me a mikdash so that I may dwell among them” (Shemos 25:8) should, by reason, be mishkan, as various meforshim point out. It is, after all, a directive to build the mishkan, the temporary sanctuary not the final edifice, the Beis Hamikdash.

Another anomaly in the pasuk is the change of object, from “They shall make for me a mikdash” to “and I will dwell in them.”

The simple approach to that latter incongruity is that the second phrase is, in effect, a new sentence, and that its object (the people) is different from the object of the first sentence (the mikdash). So that the pasuk is rendered: “Let them make me a mikdash. [And that structure will make it possible for me] to dwell among [the people].”

What occurs, though, is that a key to the second curiosity may lie in the earlier problem, the unexpected use of mikdash for the mishkan.

To wit: The mishkan may not actually be a mikdash, but kiddush is what it does: It effects a kiddush Hashem. It declares Hashem’s glory to the people and the world.

We Jews are charged with being mekadshei Hashem, too. Not only, when required, to die al kiddush Hashem, but also to live al kiddush Hashem, to proclaim, by our demeanor and deeds, the glory of Hashem to other Jews and beyond.

So perhaps the use of the word mikdash for the mishkan is meant not to define the structure but, rather, to describe what it does. And the second part of the pasuk could be alluding to the fact that what the mishkan does – namely, creates kiddush Hashem – is what we as Jews are likewise to do in every era of history, that we are to be walking, talking batei mikdash – mekadshei Hashem.

And so, as a result, Hashem says, vishachanti bisocham, I will dwell in them, in their essences, in who they are, mekadshei Hashem.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Mishpatim – A Puzzling Prohibition

There’s something puzzling about the law prohibiting a judge to take a bribe (Shemos 23:8).

The law, of course, is aimed at ensuring that a decision will be made without prejudice. As the pasuk continues, “for bribery blinds the clear-sighted, and perverts the words of justice.”

And the Gemara (Kesuvos 105a) states that, beyond the obvious wrong in a judge’s favoring one litigant over the other, the Torah is teaching us that a remuneration is sinful “even if the purpose of the bribe is to ensure that one acquit the innocent and convict the guilty,” where “there is no concern at all that justice will be perverted.”

That, too, is understandable. If one litigant offers money or service to a judge, even in exchange for only the latter’s impartial and best judgment, there is still the fact that the judge, by accepting the offer, may favor the offerer.

But the Gemara seems to say, too, that a bribe “to acquit the innocent and convict the guilty” is forbidden even if it is offered by both litigants (see Derisha, Choshen Mishpat 9:1). Presumably offered simultaneously, where there isn’t even the fact of one party being the first to offer, thereby prejudicing the case.

Why should that be? Nothing is changed by such a joint bribe to deliver a proper judgment.

It could be that there is no logical answer. That mishpat, judgment, is, in the end, a chok, a Divine ordinance, and, no less than other laws in the Torah that defy human reason, so must  judgment of court cases follow the Torah’s direction, logical to our minds or not. But the pasuk’s providing a reason for the prohibition – that bribery “blinds the clear-sighted” – would seem to require some rationale here. 

The best I can come up with is that the entry of any other factor – money or any other benefit – beyond the testimony of the litigants and the pertinent prescribed laws somehow pollutes the process of adjudication. Mishpat must be executed in purity, with no extraneous elements present. Anything less, puzzling though the fact may be, somehow perverts a judgment.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Yisro – Iron and Irony

I’ve long fixated on a phrase Yisro uses. When he rejoins Moshe and joins Klal Yisrael, he declares why, although he had been a guru in countless cults, he came to the conclusion that “Hashem is greater than all the powers.” 

“Because,” he explains, “of the thing that [the Mitzriyim] plotted against them [i.e. Klal Yisrael]” (Shemos 18:11).

Rashi, in explanation, cites the Mechilta: “… the Mitzriyim thought to destroy Yisrael by water and they were themselves destroyed by water.” And he quotes Rabi Elazar (Sotah 11a), punning on the word “plotted,” which can also mean “cooked,” that “in the pot that they cooked up they ended up being cooked.”

