Rabbi Wolpe - ADL Impressions

It is one of the most puzzling verses in the Torah: “Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold.’ God made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and...

We are used to the idea that there were ten plagues, but why did God need more than one? Presumably, once Pharoah and the people of Egypt saw the Nile turn to blood or frogs magically multiply across the land...

God speaks from the fire in the burning bush, but Moses knows that God is not in the fire. God speaks to Elijah after the fire on Carmel, and the text tells us explicitly that God is not in the...

Sometimes, the best way to understand the message of a book is to look at the beginning and the end. Genesis starts with the creation of the world and ends with Jacob blessing his children. From this, we learn that...

Joseph, having been sold into slavery by his brothers, is liberated from captivity in Egypt and attains a position of great prominence. Why doesn’t he let his family know where he is? The great commentator, Ramban, puts it sharply: “Even...

At the time of the Maccabees (166BCE), the Temple had been defiled and used as a garbage dump. The Maccabees rededicated it. Very few remember when the first Temple was dedicated (on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot [1 Kings 8:2]),...

Each year when I would speak to the teachers in our school, I would remind them of the silent student in the back. That child, the one who seems never to pay attention and appears not to absorb a word....

When Jacob hears that Esau, his brother who has sworn to kill him, is coming with 400 men, “Jacob was greatly frightened (Gen. 32:8).” Yet after Jacob’s encounter with the angel, from which he emerges limping, Jacob in fact does...

A woman once asked Rabbi Jose Ben Halafta: “If creation was completed in only six days, what has God been doing since?” He answered: “God spends his time building ladders, for some to ascend, and others to descend.” That teaching...

On this Thanksgiving, it is time to reflect anew on two kinds of gratitude. Sitting at the Thanksgiving table, we feel grateful for the bounty we were privileged to enjoy. For the abundance of food we enjoy and the enormity...