Rabbi Wolpe - ADL Impressions

A rabbi once told me of teaching young children about the Jewish idea of God. He told them that God was everywhere. One boy reached out his hands, clapped them together and said, “Got Him!” We are spatially oriented creatures....

The Torah reads, “Six days shall you do your work, but on the seventh day you shall cease from labor” (Ex 23:12). But last week, we read, “Remember the seventh day and keep it holy. Six days shall you labor...

Psychologically, we are predisposed to pay close attention to beginnings and endings. Origin stories are seen as the keys to people’s lives. And psychological research has often shown that how something ends – whether an ordeal or a joyous occasion...

There is an old joke about a rich man who dies and stands before God. God asks, “I made you so wealthy, why did you give nothing to charity?” The man answers, “I will, I have many assets on earth,...

There is an obvious question about the plague of darkness that arises with no other plague – why didn’t the Egyptians just stop it? When locusts are swarming in the sky, or hail is pelting the ground, human beings are...

Moses brings news of liberation to the slaves of Israel – but they are unable to hear it. We are told that because of “kotzer ruach” – literally shortness of spirit, and because of hard bondage, the beleaguered people are...

The book of Genesis presents a family with all of the dysfunction common to families. Then under very peculiar circumstances, that family becomes a different kind of entity. Families we understand – but what are the Jews? Among the baffling...

This column is dedicated to a great, unsung hero in the Torah. In order to understand why he is such a hero, we need to start at the beginning of the story. The Torah teaches that we are all brothers...

I don’t mean to make light of serious things, but a lot of the problems of the bible could have been solved by cell phones. Imagine Joseph, lost for years, texting his father Jacob back in Israel: “In Egypt –...

We are told that Jacob “saw that there was shever in Egypt” (Gen. 42:1). What is “shever”? Although it is normally translated as grain or provisions, in the Midrash, Rabbi Yohanan ties it to the word “sever” (Gen. R. 91:1),...