What strikes me is that it is irony – here, that the means the Mitzriyim employed to kill Jews ended up as the agent of their own downfall – that moves Yisro to perceive the Divine hand.  

It is such a Purim thought. In Megillas Esther, too, although Hashem’s name is entirely absent, His hand is perceptible through the irony that saturates the story: Haman turns up at just the wrong place at just the wrong time, and ends up being tasked with arranging honors for his nemesis Mordechai. All the villain’s careful planning ends up upended, and he is hanged on the very gallows he prepared for Mordechai. Haman’s riches, according to the Book of Esther, were given to Mordechai. V’nahafoch hu, “and it was turned upside down.”

Amalek may fight with iron, but he is defeated with irony.

Shortly after Germany’s final defeat in WWII, an American army major, Henry Plitt accosted a short, bearded artist painting on an easel in an Austrian town and asked him his name. “Joseph Sailer,” came the reply.

Plitt later recounted: “I don’t know why I said [it, but] I said, ‘And what about Julius Streicher?’” – referring to the most vile and antisemitic of Nazi propagandists.

“Ya, der bin ich,” the man responded. “Yes, that is me.” And it was.

A reporter later told Major Plitt that, had only “a guy named Cohen or Goldberg or Levy… captured this arch-anti-Semite, what a great story it would be.”

Major Plitt, in fact, was Jewish.

Stars and Stripes in late 1945 reported that Streicher’s possessions were converted to cash and used to create an agricultural training school for Jews intending to settle in Eretz Yisrael. 

And when Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, his final words, shouted just before the trap sprang open, were: “Purim Fest 1946!” – a rather odd thing to say on an October morning.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Bishalach – The Nation Newborn

I’ve always found it delightful that the term we use for when the amniotic sac ruptures, releasing the fluid within and beginning the birth process, is “breaking of the waters.” Because the birth of the Jewish nation, after its gestation for centuries in Mitzrayim, also involved the “breaking” of the waters of the Yam Suf.

The comparison is not whimsical. A newborn is empty of worldly experiences and intelligence, unable to speak or move in willful ways. What it is, though, is a dynamo of potential. So was the nation that was comprised of our ancestors. They had sunk to the penultimate rung of tum’ah in Mitzrayim and they still pined, when trapped at the sea, to return to their nation-prison. Their worthiness lay in their potential, which began to emerge weeks later at Har Sinai.

The Maharal (in his Gur Aryeh supercommentary on Rashi [Beraishis 26:34] and in his sefer Ner Mitzvah) assigns a stage of human life to each of the year’s seasons.  We tend to associate nature’s awakening in spring with childhood, the heat of summer with petulant youth, autumn with slowed-down middle age and cold, barren winter with life’s later years.

The Maharal, however, describes things differently.  He regards autumn, when leaves are shed and nature slows down, as corresponding to older age; summer’s warmth, to our productive middle-years; spring, to reflect the vibrancy of youth.  And winter, to… childhood.

It seems counterintuitive, to put it mildly. Winter is, after all, stark, empty of vibrancy, activity and growth. Childhood is, or should be, full of joy, restlessness and development.

But spring’s new plants and leaves don’t appear suddenly out of nothingness. The buds from which they emerge were developing for months; the sap in the seemingly dormant trees was rising even as the thermometer’s mercury fell.  The evidence of life that presents itself with the approach of Pesach was developing since Chanukah.  In the deadest days of deepest winter, one can see branches’ buds, biding their time, readying to explode into maturity when commanded.

Winter, in other words, evokes potential.  And so, what better metaphor could there be for childhood, when the elements that will emerge one day and congeal into an adult roil inside a miniature prototype?  When chaos and bedlam may seem to be the norm but when potential is at its most powerful?  “The Child,” after all, as Wordsworth famously put it, is indeed “father of the Man.”  Every accomplished person was once an unbridled toddler.

And we read of the potential that lay in our ancestors at the “breaking of the waters” of the sea while winter still envelops us. And as the days are few until Tu B’Shvat, the Rosh Hashanah of the trees.

© 2025 Rabbi Avi Shafran