This week's parsha

Unless otherwise noted, "This week's Parsha" comprises articles taken from contributors to the Chabad.org website. We show the original author's name here, so that proper attribution is given. For the sake of brevity, footnotes cited in the original author's writings are omitted from this website. If you need to see the citations, please refer to the original articles on the Chabad.org website.

Prison Break

Published: 26 September 2016 | Written by Elisha Greenbaum

There is a well-known fable of a man in distress looking up to G‑d; "G‑d, You promised to walk besides me, but when I look behind me I see only one set of footprints trodden into the sands of my life?"

And a caring, compassionate voice responds, "My son, those footprints you see are Mine, carrying you as you traveled along your journey."

We read this Shabbat how, after the foretold galut (exile) which we are currently suffering, (and if we think we’re not suffering that just shows how blinded to the realities of our unnatural existence we’ve become), "G‑d will return home..." Note: not "G‑d will return you home"; rather He, too, is in exile, as it were, and the future redemption will see G‑d Himself resume His rightful place, as it were, in our common homeland.

Get Back into Class!

Published: 19 September 2016 | Written by Levi Avtzon

You enjoyed preschool, you persevered through elementary school, you survived high school, and you even pulled yourself through college. Finally, you were done with study, and the time had come for you to enter the "real world" (wherever that is…).

When you walked out of the school building for the last time, and entered cloud nine where there are no classes, no strict teachers and no "How will algebra help me in my life?", you might have made a silent commitment to free yourself from the bondage of study for all eternity.

Letting Go of Hate

Published: 12 September 2016 | Written by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness . . .

Martin Luther King

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

James Arthur Baldwin

There is a verse in Ki Teitzei momentous in its implications. It is easy to miss, appearing as it does in the midst of a series of miscellaneous laws about inheritance, rebellious sons, overladen oxen, marriage violations and escaping slaves. Without any special emphasis or preamble, Moses delivers a command so counter-intuitive that we have to read it twice to make sure we have heard it correctly: