A Society Built on Brotherhood, Dignity, and Divine Trust

Even the best and most generous promises may come with strings attached. We know this from the deal that God offers us in this week's Torah reading. Rabbi Paul Bloom develops this theme here.

There is something profoundly reassuring about the Torah’s promise in Parashat Behar. It offers a vision of life in Eretz Yisrael that is secure, prosperous, and free from fear:

“וִישַׁבְתֶּם לָבֶטַח עָלֶיהָ”

“You shall dwell securely upon it.” (ויקרא כ״ה:י״ח)

A life without threat. A society able to focus not on survival, but on growth—spiritual, familial, and national. This is the dream the Torah lays before us. But the Torah is equally clear: this promise is not unconditional. Parashat Behar is not only about the blessing—it is about the conditions required to sustain it.

The Revolutionary Reset: Yovel

At the heart of this parashah lies one of the most radical economic ideas in human history: the Yovel (Jubilee year). Every fifty years, the entire economic system resets. Land returns to its ancestral owners.  Debts are canceled.  Indentured servants go free. Yovel is a “factory reset” for society.

In biblical times, land was everything. It was not merely property—it was livelihood, identity, and dignity. To lose one’s land was to lose one’s footing in life. And yet, the Torah ensures that such loss can never become permanent. No one is locked into generational poverty. No elite class can permanently dominate. No underclass is condemned to endless dependence. The Torah constructs a society where everyone eventually stands again on equal ground. This is not merely economics—it is a moral vision.

The Descent Into Poverty—and the Torah’s Response

The Torah then maps out, with remarkable sensitivity, the stages of human decline into poverty. It does not ignore hardship—it anticipates it. Each stage begins with the word “וכי ימוך אחיך”—“If your brother becomes impoverished…” Notice the word “your brother.”

The Torah outlines four stages: He sells his land – his first line of stability is gone. He takes loans – and must be supported with interest-free lending. He sells himself to another Jew – yet must be treated with dignity, never as a slave. He sells himself to a non-Jew – triggering a communal obligation to redeem him.

At every stage, the Torah intervenes. Not after collapse—but along the way, step by step. This is a system designed not merely to alleviate poverty, but to prevent despair.

A Moral Society Is Measured by Its Weakest Members

The Torah’s message is unmistakable: A society is judged not by its wealth, but by how it treats its most vulnerable. If the weakest are protected, uplifted, and restored—then the society is moral. Parashat Behar demands not charity alone, but responsibility.
 Not occasional generosity, but structural compassion.

“Your Brother”: The Foundation of Everything

Perhaps the most powerful word in the entire parashah is repeated again and again: “אָחִיך” — “your brother.” The person in need is not a stranger.  Not a statistic.  Not an obligation. He is your brother.

This idea echoes the words of Yehudah, who declared regarding Binyamin: “אָנֹכִי אֶעֶרְבֶנּוּ” --  “I will be his guarantor.” That is the model: personal responsibility, total commitment. And as Rambam deepens this idea, the foundation of this brotherhood is not merely biological. We are brothers because we share the same Torah, the same Shabbat, the same mitzvot and the same covenant with Hashem. This is a spiritual brotherhood, rooted in shared destiny.

Living in God’s Land

Yovel carries another essential message. Even as we affirm our connection and claim to the Land of Israel, the Torah reminds us: “כִּי לִי הָאָרֶץ” (“For the land is Mine”). We are not absolute owners—we are tenants of the Ribbono Shel Olam. Living in Eretz Yisrael is not only a privilege; it is a responsibility. It demands a higher standard of ethical and spiritual conduct.

A Subtle Allusion: The Return in Our Time

The parashah concludes with a seemingly redundant phrase: “וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל אֲחֻזָּתוֹ… תָּשֻׁבוּ” (“You shall return… you shall return”).  Why repeat the idea? Chazal often teach that nothing in the Torah is superfluous. A beautiful insight notes that the phrase hints—through gematria—to a moment in history when the Jewish people would once again return to their land—a year etched into our collective memory: 1948. The Gematria of תָּשֻׁבוּ

The establishment of the State of Israel was not merely political—it was the unfolding of a divine promise: a return, a restoration, aAn ancient vision described in our parashah.

The Condition for the Promise

We began with the Torah’s promise: a life of security, a life of prosperity and a life free from fear. But Parashat Behar teaches us the condition:

• If we see each other as brothers…
• If we build systems of justice and compassion…
• If we protect the vulnerable…
• If we remember that the land belongs to Hashem…

Then—and only then—will we merit to dwell securely in the land.

Conclusion: The Blueprint for Redemption

Parashat Behar is not just about agriculture or economics. It is a blueprint for a redeemed society. A society where wealth does not corrupt, poverty does not trap, power does not exploit and every individual retains dignity. It is a vision deeply relevant to our generation—one that has witnessed the physical return to the land.

The question now is: will we build the kind of society that the Torah envisioned? Because the promise is still there.  And so is the condition.

When the Warning Turns Toward You

There are moments when a person knows, before anything explicit is said, that the conversation has changed. Someone says his name a little differently. A sentence begins in an ordinary tone, then narrows. He feels it almost at once—not in thought, not yet, but in the body. Something in him braces. By the time the words themselves arrive, he is already preparing an answer, or an explanation, or a way of making what is coming seem less final than it sounds. That is part of what makes rebuke so difficult to receive. The self often begins protecting itself before it has fully heard what is being said -- and that is what this week's Torah reading is all about. Our member Rabbi Steven Ettinger explains.

