Category Archives: Holidays

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

Amoebas, Aardvarks and Goats

When one thinks about it, it’s clear that the Torah’s most fundamental message is that our lives are meaningful. That what we do makes a difference. And when one thinks about it a bit more, one realizes that the idea – that we are powerful enough for our actions to count in the cosmos – is really most shocking. 

It’s a truth, unfortunately, that’s not embraced by a considerable chunk of humanity, by countless people who choose to view their existence as nothing more than the product of a long series of meaningless, chance happenings. And what they do or don’t do, as essentially meaningless.

I have often wondered how, despite that delusive belief, such rejecters of human purpose justify their glaringly contradictory claim that ethics or morality exist. If humans are not qualitatively different from amoebas, why should there be any more meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather? Why should there be any more import to right and wrong than to right and left?

Some of the “we’re all just the detritus of random events” crowd try to deflect those starkly obvious questions by invoking the idea of a “social contract,” the agreement of all people to behave a certain way in order to ensure everyone a greater likelihood of survival and happiness. 

But a social contract, to the extent that it can actually work, is at best only a practical tool, not a serious imperative. Only if there is a Creator in the larger picture, offering our behavior consequential meaning, can there be true import to human life, placing it on a plane above that of aphids and aardvarks.

Even from a purely secular perspective, seeing life itself, let alone human life, as the product of chance is absurd. Sir Fred Hoyle, who was a famed astronomer but also a deep thinker about science, called the notion of life’s random emergence “nonsense of a high order.” He embraced no religion but felt compelled nonetheless to compare the likelihood of the random emergence of life to that of “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard… [and] assembl[ing] a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

The recognition of human life’s momentousness is poignantly pertinent to Yom Kippur.

Because, when the Beis Hamikdosh stood, as we recount and envision during our Yom Kippur tefillas Musaf, two indistinguishable goats were brought before the Kohein Gadol, who placed randomly-pulled lots on the heads of the animals.  One lot read “to Hashem” and the other “to Azazel” – the name of a steep cliff in a barren desert.

The first was offered as a holy korban; the second, taken to the aforementioned cliff and thrown off, dying unceremoniously, as the Mishna (Yoma 6:6) recounts, battered to pieces before even reaching the bottom.

The goat that is brought as a korban – the word means “closeness maker,” as it brings the offerer closer to Hashem – implies recognition of the idea that we mortals are beholden to a divine mandate.  And the counter-goat, fated to a desolate, unholy place, may imply a perspective of life as pointless, lacking higher purpose.

Strangely, the Azazel-goat is described by the Torah as carrying away Klal Yisrael’s sins. What might that mean?

Consider: The ability to sin stems from not fully realizing how meaningful our lives are; if we truly felt the power that inheres in our actions, we could never do wrong. Resh Lakish in fact said as much when he observed (Sotah 3a) that “A person does not sin unless a spirit of madness enters him.” Sin’s roots lie in the madness born of our doubting our significance.

And so it’s not outside the realm of the reasonable to imagine that the sight of the doomed-to-Azazel goat being led to an aimless, arbitrary death – the opposite of its erstwhile partner’s honored, sacred one – might serve to remind us of the stark difference between the two diametric attitudes toward human life. 

Pondering our lives’ meaningfulness on the holiest day of the Jewish year would thus be most appropriate, generating thoughts of teshuvah, of re-embracing the truth of our power Hashem has given us, “carrying away” our sins.

G’mar chasimah tovah.

© 2024 Ami Magazine

Pondering the Season – Electoral and Jewish

You probably think that there isn’t anything that an impending presidential election might have to say to us about the aseres yimei teshuvah. Ah, but there is.

Those of us old enough to have been observers of politics back in 2004 might recall the now largely-forgotten “Dean Scream.” Howard Dean, then the governor of Vermont, was seeking the Democratic nomination for President. He blew his chances in a matter of seconds. 

It was at the end of an address that, in an attempt to show his enthusiasm, he let loose a roar somewhere between a jihadi war cry and a leafblower.  That decision to express himself in that way left the public – a public that, at the time, still expected a degree of decorum from candidates – wide-eyed with something other than wonder. Some called it the candidate’s “I Have a Scream” speech.  

