Dear Friends,
It doesn’t really make sense to have a favorite parshah for the same reason that it doesn’t make sense to have a favorite body parts (say your cute little toes). They only have content in relation to the rest of your body. It would be quite a stretch to envision anyone really liking disembodied toes! In the same way (but with infinite lehavdils- verbal separations between something sacred and something ordinary or profane), the Torah is one beautiful indivisible body of wisdom. Each word, letter and parshah is entwined with the whole. The source of this kind of unity is Hashem Himself. The Torah is Hashem’s unknowable wisdom, His unity and His infinity.  He gave us some access to Him when He let it flow down to our world. We don’t always have the will or the ability to relate to the Torah and its mitzvos as being G-d’s Mind. Try to stretch…   Imagine looking upwards and seeing a basin full of water flowing from a hidden source. If there are hundreds of holes in the bottom of the basin, what you see when you look up is hundreds of streams. You don’t even see the basin, let alone the source of its water.

When Hashem created the world, His light was unified and undiffused, like the water in our parable. When He decided to make a finite world, He created innumerable different streams, ranging from the vitality that gives your life, to the energy that sustains the physical world. As the flow grows more distant from its source an interesting thing happens. Because you just see the flow, you may end up not looking much further. You may end up not even looking up high enough to see that there is a source because it’s so far out of sight and your eyes are cast downward.
This is what happened to Pharaoh.

When he met Yaakov he knew that the person that he was facing was holy, and unlike anyone he had ever met.  Yaakov blessed him before leaving. The result of the blessing was that the Nile rose towards Pharaoh when he went towards its shore. Instead of “looking up”  realizing that the truth that Yaakov had revealed, which is that the Nile’s flow can be changed in response the being blessed by a person who “learned” G-d,  who lives his entire life in awareness of the Source, Pharaoh came to an entirely different conclusion. “I am the Nile; I made it.

The Torah is Hashem’s will and wisdom. It comes from a place that is far beyond human vision, a place of absolute unity. This is why the Torah can’t be sensibly divided into segments and still retain its meaning any more than a body part divorced from the body still has real purpose.
I still like Parshat Shmot an awful lot.

The narrative of the nascent Jewish people sprouting from a family, the drama of self-discovery in the midst of enslavement and suffering and the sparks of heroism in the darkness all speak with the kind of poetry that words alone never have. It’s the first of six parshas that narrate the story of the redemption.  It’s much bigger than anyone’s individual life. Being redeemed means (according to Maharal) being able to become what you are in the most genuine sense of the word. The suffering that this parshah narrates forced us into the kind of humility that comes from knowing that you have no choice but to relinquish any fantasy of control that you have.  Once that’s there, you can morph into becoming the kind of person your great-greats were, when they followed Hashem into the desert. They chose to break the mold of dependency on humans, on natural cause and effect, and personal fear. They never could have done it alone; Hashem was with them every step of the way. Don’t you wish that you were there? The good news is that in a spiritual sense you were and you still are.
​
Enjoy the view from Goshen,
Tziporah

Dear Friends,

One of the questions you might have found yourself asking is where to store the things that you wish never happened? The more Torah you learn, the more of an idealistic you become. You don’t live up to your ideals with absolute integrity, and neither does anyone else who populate your memory bank. You may even feel like you are stuck in the “before” pose that you see in makeovers. You were pretty satisfied until you saw the “after”.

How do you stay an idealist without falling into the trap of being bitter and cynical?
If anything, Yosef had no illusions about flawlessness. Where did he store the memory of pleading for his life, and having his pleas fall on deaf ears? Why didn’t he drown in the bottomless pit of bitterness or cynicism? What was his trick?

One insight that the Torah gives us is through its recording the names of his children. Their names tell you that he didn’t try to erase his experiences. He chose to deal with them instead. He named the first one Menasheh, which means that “Hashem has caused me to forget all my hardship and my father’s entire house”. His second son was Ephraim, meaning, “Hashem has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering”. Would you ever give a child a name that reflects your longing to forget the things that you wish didn’t happen? Wouldn’t his name just perpetuate the very memories that you wish to erase? Would you choose to recall the fact that you never chose to live in the land that has replaced your birthplace every time you called your son?

Yosef chose to find meaning in where he was once was and where it took him. His children’s names were an appropriate place to begin.  In Tehillm, children are compared to arrows in the hand of a strong man; he draws them close as stretches his bow, and then lets them go. Children are closer to us than anyone except a parent can know; they start out as part of your body, and morph into themselves. Your goal is to aim and then let them fly free. Menasheh’s name tells you about Yosef. He is willing to forget the struggles and to move on. Ephraim’s name tells you that he ultimately found his actualization by doing just that.
Yosef was sold as a slave at the age of seventeen. He lived to be 110. He could have spent 93 years embittered and disillusioned. He made another choice. Instead, he chose to find G-d’s wisdom in every situation he experienced and in every step that he walked. He didn’t whitewash anything. He also didn’t choose to see only chaos. Instead, he chose to walk the same path that his father, Yaakov had walked. What was Yaakov’s path?