The tochachah of Bechukotei enters that charged territory. It is easy to read the parashah’s warnings only on the largest scale—as covenant, consequence, history, punishment. But the Torah is also tracing something closer and more unsettling: the psychology of not listening. Again and again the language circles that point. V’im lo tishme’u li—if you will not listen to Me. And later, more sharply still, im telchu imi keri—if you walk with Me in happenstance, in resistance, in a kind of estranged casualness. The problem is not only what a person does. It is what he does in order not to let what he has done become fully knowable.

That shift matters more than it first appears. A person can live with a great deal of contradiction. He can reinterpret. Delay. Rename. He can hear something that should trouble him and convert it, almost instantly, into circumstance. The Mei HaShiloach understands keri in something like that way: not simply disobedience, but the refusal to encounter what happens as if it were speaking to you (Mei HaShiloach I, Bechukotai). If pain comes, it is chance. If a pattern appears, it is coincidence. If something in life begins pressing too closely, it is dismissed as mood, misfortune, bad timing. The self remains undisturbed not because it is innocent, but because it has learned how to keep truth from sounding personal.

That is what makes the tochachah so unnerving. Its force does not feel arbitrary. It feels cumulative. The warnings intensify not only because the failure is severe, but because what was meant to be heard has not been heard yet. The Or HaChaim notes that the language of the parsahah moves with a kind of inner sequence; the distance does not merely exist, it hardens (Or HaChaim, Vayikra 26:14). Something is said, and it does not enter. So it returns in a form less easy to ignore. Then again. And again. Not because God has become erratic, but because a person can remain strangely intact while refusing what should have reached him the first time.

This is one of the less flattering things Torah says about the human being: he may need reality to repeat itself before he will consider that it is speaking. Rav Dessler writes that the deepest obstacle to truth is not lack of intelligence, but negiah—the private stake that bends judgment toward what the self needs to preserve (Michtav MeEliyahu, Vol. I). From the inside, that bending does not usually feel corrupt. It feels fair. Balanced. Even noble. Which is why rebuke is so destabilizing. The difficulty is not only in changing course. It is in allowing oneself to know, without rearranging it, that a change is being asked.

And perhaps there is something almost compassionate in the Torah’s honesty about this. It does not imagine that warning naturally produces insight. It does not flatter a person with the assumption that being told is enough. The Netivot Shalom describes the tochachah not as abandonment, but as a severe form of nearness—a refusal to let a person settle permanently into spiritual sleep (Netivot Shalom, Bechukotai). Left alone, one can become very comfortable there. One can build routines inside it, language inside it, even religious identity inside it. The warning comes not only to accuse, but to interrupt the false peace that sleep can borrow from continuity.

It is difficult not to hear some echo of this in Good Will Hunting (1997), a film that understands how brilliance can become a shelter from being reached. Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT, intellectually gifted far beyond the academic world around him. He can solve mathematics that others can barely read, and he can dismantle another person in conversation almost before they have finished speaking. He comes from South Boston, carries violence and humiliation close to the surface, and survives by staying just ahead of intimacy. When he is arrested after a fight, a professor arranges to keep him out of jail on the condition that he study mathematics and attend therapy. Will accepts the arrangement, but every session becomes a form of combat. He jokes, deflects, humiliates, performs. No one can quite get hold of him.

What makes the film painful is not that Will is rebellious. Rebellion would be easier to understand. It is that he is defended in all directions at once. Concern becomes weakness. Insight becomes condescension. Affection becomes something to mock before it can become something to need. He does not simply resist correction. He transforms it before it can touch him. There is a scene on a park bench in which Sean Maguire, the therapist played by Robin Williams, stops trying to outwit him and simply begins speaking from a place Will cannot control. He tells him, with a kind of exhausted tenderness, that all his intelligence means very little if it remains only commentary on life from a distance. “You’re just a kid,” he says—not to diminish him, but to expose how much of him is still hidden behind the performance of knowing. For one of the first times in the film, Will does not answer quickly. The words have reached a place argument cannot fully protect.

And even that is not the deepest moment. That comes later, when Sean says to him, again and again, “It’s not your fault.” At first Will laughs, then resists, then grows angry. The line is too simple for cleverness. He cannot analyze it usefully. He cannot redirect it. He can only try to keep it outside himself. The scene is powerful precisely because nothing new is being argued. Something is simply being repeated until it becomes harder to escape than to hear. Rebuke does not always come as accusation. Sometimes it comes as the truth that leaves a person with fewer and fewer places to hide.

That, too, belongs to Bechukotei. The tochachah is not merely telling Israel that actions have consequences. It is confronting the human capacity to live as if consequence were impersonal. *Keri* is not only disobedience. It is distance disguised as normal life. A person can continue for a very long time in that mode. Duties are still performed. Words are still said. The external life remains recognizable. Rav Hutner writes, in another context, that one of the great dangers in spiritual decline is not dramatic collapse, but adjustment—the slow accommodation to a diminished inner life until what should feel intolerable begins to feel ordinary (Pachad Yitzchak, Igrot u’Ketavim). That is what rebuke interrupts. Not only behavior, but adaptation itself.