Then there were other blown-in-a-moment presidential campaigns, like that of Maine governor and four-term Senator Edmund Muskie, who, in 1972, defending his wife’s reputation, seemed to shed tears, which some American voters felt disqualified him. There was also Gary Hart’s 1988 marital indiscretion (ah, times were so different back then) and, the same year, Michael Dukakis’s donning of an ill-fitting combat helmet, which helped sink his bid for the White House. 

See where I’m going? No? Understandable. Let me spell it out.

Every one of us, too, in our personal lives, comes face to face at times with opportunities of our own that, wrongly handled, can lead to places we don’t want to go. And, rightly handled, benefit our spiritual growth.

And we are vying for something much more important than a mere nomination for public office. We’re in the race to fulfill our missions in this world. 

In the bustle of everyday life, it is all too easy to forget that decisions we make, sometimes almost unthinkingly, might be crucial ones, that seemingly minor forks in the roads of our lives can, as Robert Frost famously put it, make all the difference.

Seizing an opportunity to do something good changes one’s world. Letting the opportunity go by unaddressed – which is also choice, after all – does the same. Offering an encouraging word can make a great difference. Doing the opposite can be as self-destructive as Howard Dean’s scream. 

As Chazal teach us, “One can acquire his universe” – the one that counts: the world-to-come – or, chalilah, “destroy” it “in a single moment.”

We can even, through sheer determination, create our own critical moments.  Consider the case of the “conditional husband.”

A Jewish marriage is effected by the proposal of a man to a woman – the declaration of the woman’s kiddushin, or “specialness” to her husband – followed by the acceptance by the woman of a coin or item of worth from her suitor.  If the declaration is made on the condition that an assertion is true, the marriage is valid only if the assertion indeed is.  Thus, if a man betrothes a woman on the condition that he drives an electric car, or still has his own teeth, unless he does, they aren’t married.

The Gemara teaches that if a man conditions his offer of marriage on the fact that he is “a tzaddik,” even if the fellow’s reputation isn’t flawless, the marriage must be assumed to be valid (and requires a gett to dissolve it).

Why?  Because the man “may have contemplated teshuvah” just before his proposal.

That determined choice of a moment, in other words, if sincere, would have transformed the man completely, placed him on an entirely new life-road.  The lesson is obvious: Each of us can transform himself or herself – at any point we choose – through sheer, sincere will.

And potentially transformative situations that present themselves are hardly uncommon.  When we make a decision about where to live or what shul to attend – not to mention more obviously critical decisions like whom to marry or which schools our children will attend – we are defining our futures, and those of others.  We do ourselves well when we recognize the import of our decisions, and accord them the gravity they are due.

Ksiva vachasima tovah!

© 2024 Ami Magazine

Nitzavim – How to Perform a Miracle

As is the case with any question about nature, when a child asks why the sky is blue, the answer you give (here, that blue light is scattered more than other colors) will elicit a subsequent why (because it travels as shorter, smaller waves); and then that answer will yield yet another question: Why is that? Eventually, the final answer is “That’s just the way it is!” In other words, it’s Hashem’s will.

Rav Dessler famously explained that all of nature, no less than a sea splitting, is ultimately a miracle, an act of G-d. What we call miraculous is just a divine-directed happening we’re not used to seeing.

The season of teshuvah, in our Torah-reading cycle, coincides with our parshah, in which we read: “And you will return to Hashem…” (Devarim 30:2).

The most fundamental element of nature, arguably, is time. The past is past, and time proceeds into the future relentlessly. But time itself, too, is a divine creation. Commenting on the Torah’s first words, which introduce Hashem’s creation, “In the beginning…,” Seforno writes: “[the beginning] of time, the first, indivisible, moment.”

And time, too, like the rest of nature, can be manipulated by Hashem’s will. Indeed, as it happens, by our own as well.

Because teshuvah, Chazal teach us, can change past intentional sins into unintended ones. Even, if the teshuvah is propelled by love of Hashem, into merits.

Is that not a changing of the past, the temporal equivalent of splitting a sea?

And that ability to manipulate time may be why, on Rosh Hashanah, unlike on every other Jewish holiday, the moon, the “clock” by which we count the months of the year, is not visible. What’s being telegraphed may be the idea that time need not limit us, if we properly engage the charge of the season.

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Ki Seitzei – Butterflies and Baker’s Bread

The ben sorer umoreh is judged al sheim sofo – because of where, on the evidence of the present, the youth’s life is headed. And his very existence, Chazal say, is the result of his mother’s having become “hated” by her husband. And that fact itself was born of the man having married an eishes yifas to’ar. And so, as the Midrash Tanchuma quoted by Rashi notes (Devarim, 21:11), the order of the topics in the parsha is meaningful.

The fact that “one small thing can lead to more significant ones” – as the old proverb has it, “For want of a nail… the kingdom was lost”  – seems to be a theme here.

The idea is whimsically called “the butterfly effect” – evoking the fancy that the flutter of an insect’s wings could eventually affect the weather in a distant land. The idea is particularly operative at beginnings, at initial stages of development. And so, it is very much a Rosh Hashanah idea. Because each year itself unfolds from its beginnings, no less than a single fertilized cell evolves into a baby, and the baby, in turn, eventually, into an adult.

That metaphor is particularly apt, since Rosh Hashanah commemorates haras olam, the conception of the world (and, not coincidentally, is the day on which, Chazal say, childless women in the Torah conceived their first children).

The Shulchan Aruch tells us to conduct ourselves in a particularly exemplary manner at the start of a new Jewish year. We are cautioned to avoid anger on Rosh Hashanah itself.  And for each year’s first ten days, we are encouraged to avoid eating even technically permitted foods  (like pas palter, “baker’s bread,” kosher bread baked by a non-Jew), and to conduct ourselves, especially interpersonally, in a more careful manner than during the rest of the year.

What is the point, though, of pretending to a higher level of observance or refinement of personality when one may have no intention at all of maintaining those things beyond the week?

Might it be that things not greatly significant under other circumstances suddenly take on pointed importance during the year’s first week, because those days have their analog in the concept of gestation?

Might those days, in other words, be particularly sensitive to small influences because they are the days from which the coming year will evolve?

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Devarim – The Ox Whisperer… and Us

The navi Yeshayahu famously invokes a metaphorical bovine and equine at the beginning of his prophecy, which is recited as the haftarah of the parsha,

“An ox knows its owner, donkey its master’s trough. Yisrael does not know; my people does not introspect,” laments the navi (Yeshayahu 1:3).

The animals  are reminiscent of two aggados.

Pesikta Rabbasi 14 relates how an ox who was sold by its Jewish owner to a non-Jew refused to plow on Shabbos, causing the buyer to complain. The original owner whispered into the cow’s ear that he was no longer his property and that his new owner had no obligation to keep Shabbos. And so the cow complied.

And in Chullin (7a-b) we read the account of Pinchas ben Yair’s donkey, who refused to eat an innkeeper’s untithed produce until the animal’s owner tithed it.

What created so strong a bond between those animals and their Jewish owners? A hint may lie in the Gemara’s statement that Pinchas ben Yair never benefited from anything that wasn’t entirely his, anything that he hadn’t truly earned and owned. Perhaps that sensitivity to what others owned empowered a special bond between him and what was in fact his.

In any event, such a bond is surely the meaning of Yeshayahu’s lament. The word for “knows,” that he uses – yada – implies the closest of connections. The bond between Hashem and His people, the navi bemoans, has frayed. 

In anticipation of Tisha B’Av, the navi’s words in the haftarah are chanted in the lamentation tune of Eicha. The churbanos and other Av tragedies are the tragic outcome of that frayed bond.

But the bond is only frayed, not snapped, and can yet be repaired. After Av will come Elul, whose initials famously stand for – “Ani l’dodi vidodi li” (Shir HaShirim, 6:3) – “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” 

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Acharei Mos – Dispatching the Goat

Two indistinguishable goats were brought on Yom Kippur before the Kohein Gadol, who placed a randomly-pulled lot on the head of each animal.  One lot read “to Hashem” and the other “to Azazel” – the name of a steep cliff in a barren desert.

The first was sacrificed as a holy korban; the second, taken to the cliff and thrown off, dying unceremoniously before even reaching the bottom.

There are two ways to view human life, either as the result of intent or the product of accident.  And a corollary follows: Either our lives are meaningful, or they are not.

