Parsha Podcast - By Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe

How do we respond when we are faced with challenges? What are we supposed to think when the path before us seems unsteady and laden with dangers? Our Parsha contains some of the most memorable and iconic stories of the whole Torah. It begins with the single greatest documented episode of hospitality, and it ends […]

Abraham seems to always be journeying. In last week’s Parsha he traveled from his birthplace of Ur to Charan. This week the Parsha begins with Abraham’s journey to Canaan. He traveled there with his family, he traversed the land in every direction; and when famine strikes, he went down to Egypt and returns. Abraham’s journey […]

Abraham was the most consequential human in all of history. He began the process of fixing the world and humanity. Amid a cesspool of idolatry, Abraham emerged as a beacon of faith. When the entire world had forgotten about its Creator, Abraham restored faith in God to the world. Our Parsha follows Abraham in his […]

After spending a year in the ark, Noah and his family exited it to find an empty and desolate world. The sinners who dominated the world before the flood were gone as were basically everything else. The animals, not including token representatives of each species, were gone. The trees, the grass, the plants – everything […]

The Flood was a disaster for all the Earth’s inhabitants, humans and animals alike. With the exception of Noah and his family and the animals safely housed in the Ark, all the land-based animals died in the Flood. But not the fish. The fish were completely unaffected by the Flood. The sources maintain that the […]

With gratitude to the Almighty for all the goodness that He has bestowed upon us, we hereby begin again with the book of Genesis with year nine of the Parsha podcast. Who would have believed that we would have been able to study the weekly Parsha together for so long?! In this episode, we study […]

Welcome to Year Nine (!) of The Parsha Podcast. Each week will feature, with the help of the Almighty, three episodes, two ones from previous years and a new one: On Sunday, the Parsha Rebroadcast that covers the whole Parsha in about an hour will be released. On Tuesday, we will release the episode from […]

The final Parsha of the Torah tells of Moshe’s deathbed blessing to the tribes. For the duration of the Torah, Moshe has been constantly criticizing and reprimanding the nation. Praising the people is something that he does only on his last day. After Moshe blesses the nation, he ascends the mountain and passes away. The […]

The final Parsha of the Torah contains the blessing of Moshe to the nation, his death, burial, and eulogy. Rashi tells us that his blessing began with a recounting of the offer of the Torah to the Nations and to Israel. Before the Sinai Revelation, God offered the Torah to every other Nation, and they […]

Parshas Hazinu is one of the most fascinating, poetic, and richly profound Parshas in the Torah. It is also arguably the most mysterious one. The majority of the Parsha is the Song of Haazinu, an intricate tapestry of prophecies that encapsulate the grand scope of Jewish history. The commentators on this Parsha strive to even […]

The Song of Haazinu, the third of three Songs on the Torah, tells the story of the Jewish people, past, present, and future. It speaks of high points and nadirs, this world and the next, devastation and reclamation. In this podcast we examined the Song’s beginning. Moshe compares his words and his speech to rain, […]

We are not machines. We are humans. And that’s messy. We have all sorts of struggles doing the right thing. We are influenced by a myriad of impulses, inclinations, and predispositions. We don’t operate like clockwork. There are other things that always follow a prescribed pattern: The sun always rises in the East and sets […]

On the last day of Moshe’s life, he accomplished a lot. He wrote 13 copies of the Torah, one per tribe and one to be permanently stationed in or near the Ark, he spoke words of comfort to the people, and he formally passed the baton of leadership of the nation to his disciple and […]

Repentance is one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind. When we blunder; when we err; when we create distance and barriers between us and God, we are afforded the ability to rectify and restore our previous pristine state. But repentance, at first glance, seems nightmarishly hard. To change demands an admission that we are flawed; […]

Blessings and curses. That is the dominant theme of our Parsha. We read the admonition of Deuteronomy – 98 bone-chilling curses that will befall our people in the event that we repudiate our covenant with God. Blessings and curses appear a second time: the nation is instructed to assemble at Mount Gerizim and mount Ebal […]

On the surface, Bikkurim appears to be an ordinary, tithe-like Mitzvah. When the first fruits of a season’s crop begin to sprout, you designate them as Bikkurim, and eventually bring them to Jerusalem with much pomp and ceremony. Upon closer examination, this mitzvah is associated with all kinds of surprising people: When we bring the […]

Of the motley potpourri of subjects featured in Parshas Ki Seitzei are several fascinating mitzvos that we address in this week’s Parsha podcast. We begin with a fascinating analysis of the law of the beautiful captive woman. We proceed with a heartening insight based upon the wayward and rebellious son. Finally, we offer a sharp […]

We begin the month of Elul on the Parsha Podcast with style, flair, and panache. It starts with some sweet, sweet vindication as we share a citation that legitimizes the philosophy of a brief, truncated, intensive effort to ascend the spiritual ladder, in lieu of a slow and steady and incremental ascent. We then proceed […]

Our Parsha contains the instructions for how to conduct war. We are told that we must extend peace overtures before launching an attack, we are told about the special nature of the Canaanite wars, and we are prohibited from felling fruit-bearing trees in order to make siege works. This podcast discusses the very unusual way […]

The Torah spends a lot of time cautioning us against idolatry. As the nation is about to cross over the Jordan and enter Canaan, they are repeatedly warned to not fall prey to the idolatrous practices of the indigenous population. Instead, they must shatter the idolatrous altars, destroy idolatrous infrastructure, obliterate idolatrous paraphernalia , uproot […]