There is a story told of the Kotzker Rebbe that lands in a similarly hard place. A chassid once came to him after a long period of heaviness and began speaking about his failures. His prayer felt distracted. His learning felt dull. He had tried, he said, and still found himself circling the same weaknesses. There was sincerity in the words, or at least enough of it that another person might have mistaken the speaking for the work itself. The Kotzker listened in silence. The room, one imagines, had already grown tense before he answered.

Finally he asked, “And this troubles you?”

The chassid looked up, confused. “Of course it troubles me.”

The Kotzker’s face did not soften. “No,” he said. “What troubles you is that you feel badly. If the truth of what you are saying troubled you, you would not be so calm while saying it.”

It is the kind of answer that stays in the room after the conversation is over. Not because it is harsh for the sake of harshness, but because it removes a refuge the person did not know he was using. What the chassid had brought as honesty may itself have been one more layer of concealment—the comfort of naming one’s failures without yet being altered by them. The Kotzker did not deny that he was suffering. He denied him the comfort of confusing self-description with self-knowledge.

That is part of what makes rebuke so psychologically disruptive. It is not satisfied with what a person is willing to say about himself. It asks whether he has actually been reached by what he is saying. The Baal Shem Tov taught that where a person’s thought is, there he is entirely (Tzava’at HaRivash, §9). But there are moments when the opposite becomes painfully visible: a person can speak words that are perfectly true while holding himself just beyond their reach. He can hear the warning and preserve the self that made the warning necessary.

Bechukotei is unusually lucid about how long that can go on. The tochachah grows more severe because the earlier word was not enough. Then the next was not enough. Then the next. The Torah does not flatter a person with the fantasy that truth, once spoken, will naturally be welcomed. It suggests something both more frightening and more hopeful—that the collapse of one’s defenses may itself be a form of mercy. Not a pleasant one. But mercy nonetheless.

Because there is mercy here. Hard mercy, but mercy. The warnings are not the opposite of relationship; they are what relationship sounds like when gentler forms of address are no longer enough. The covenant has not gone silent. It is still turning toward the one who would rather experience life as accident than as response. That may be the deepest discomfort of rebuke: not that it condemns, but that it refuses to let a person remain incidental to his own life.

And perhaps that is why the parashah does not end in annihilation, but in a remembered covenant. Rebuke is not the last word because rebuke, in Torah, is not finally about destruction. It is about making response possible again. A person who can still be addressed has not yet been abandoned.

The hardest truth is not always the one that accuses us. Sometimes it is the one that refuses to let us remain beyond the reach of our own lives.

Counting Days, Transforming Life: The Journey of the Omer

Sefirat HaOmer is more than an exercise in practical Jewish arithmetic: it is a process that has layers of significance for each of us individually, if we open ourselves to its message of self-improvement through internalization. Our member Rabbi Paul Bloom explains.

The Question of Time

The pasuk in Tehillim says:

לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ, כֵּן הוֹדַע; וְנָבִא, לְבַב חָכְמָה

“Teach us to count our days, and we will come to a heart of wisdom (Tehillim 90:12)

At first glance, it sounds simple. Count your days. But the more you think about it, the more difficult it becomes. What does it mean to count days? We don’t just count days like numbers—1, 2, 3. We live them. So what does the Torah want from us when it commands us—once a year—to count every single day? Because right now, we are in the middle of a mitzvah that appears deceptively simple, ספירת העומר. And yet, it is one of the most profound avodot of the entire year.

The Great Contradiction – Chametz and Matzah

Let us begin with a basic question. Pesach demands something radical. the total elimination of chametz. Not just avoidance—but destruction. Chametz represents ego, inflation, physical desire and the yetzer hara. We burn it. We nullify it. We remove it completely.

But then, only 50 days later, on Shavuot, what is the central korban? שתי הלחם — two loaves of chametz, not matzah. And this chametz is not only allowed; it is brought into the Beit HaMikdash itself.

How is this possible? How do we go from total rejection of chametz to elevation of chametz? What bridges that gap? The answer is ספירת העומר.

Why Is It Called “Omer”?

Let’s ask a second question. Why do we call this mitzvah ספירת העומר? “Omer” is just a measurement, like a kezayit or a revi’it. We don’t call kiddush “the mitzvah of the revi’it”; we don’t call matzah “the mitzvah of the kezayit.” So why here is the mitzvah defined by a measurement? Clearly “omer” means something deeper.

A Radical Insight: The Meaning of “Omer”

The deeper explanation—based on classical מפרשים—is that the word “עומר” is related to התעמר – to dominate, to subjugate, to take control. The Torah uses this word in the context of enslaving or dominating another person. This sounds negative—but here is the transformation. Sefirat HaOmer is the process of learning to dominate not others but yourself. your instincts, your impulses and your desires—day by day, step by step.

The Journey – From Rejection to Transformation

Now we understand the journey. Pesach is not the goal. Pesach is just the beginning. At Pesach, we say “Remove the chametz; separate from it; distance yourself.”. But that is not the end. because Judaism does not believe in escaping the physical world: Judaism believes in transforming it. And that is the purpose of the Omer: to take everything that chametz represents—desire, drive, ego and ambition—and slowly refine it, not to destroy it but to elevate it.

Serving Hashem with Both Yetzarim

This leads us to a famous teaching of Chazal:

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת ה׳ אֱלֹקֶיךָ בְּכָל לְבָבְךָ

בשני יצריך – ביצר טוב וביצר הרע

“You shall love Hashem with all your heart”—with both inclinations” (Berachot 54a).

But how is that possible? How can the yetzer hara be used for Hashem? The answer is that you don’t eliminate it. you redirect it. Aggression becomes courage. Desire becomes passion for mitzvot. Ambition becomes drive for growth.

The Rambam – A Life of Total Integration

Maimonides writes: שֶׁיְּהֵא כָּל מַעֲשֶׂיךָ לְשֵׁם שָׁמַיִם (הלכות דעות ג׳:ב׳): “All your actions should be for the sake of Heaven”. This is how he explains it: even: eating. working. exercising and earning a living can all become avodat Hashem if they are directed toward serving Hashem. That is the goal of Sefirat HaOmer: to transform life itself into avodat Hashem.

The Deeper Meaning of Counting

Now we return to our opening pasuk: לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע. Why does it say “count our days”? The answer is that counting is not about numbers: ounting is about value. When something matters—you count it. When something is precious—you don’t let it pass unnoticed. Sefirat HaOmer teaches us that every day matters, every day can elevate, every day can transform.

Conclusion: From Matzah to Chametz

Now we understand the journey. Pesach says:”Leave Mitzrayim” but Shavuot says: “Transform yourself” Pesach removes chametz, while Shavuot brings chametz into the Beit HaMikdash. This is because the goal is not to escape the world but to elevate it.

Final Message

Each night we say: “Today is day 1… day 2… day 3…” but we are not counting days. We are building a person, day by day, layer by layer. In doing so we take everything we are—and slowly transforming it into something holy. This is so that, by the time we reach Shavuot, we are no longer the same person who left Pesach. We are someone who has learned not just how to reject the negative but how to transform it into Kedusha.

If we live that way, then we are not just counting the Omer. We are becoming it.

 

The Discipline of Being Seen

 In the lives of every one of us we find ourselves occupying a space in which what we are does not match the image we seek to project or the person we purport to be. Which is the role, which is the reality--and is there a way to bridge or synthesize them? Starting with the position of the kohen in parashat Emor, our member Rabbi Steven Ettinger probes this fascinating topic.

There are moments when a person becomes aware of himself in a way he wasn’t a moment before. He is speaking casually, saying something he would not normally think twice about, when he realizes something: someone else is listening. Not just present, but listening closely. The sentence finishes differently than it would have otherwise. His tone shifts, almost without deciding to. Or he walks into a room, expecting to pass through unnoticed, and sees someone watching him—someone whose opinion matters to him—and suddenly the way he stands, where he looks, even how he moves his hands feels less automatic. Nothing external has changed. But it is no longer entirely his own.

Most of life moves without that kind of awareness. He acts, corrects himself, adjusts quietly. But there are moments when that space narrows, and what he does begins to carry a different weight.

The Torah opens parashat Emor by placing the kohen into that kind of life. “לְנֶפֶשׁ לֹא יִטַּמָּא”—he is not to become impure through contact with the dead. It is a simple instruction, but it draws a line. Not everywhere, not always—but in certain moments, he must hold himself back. And he must do so not because he fully understands why, but because this is now part of the life he carries.

At first, that kind of boundary feels external, something imposed. A rule to follow, a line not to cross. Over time, it begins to work more quietly. It changes how a person moves through the world. He starts to notice things differently, hesitating in places he once would have passed through without thought. What began as restraint becomes part of how he sees.

The kohen lives inside that shift. His life does not disappear into the ordinary flow around him, because the boundaries he carries are not occasional—they shape where he goes, what he enters into, and what he holds back from. There are moments others pass through without thinking that he must pause before, or step away from entirely. Over time, those pauses begin to form a pattern. They do not constantly draw attention, but they are enough to give his life a different contour. The Maharal describes kedushah as a kind of separation that allows something to become defined (Tiferet Yisrael, ch. 2). It is not distance for its own sake, but the kind that gives form. Without it, everything blends together. With it, a life begins to take on clearer lines.

It carries a quiet weight. Most of us move with the ability to adjust quietly, to shift, to correct, to hold contradictions without anyone fully seeing them. The kohen has less of that space. His life leaves less room for that kind of quiet revision. The question for him is not only what is right, but how it appears in practice.

Rav Hirsch writes that the kohen’s role is not to escape the world, but to give form to it—to live in a way that makes certain values visible, almost tangible (Horeb, §467). The discipline is not about distance for its own sake. It is about living in a way that can be recognized without needing explanation. It is possible to learn where to stand, what to avoid, how to carry oneself within clear lines. But that kind of formation does not always move inward at the same pace. Sometimes the pattern settles first, and the person is still catching up to it.

And that is where a quieter tension begins to appear. Form can arrive before alignment. A life can take on the appearance of precision before the inside has settled into it. When that happens, the structure does not collapse—it holds. What begins to thin is something less visible: the sense that the life being lived is actually one’s own.

This tension is not unique to the kohen. It appears whenever a person is asked to live inside a form that carries more than he has yet made his own. Sometimes the structure holds steady, while the person within it is still trying to settle into it. And when that gap widens, it does not always show on the surface right away—but it is there.

Black Swan (2010) follows that movement from the inside. The film centers on Nina, a young ballerina cast in the lead role in Swan Lake, a ballet that demands not only technical precision but emotional transformation. From the outside, her life looks like discipline carried to its highest form—hours of practice, relentless control, exact movement. But as the pressure of the role intensifies, something inside begins to fracture. She can execute every movement flawlessly, but she cannot hold herself together in the same way. The more she perfects what can be seen, the less stable she becomes beneath it. The structure does not fail her. It moves ahead of her.

The kohen is asked to live close to that edge, but not to cross it. Not to become perfect, but to become aligned—to allow the outer form to grow out of something inward that has stopped pulling in different directions. That does not happen all at once. It does not even happen cleanly. It develops unevenly, often in ways that are difficult to measure from the outside.

There is a story told about Yisrael of Ruzhin that captures this in a way explanation does not. His court was known for its refinement—everything deliberate, measured, almost regal. To some it felt elevated; to others, distant. One winter evening, after days of travel over frozen roads, a young man arrived at the edge of the beit midrash. He stood there for a long moment before stepping in, letting his eyes adjust to the light, taking in the stillness of the room.

When he moved forward, his boots left faint traces of slush on the wooden floor. He noticed it immediately and shifted, as though he could erase it by standing differently. The Rebbe was sitting among a small group, speaking quietly. Nothing about the scene called attention to itself. That was part of what unsettled him.

When the room thinned, the young man came closer. “Rebbe,” he said, his voice low, “I don’t know how to be here. Everything feels so…put together. I try to hold myself like this, to be more careful, more exact. But it doesn’t feel real. It feels like I’m copying something that isn’t mine.”

The Ruzhiner looked at him—not quickly, not searchingly, just long enough that the young man felt himself slow down. “You think this begins here,” he said, motioning lightly around the room.

The young man did not answer.

The Rebbe reached out and adjusted the edge of the tablecloth, almost without thinking. “What you see,” he continued, “is what remains when something inside has stopped arguing with itself.”

The words did not resolve anything immediately. The young man stood there, unsure whether he understood. “Don’t try to live like this,” the Rebbe added. “You will only learn how to look like it. Find the place where you are not divided—even if it is small. Stay there. Let that grow. The rest will come when it can.”

Nothing in the room changed. The same order remained. But it no longer felt like something he had to imitate. It felt, instead, like something that could emerge.

The Beit Yaakov of Izbica warns that the danger of visible kedushah is not that it is insincere, but that it can be misunderstood—that a person can begin to live toward the form instead of from the source (Beit Yaakov, Emor). When that happens, the structure holds, but the life inside it becomes increasingly thin.

The Torah seems to anticipate that risk. It does not begin by asking the kohen to feel different. It asks him to live differently—to hold a boundary, to remain within it, to let it shape him slowly until the outer line and the inner life begin to meet. The movement is quiet, almost invisible. Over time, something changes—not only in what is done, but in who is doing it.

At the end of Black Swan, Nina reaches the performance she has been chasing. From the outside, it is flawless. Every movement lands. Every gesture aligns. For a moment, everything holds. “I was perfect,” she says.

But it is not clear who remains to say it.

The Torah asks for something quieter, and in some ways more demanding—not perfection, but wholeness. A life in which what is seen is not ahead of what is lived, and what is lived does not need to hide behind what is seen.

That kind of life does not arrive all at once. It grows slowly, often in ways that are difficult to recognize while they are happening. He begins to find a place where he is a little less divided than before, holds it, returns to it, and gradually allows more of his life to gather there.

The kohen lives inside that process. Not fully resolved, not hidden—just steadily becoming. And perhaps that is the deeper demand—not that the form already be complete, but that it become real enough that, over time, nothing needs to be added to it from the outside.

 

The Many Dimensions of Kedusha

What does Kedusha really mean? Is it just a word on the page, a theoretical concept  or an object of reverence and awe? No, says our member Rabbi Paul Bloom, it's a valuable component of our daily lives -- or should be. Here's how he puts it:

There is a pasuk, almost hidden in the middle of the parashah, that at first glance seems like just another line—but in truth, it is a foundation stone of Jewish life. The Torah says:

וְנִקְדַּשְׁתִּי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל

 “I shall be sanctified among the Children of Israel” (Vayikra 22:32).

This pasuk appears just before the Torah launches into the entire system of the מועדים—the rhythm of Shabbat and Yom Tov that shapes the Jewish year. But why here? Why does the Torah place this seemingly general command right at this transition point? Because this pasuk is not just one idea—it is three layers of Kedusha, each deeper than the next.

Kedusha Requires a Community

Chazal derive from here a powerful halachic principle:

דבר שבקדושה אינו נאמר בפחות מעשרה

Matters of sanctity—Kaddish, Kedusha, Barechu—require a minyan.Why? Because true Kedusha is not achieved alone. A person can daven alone. A person can learn alone. But there is a higher level—a moment where we are lifted beyond ourselves—where we stand not as individuals, but as part of Klal Yisrael: “ונקדשתי בתוך בני ישראל”—within Bnei Yisrael.

Kedusha happens in the midst of the people. This is a profound idea: holiness is not just an internal feeling. It is something that emerges between people, in connection, in shared purpose.

Kedusha as Mesirut Nefesh – Kiddush Hashem

Chazal understand that this pasuk also speaks about something far more extreme: קידוש השם—the willingness to give up one’s life rather than desecrate Hashem’s Name. Maimonides, in Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah (Chapter 5), explains when a Jew is obligated, רח״ל, to sacrifice his life rather than transgress. Throughout history, countless Jews have done exactly that—choosing faith over survival. But this idea is not just historical. It is alive today. We see it in the soldiers of the IDF—young men and women who knowingly place themselves in danger to protect Klal Yisrael.

The Inner Meaning – Avoiding Emptiness

But there is a third, deeper interpretation, brought by the Maharal of Prague.The word “חלול”—desecration—also relates to חלל, an empty space. The Torah is telling us:

ולא תחללו את שם קדשי

 Do not make your life into a vacuum—an empty space devoid of Hashem.

Every person experiences moments of emptiness—moments of disconnection, lack of meaning. When that happens, the instinct is to distract ourselves, to numb the feeling. But the Torah says: that is not the solution.The solution is ונקדשתי: Fill the space—not with distraction—but with Kedusha. Reconnect through Torah, Tefillah amd connection to Klal Yisrael. These are not just mitzvot—they are the antidote to emptiness.

Three Levels, One Life

This single pasuk now emerges as a blueprint for life:

1. Communal Kedusha – You cannot reach the highest levels alone
2. Mesirut Nefesh – A life devoted to something greater than yourself
3. Inner Kedusha – Filling the emptiness with connection to Hashem

And perhaps that is why this pasuk introduces the מועדים. Because Shabbat and Yom Tov are exactly this: communal. Elevating and deeply meaningful. They teach us how to live a life that is not empty—but full.

Takeaway

When a person feels distant… disconnected… empty…the Torah does not say: distract yourself. The Torah says:ונקדשתי בתוך בני ישראל Find Kedusha. Reconnect—to Hashem, to Torah, to Klal Yisrael. And in doing so, we transform not only moments but our entire lives into a living Kiddush Hashem “בתוך בני ישראל” – In the midst of the People.

Let me close with a story, not from long ago. not from history—but from now. A young man—19 years old—leaves his home, his family, everything familiar, and enters the battlefield. He is not a general.  He is not a hero in the conventional sense.  He is just one individual—one Jew.

In the chaos of battle, a fellow soldier is struck and falls—wounded, exposed, completely vulnerable. There are snipers.  There is crossfire.  No one can reach him. And in that moment, everything we spoke about becomes real. This young man has a choice. He can stay safe—after all, what can one person do? Or he can act.

He jumps out.He runs into danger. He reaches the fallen soldier—but he cannot lift him—too heavy, too exposed, too dangerous. So what does he do?

He wraps his arms around him, holds him tightly and begins to roll. Slowly. Painfully. Dangerously. Rolling together—one Jew holding another—until they reach safety.

Later, they asked him:“What were you thinking?” And he answered with words that capture the entire drasha: “He’s one of us.”

The Closing Message

That is the meaning of:וְנִקְדַּשְׁתִּי בְּתוֹךְ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל. Kedusha is not abstract. It is not theoretical. It is not something we only find in a ספר. It is what happens when a Jew sees another Jew and says:“He’s one of us.”

At the beginning, we asked:why the Torah says that Kedusha must be “בתוך בני ישראל” Now we understand. Because Kedusha is not created in isolation. It is created in a minyan, in mesirut nefesh, in moments of connection and in refusing to live a life of emptiness. And sometimes—it is created when one Jew is willing to roll through danger just to save another.

Epilogue

If we can live with that awareness— If we can see every Jew as “one of us”—then our lives will not be empty. They will be filled with Kedusha. And we will not only speak about Kiddush Hashem—we will become it.

Sacred Time and Real Life: Where Ideals Meet Reality (Emor 5786)

This post is also available on Hanassi Highlights and, in Ivrit (thanks to ChatGPT) here.

 At first glance, the Torah’s presentation of the festivals in Parshat Emor appears carefully structured and complete. From Pesach, through Sefirat HaOmer to Shavuot, and onward to the Yamim Noraim and Sukkot, the parsha maps out the sanctity of Jewish time with precision. Yet in the midst of this ordered sequence, a seemingly unrelated verse appears:

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not completely remove the corners of your field… you shall leave them for the poor and for the stranger.”

Why interrupt a discussion of sacred time with agricultural laws of charity?

One approach, offered by the Ramban, reframes the question entirely. This verse, he suggests, is not a general repetition of the laws of pe’ah and leket, but refers specifically to ketzirat haOmer—the harvest performed for the sake of bringing an offering in the Beit HaMikdash. The Torah is teaching that, even when one is engaged in a lofty spiritual act, one must not lose sight of the needs of others. Devotion to Hashem does not exempt us from human responsibility; it demands it.

But the message does not run in only one direction. The Torah is not diminishing the importance of mitzvot or spiritual aspiration—far from it. The festivals themselves, and the entire surrounding framework, testify to the centrality of sacred time and divine service. Rather, the Torah is weaving together two dimensions that must remain inseparable: commitment to Hashem and sensitivity to people.

A second approach helps sharpen this point further. The placement of these laws here may indeed relate to Shavuot – the time of the giving of the Torah. The Torah deliberately shifts from the Beit HaMikdash to the field, from sacred ritual to the demands of physical labor. Because the true test of Torah is not in a protected, “sterile” environment, but precisely there—in the sweat and strain of a long day’s work.

It is relatively easy to live a life of Torah in moments of inspiration, in the Beit Midrash, or immersed in the sanctity of Yom Tov. The real question is whether that same Torah accompanies us into the field—into the pressures of work, the frustrations of daily life, and the complexity of human interaction. Does it still guide us when we are tired, preoccupied, or stretched? Does it shape not only what we aspire to, but how we act?

That is why this verse appears here. The journey from Pesach to Shavuot is not only a movement through sacred time; it is a movement toward integrating Torah into life itself. The mitzvot of the festivals and the mitzvot of the field are not competing values, but complementary ones. One without the other is incomplete.

Parshat Emor reminds us that a life of Torah is measured not only by moments of elevation, nor only by acts of kindness, but by the ability to hold both together—faithfully, consistently, and even under pressure.

Shabbat Shalom!

When the Sacred Becomes Familiar: Acharei Mot 5786

 This piece was originally posted in Hanassi Highlights, Thursday 23 April 2026. You can also read it in Hebrew, thanks to ChatGPT, here.

Parashat Acharei Mot opens with a striking instruction. Before describing the sacred service of Yom Kippur, the Torah warns that even Aharon, the Kohen Gadol, may not enter the Holy of Holies “at all times.” Rashi explains that it is precisely because the Divine Presence rests there that one must avoid becoming too accustomed to it. The greatest spiritual experiences lose their impact when they become routine. Even holiness can be dulled by familiarity.

A similar idea appears in the Navi: one who enters the Beit HaMikdash through one gate must leave through another. Even retracing the same steps risks diminishing the uniqueness of the encounter. The Torah alerts us to a basic truth about human nature: habit reshapes perception. What is repeated often enough begins to feel ordinary—even when it is anything but.

This challenge is not confined to the Beit HaMikdash. It is woven into the fabric of everyday life. Moments that once felt extraordinary—moments of clarity, gratitude, even transformation—gradually recede as routine reasserts itself. The intensity fades, not because the reality has changed, but because we have grown used to it.

And that same dynamic shapes our relationship to Eretz Yisrael. Living through the miraculous return to our homeland after centuries of exile, do we still experience a sense of wonder? Or has the extraordinary quietly become familiar?

In 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, Rabbi Norman Lamm cautioned that if we do not open our eyes, we may fail to recognize a “giluy Shechinah” unfolding before us. The danger is not only denial—it is habituation. When something becomes part of the texture of daily life, we cease to see it for what it truly is.

Perhaps the avodah of our time is not to seek constant intensity, but to guard against indifference.

To notice again what we have begun to take for granted. To approach familiar mitzvot with fresh attention. To speak and think in a way that reflects awareness rather than assumption. Above all, to ensure that what is sacred does not become merely routine.

The Torah’s message is both simple and demanding: do not become too familiar. Because when we preserve that sense of awareness, we allow even the ordinary to become a space in which the Divine presence can once again be felt.

Shabbat Shalom!

Where the Same Life Begins to Move

 How do we measure change in a lifestyle that appears to consist of nothing but endlessly repeating cycles of action and consequence? Is growth even possible in such a cycle? Perhaps it is not merely possible but essential. Our member Rabbi Steven Ettinger explains.

There are stretches of life that feel settled long before anything has actually settled. Not peaceful—just patterned. A person moves through the same responses, restrains himself where he knows he must, fails where he has failed before, and returns again without anything clearly breaking or resolving. It does not feel like movement. It feels like continuation.

Into that eixtence the Torah speaks without waiting for proof—kedoshim tihyu. Not after change, not once something has shifted, but as if the shift is already underway—and as if it is meant to reach a place where it can remain. This makes the Ramban’s warning harder to ignore: a person can live fully within the framework of Torah and remain essentially unchanged—not because he is doing anything wrong, but because nothing in him is actually moving. The actions may be correct, even consistent, yet they can settle into a kind of spiritual stillness where a person is no longer growing, only subsisting. And that is the danger—not failure, but stagnation; not distance, but sameness. A life that appears complete can quietly lose its sense of becoming.

From the inside, though, that sameness is not experienced as a concept but as repetition. You return to the same impatience, the same lapse in attention, the same quiet compromise. You try again, and it unfolds again. After a while, even effort begins to feel like part of the pattern—movement that does not seem to lead anywhere.

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen writes that the deepest forms of change often take place beneath the level at which a person expects to recognize them, so that from within they can feel indistinguishable from standing still (Pri Tzadik, Kedoshim). That claim is difficult not because it is abstract, but because it asks a person to take seriously what he cannot yet see.

Still, something begins to give—not in the outcome, which may return as before, but in the experience of it. There are moments, brief and unsettled, in which a person registers what is happening even as it unfolds. He does not stop it. He does not redirect it. But he is no longer entirely carried by it. That does not resolve the pattern. But it alters it. The next time he returns, it is not quite untouched. Something of what was seen remains, and the repetition, though familiar, no longer feels entirely closed.

The Noam Elimelech describes holiness not as leaving the ordinary, but as refusing to disappear completely into it (Noam Elimelech, Kedoshim). Not escape—interruption. And what interrupts does not vanish. It leaves something behind, subtle but persistent, that begins to gather across returns.

In Whiplash (2014), a young drummer is driven back into the same passages again and again, each return stripping away whatever sense of mastery he thought he had achieved. The music itself does not change, but his encounter with it does. With each repetition, he becomes more precisely aware of where control breaks—not once, but in a way that begins to accumulate. The failure remains, but it no longer lands on untouched ground.

That awareness does not protect him. It unsettles him. He is no longer carried by habit, but not yet able to hold something new. And yet the repetitions are no longer empty. Each return sharpens something, builds something, even as it destabilizes him.

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe once listened to a student describe how he kept returning to the same struggles despite sustained effort—the same lapses, the same inability to hold onto clarity.

“I don’t see that anything is changing,” the student said.

Rav Wolbe was quiet.

“When you return,” he asked, “is it exactly the same place?”

“It feels the same.”

“Does it feel as comfortable as it once did?”

The student paused.

“No. I notice it more.”

Rav Wolbe nodded.

“Then you are not in the same place.”

He did not say the pattern would break. Only that something within it had already begun to shift—and that what shifts, even without stabilizing, is not without direction.

And over time, that direction begins to register. Not as a clear transformation, and not as something that can yet be held, but as a quiet certainty that the effort is not empty. That what once felt like circling has begun, almost without announcement, to move forward. The same struggles remain—but they no longer feel meaningless. There is something in them now that points beyond them.

The Kedushat Levi writes that holiness is not something a person enters and remains within at once, but something he turns toward repeatedly until it can begin to hold (Kedushat Levi, Kedoshim). This means that the repetition is not a failure of change—it is the form that change takes before it becomes strong enough to remain.

At the end of Whiplash, nothing is resolved. The performance does not prove stability or mastery. But it reveals something that cannot be undone: the same act is no longer inhabited in the same way. What has been built—uneven, incomplete—has begun to take form.

And perhaps that is what the Torah is naming—not a holiness that appears all at once, but one that is formed through returns that are never entirely the same, until, at some point that cannot be clearly marked. What once felt like repetition is recognized as progress— and the life that seemed to be circling begins, quietly, to move toward and is now something that can endure eternally.

Seeing the Extraordinary: Tazria-Metzora 5786

This devar Torah by Rabbi Kenigsberg was first posted in the Hanassi Highlights, Thursday 16 April 2026.  You can also read it in Hebrew, thanks to ChatGPT, here.

Parashat Tazria–Metzora confronts us with one of the Torah’s most unusual phenomena: tzara’at. Often (mis)translated as “leprosy,” it was far more than a medical condition. It affected not only the body, but even clothing and homes.

There were those who sought to explain it in purely natural terms. Some suggested that discoloration in houses was simply the result of damp or mould. However, the dominant voice of our mesorah—including such giants as the Ramban and the Rambam—insists that tzara’at was not a natural illness at all, but a Divine sign: a spiritual phenomenon requiring the intervention not of a doctor, but of a Kohen.

What is remarkable is not only the phenomenon itself, but the disagreement about how to understand it.

The striking point is this: even something as extraordinary as tzara’at could be explained away. Throughout the generations, there were those who reduced it to a natural occurrence. When a person’s vision is limited, even the most remarkable events can appear mundane. Even what is meant to awaken us can be dismissed as ordinary. The question is not only what is happening before our eyes—but whether we are prepared to see it for what it is.

The Gemara (Arachin 16a) teaches that tzara’at comes as a consequence of various moral failings, most notably lashon hara. Among them appears a less obvious trait: tzarut ayin—narrowness of eye. Beyond stinginess, it reflects a constricted way of seeing the world: a failure to recognize significance, to appreciate what lies before us.

That insight is deeply relevant to the days in which we find ourselves.

We stand once again in the shadow of uncertainty. Ongoing conflict has brought disruption, tension, and a fragile reality that may yet shift again.

And yet, at the same time, we approach Yom Ha’atzmaut—the anniversary of the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in our land after nearly two thousand years, something that within living memory seemed impossible.

The danger is not that we see the challenges—it is that we see only the challenges.

To live with tzarut ayin is to look at the events of Jewish history unfolding before our eyes and interpret them as merely political, merely military, merely coincidental. To see with openness is to recognize something larger at play: the ingathering of exiles, the rebuilding of a homeland, the resilience of a people under fire.

We are living through a chapter of Jewish history that previous generations could scarcely imagine. Like tzara’at, it can be viewed in different ways. One can explain it away. Or one can recognize it for what it may be: an extraordinary unfolding of Divine providence.

In a week that moves from remembrance to celebration—from Yom HaShoah to Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut—the challenge is not only to feel, but to see.

To resist tzarut ayin.
To widen our vision.
And to recognize the fulfillment of Divine promise unfolding before our very eyes.

Shabbat Shalom!