If the roots of our existence ultimately lie in randomness, there can be no more meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad plays; no more import to right and wrong than to right and left.  Societal norms can be promoted, but a social contract is a practical tool, not a moral imperative.  Only if there is a Creator in the larger picture can there be ultimate import to human life, placing it on a plane meaningfully above that of mosquitoes.

The Torah’s most basic message is the meaningfulness of human life. 

Might the goat brought as a korban symbolize recognition of the idea that humans are beholden to something greater?  And the counter-goat, fate to a desolate, unholy place, allude to the perspective of life as pointless, lacking higher purpose?

Strangely, the Azazel-goat is described by the Torah as carrying away the people’s sins.

Might that mean that sin stems from not realizing how meaningful our lives are?  And might a reminder about that idea on the holiest day of the Jewish year spur thoughts of repentance, of re-embracing the grand meaningfulness that is a human life?

© 2024 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Vilified… Once Again

Ours are times when it isn’t hard to imagine oneself as a Jew in Mitzrayim –  at least according to the way two commentaries understand a word in Devarim.

The word is in one of the pesukim comprising the declaration to be made by those bringing bikurim, the firstfruits of the season, to the Beis Hamikdash. It is, famously, a declaration that the Haggadah expands upon. The word is vayarei’u, often translated as “they [the Mitzri’yim] treated us in an evil way” (26:6).

Abarbanel and the Netziv, however, see the syntax of the word as implying something subtly but decidedly different. They read it as meaning “they ‘eviled’ us” – in other words, they portrayed the descendants of Yaakov as evil. As we would say in English, they vilified us.

Could there be a better way to describe so much of the world’s attitude toward Jews today? To be sure, there are always haters who, as is their wont, hate, for any of an assortment of “reasons” or with no attempt at “justification” at all; that’s nothing new. 

But, as a result of civilian casualties in Gaza – unavoidable deaths and injuries like those that have been part of every war in history – Israel has been vilified to an unprecedented extent, not only by the usual suspects but in broad international circles and media. And, tellingly, all Jews – as Jews, simply for being Jews, our opinions unknown and of no concern to the venomous vilifiers – are targeted as well. 

Attacks on Jews, physical and verbal, abound across the globe. The despicable chants of “Burn the Jews!” and displays of Nazi symbols at “pro-Palestinian” rallies – a British bobby was recently recorded dismissing a distraught Jewish woman’s complaint about swastika flags at a demonstration by saying they needed to be “taken into context” – is evidence enough of how easily empty-headed people can, under the self-righteous guise of what they proffer as principled political positions slide into… vilification of Jews.

And so it’s no great challenge this year to put ourselves in the places of our vilified ancestors in Mitzrayim. The Haggadah’s mandate that we endeavor to see ourselves as if we, too, were redeemed from Mitzrayim logically includes imagining ourselves in the state that our forebears endured before they went free. After all, an appreciation of redemption must include what it has freed one from.

Although we refer to the splitting of the Red Sea as kri’as Yam Suf,  a “tearing” of the waters, that word is not used by the Torah. The Torah’s word for the parting of the waters is vayibak’u – “splitting” or “chopping.”

Noting the use of the same verb to describe Avraham Avinu’s splitting of wood for use in the offering of Yitzchak as an olah to Hashem, Chazal tell us that it was in the merit of that action of Avrohom’s that the sea was able to split. 

What was the essence of that merit? It’s more than plausible that it was the perseverance in the face of hopelessness, the selfless determination with which Avraham undertook to follow Hashem’s unfathomable command. Our forefather’s deepest desire lay in a world-changing future for Yitzchak and his eventual descendants. But, it seemed, in light of the command, that there was no hope left to be hoped. 

Similarly, when Klal Yisrael found itself faced with a sea before them and an approaching army closing in from behind, hopelessness would understandably have seized them. 

And yet, just as the despair Avraham had reason to feel as he split wood for the akeida was later dissipated in a crucial instant, so did the anguish our ancestors experienced at the sea suddenly evaporate, as they watched the waters before them part.

It’s a thought worth pondering these days. Even surrounded by darkening clouds of seemingly mindless, relentless hatred, we do well to remember how hopelessness needn’t be final.
The Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx, intended to herald the permanence of the power of an ancient dynasty, are today nothing more than tourist attractions, and crumbling ones at that. Our people persists, vibrant and hopeful, looking toward the ge’ulah sheleimah. 

© 2024 Ami Magazine