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.

Torah Business Inc.

Published: 01 February 2013 | Written by Yitschak Meir Kagan

Over three thousand years ago, the thunder crashed, the mountain smoked and the sound of the shofar rose higher and higher, as we received the Torah at Sinai.

According to the Talmud, G-d says, "Whoever busies himself (osek) with Torah and with charity, and prays with the congregation, I consider it for him as if he had redeemed Me and My sons from amongst the nations of the world." Why is such an outstanding expression of merit and virtue accorded to someone who "busies himself with Torah"? Isn’t Torah study the plain duty of every Jew? Isn’t this what each of us accepted and pledged ourselves to at Sinai?

The Emancipation of the Spirit

Published: 23 January 2013 | Written by Naftali Silberberg

"[Pharaoh] harnessed his chariot, and took his people with him. He took six hundred select chariots and all the chariots of Egypt, with officers over them all... And the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold! the Egyptians were advancing after them. They were very frightened, and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. They said to Moses, 'Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us to die in the desert? What is this that you have done to us to take us out of Egypt?'" (Exodus 14:6,7,10,11)

We can only imagine the state of the Egyptian army which pursued the Jews through the desert. Physically, these were soldiers who were recovering from ten catastrophic plagues. They were near starvation because the entire Egyptian food supply had been destroyed by the plagues of pestilence, hail, and locusts. Their numbers were certainly decimated by the death of all the firstborn; and we can assume that the dead included many high ranking army officers, a situation which wreaked havoc on the military chain of command vital to smooth warfare operation. Most importantly, their morale couldn't have been any lower. Virtually all of them were mourning the death of friends and relatives who had expired in the plague of the firstborn less than a week earlier. And they couldn't have been too eager to battle an enemy which obviously had super-natural powers at its disposal.

Sanctifying Time

Published: 14 January 2013 | Written by Tali Loewenthal

Time and place are two fundamental coordinates of life, and, in particular, of Jewish life and teaching. As regards "place," the Torah focuses on the Holy Land, the site of the Temple and the sacred City of Jerusalem, as the spiritual center for the Jewish people and the world. One can also think of the Jewish home and of the synagogue as examples of places where there is something special, a quality of holiness.

In the account of the Exodus there is another fundamental idea: the sanctification of time. This is expressed in the Divine instruction to Moses and the Jewish people that "This month shall be for you the first of the months, it will be the first month of the year." The Sages understand this as the law to sanctify the New Moon every month, and to calculate the details of the Jewish calendar.