Listen to what Yaakov said, when he spoke about himself.
It is unusual to find the Avos speaking about themselves at all. You can learn more about them from what they said to others, or what they did. Yaakov told Yosef that he would give him the city of Shechem as a special gift. He said, “I have given you Shechem, one portion more than your brothers; I took it from the hand of the Emorite with my sword and with my bow”. On a simple level, this verse is very difficult to understand. Wasn’t the city of Shechem conquered by Shimon and Levi, not Yaakov? Didn’t Yaakov disapprove of their radical move? The Targum explains. Before I tell you what he says, I want to tell you why it is relevant. Targum is the ancient and authoritative Aramaic translation of Torah by Onkelus the convert (c.90). What makes this translation unique is that although it is an interpretive translation, it has the approbation of his great teachers, the famous Tanaaim Rabi Eliezer and Rabi Yehoshua. This means that the scholars of the Mishneh saw this translation as an accurate one, and for that reason it appears in almost every addition of Chumash. Targum translates “my sword and my bow” as “my prayer and my beseeching” Maharal explains this translation as meaning that the prayer of the righteous is like a sword because it pierces through every possible barrier. It is like a bow, because the force with which you draw the bow close to you will determine arrows speed and power and far it will fly. Everything depends on how much strength you use when drawing the bow. In prayer, this means the strength of your devotion. It was Yaakov’s prayer that made the conquest of Shechem a reality even though it was actually done by Shimon and Levi. Had it not been for his prayer, they would have failed, and the surrounding nations would have taken up arms to do battle against Yaakov and his family. What does this have to do with Yosef?

It has everything to do with him.

He understood that the only factor that really counts is G-d’s will. He was sold into Egypt because that’s where Hashem wanted him to be, to face life, and to be challenged. He was fruitful there in every sense of the word. To him, that’s all that mattered. The only life he tried to judge and interpret was his own.
You may be thinking that this is just marvelous if you happen to be Yosef. Not so simple if you happen to be you. Wrong again.


Yaakov’s death isn’t’ directly recorded in the Torah (even though his burial is written about in great detail). The sages say that the reason is that “Yaakov our father didn’t die” they obviously don’t me that literally. What they are getting across is that he is alive in every Jew. Each one of us has the capacity to “forget” the struggle and focus on where it can bring you.

Last night I saw a documentary filmed by “Project Witness”, in which the lives of people who chose to save lives during the holocaust (and interviews with those who they saved) were presented. What each of them shared was willingness to deal with impossible situations with faith and dedication, instead of the insanity and despair that would have been an easier choice. They were so focused! So real! So much of Yaakov is still alive. 
​
Have great week!
Yours, Tziporah

Dear Friends,

This is the last day of Chanukah.

Can you imagine what being in the Bais HaMikdash was like on the last day of miracles? The Macabees and the rest of us knew that all of the waiting was finished. A new supply of oil would soon bring them back to what we laughingly call Real Life, the world that is confined to the laws of nature that G-d initiated during the six days of creation.  

On one hand, living in a predictable world where laws of nature don’t change gives you the responsibility to find Hashem in moment to moment life, even though He isn’t grabbing your attention with fireworks. This is no easy task; complacency is part of life. On the other hand, you can move to a far higher place when you listen to the message that Hashem sends you when he tells you that He will never stop being part the life you actually lead. The fact that Hashem hides behind the curtain that we call time and space tells you that He believes that you have the power to lift the curtain that seems to separate  you and your ordinary life from His unveiled self. Yes you. The real you that struggles with faith and with deeds.

I had a very extreme trip to Beitar this past Friday. You may very well be wondering how extreme a twenty minute trip from Har Nof to the largest frum town on the West Bank can be. Well, as things turned out an accident in the road that goes through the tunnels changed the equation. The police and emergency medics closed the tunnels. After a futile attempt to circle the back to back traffic, I called my granddaughter who has Waze to try to use its techno-brain to get us out.

It recommended that we go to the railroad tracks near the zoo, and make a turn south through an amazingly beautiful raw piece of nature called the Walabee. It leads you though Christian Arab village called Beit Jalla. This is a place far enough off the beaten track to make do with two lanes for all of the traffic that normally flows through its idyllic picturesque streets.  My granddaughter isn’t the only one with Waze. In no time hundreds (literally) of cars jammed the road generated the Mother of All Traffic Jams. By that point turning back was as impossible as moving forward. As time traipsed on with no consideration of me and my fellow nomads, the sun’s unmistakable message was that Shabbos will soon be arriving. Virtually everyone on the road is religious (since the road goes to Beitar, Efrat, Gush Etzion and other settlements), so the mixture of panic/despair/and tension was almost tangible. The end of the story is that I rolled into my daughter’s seven minutes before shkia (sunset).

On the way, I considered various worst case possibilities; walking back to Yerushalaim, walking to Beitar, etc. None of them were particularly appealing, and walking back to Yerushalaim was probably not even viable in halachah because there are too many open spaces in the first part of our scenic road for it to be considered still part of Yerushalaim.  The second Arab village, which is Muslim, closer to Beitar and near enough to avoid the issue of being beyond the Shabbos border, was very unappealing for other reasons. I am absolutely sure however, that if it came to it, I would get to see El Khadar and Hussan real close. I imagine that many of the other cars behind me must have done exactly that, since there weren’t many other options.       

The reason that I am sharing this with you is to give you a feeling of the exhilaration that I had when I lit candles with four minutes to spare….There is no way that this kind of simchah happens every week. I am sure that each one of you has your stories in which the real world was both the villain and the hero.
​
What a great climax to Chanukah!
Tziporah