Holidays – Torah Podcasts by Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe

In honor of the festival of Sukkot, I gathered together with some of my TORCH podcaster colleagues to chat about the festival, it’s meaning, and lessons. Each one of us got an opportunity to share an idea on the festival, and to promote our respective podcast(s). In a decision that compromised the audio quality, we […]

Yom Kippur is the greatest day of the year. The name of book of Talmud that orients around Yom Kippur is Yoma, meaning “Day.” This is The Day when everything changes. On this day, the Almighty is close to us. On this day, He extends purification and forgiveness to us. On this day, God purifies […]

One of the most mysterious elements of the Yom Kippur ceremony is the scapegoat ceremony. The High priest took two identical male goats and made a lottery, one was offered as a sacrifice to God in the Temple, and the other one was a scapegoat, upon which the sins of the nation were conferred and […]

Our Sages enumerates a list of seven things that preceded the world. Included in this list is repentance. Why was it necessary to create repentance before the creation of the world? In this podcast we speculate an answer: repentance is a supernatural miracle that thoroughly violates the rules of this world, and therefore once the […]

On the night of Rosh Hashana in Jewish homes the world over, a strange set of customs are observed. We take an apple, dip it into honey, and declare that we should have a sweet new year. We take a pomegranate, disgorge it’s seeds, consume them and pray that we be filled with merits like […]

In addition to the many other themes and motifs of the day, Rosh Hashana is called the Day of Judgment. The Mishnah tells us that on Rosh Hashana every human has an individual audience with the Almighty in the same way that a shepherd counts each sheep individually. The judgment is comprehensive: all of a […]

The Jewish holiday calendar is not evenly distributed. Mush of our Festivals are clumped together in one month, followed by a long winter with few special days, none of them of Biblical origin. Our Sages explain that the clustering of the High Holidays and the Festival of Sukkot is no coincidence. These days constitute one, […]

These 40 days from the beginning of the month of Elul, the final month in the Jewish calendar, and Yom Kippur are the most powerful days of the year. These 40 days coincide with the 40 days that Moshe was in Heaven for the third 40 day stint when he received the second set of […]

The Festival of Shavuos marks the anniversary of the greatest event in all of human history: the Revelation at Sinai. This momentous event never happened before history and was never replicated. God spoke to an entire nation. They heard His voice and lived to tell the tale. In our liturgy, this festival is known as […]

The Book of Ruth – and its eponymous heroine – are true enigmas. The Book contains no new laws and its story, while inspirational and poignant, bears no easily discernible connection to the Festival of Shavuos, when it is read. The Book’s protagonist, Ruth, has a decidedly checkered pedigree, yet becomes the matriarch of the […]

Shavuos is the day that marks the most significant event in the history of humankind: A nation coalesced around Mount Sinai to temporarily catapult into a state of prophecy, to hear God say the Ten Commandments, and to live to tell the tale. Shavuos is thus aptly named, “the Day of the Giving of the […]

Lag BaOmer is the day that marks the Yahrtzeit/Hillula of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, one of the great Sages of the Mishnaic Era. In celebration and recognition of Rabbi Shimon’s accomplishments and stature, the custom is to make it a mini-holiday. But of course, Rabbi Shimon was not the only transcendental Sage of that time. His teacher […]

The days spanning the Festivals of Pesach and Shavuos, of Exodus and Sinai, are called the days of the Omer. During these 49 days, during these 7 weeks of 7 days, we are commanded to count the days by mentioning each day’s number and the corresponding number of weeks and days. In this sweeping podcast […]

The first night of Pesach – the second night as well is the Diaspora – is arguably the most important nights of the year. On this night we were redeemed from Egypt, this is the night of the Exodus, this is the night of the death of the firstborn; tonight we became a nation. This […]

On Pesach we celebrate the Exodus from Egypt. Our nation endures hundreds of years of servitude and enslavement and unimaginable suffering and torment under the ruthless rule of Pharaoh and the Egyptians. But God did not forget His covenant. In keeping with His promise to Abraham, the Almighty redeemed us from Egypt with an outstretched […]

The Exodus from Egypt is the founding episode of our nation. The Almighty plucked us out, a nation from amidst a nation, and chose us to be His people. What were the preconditions of the Exodus? What had to happen in order to facilitate our freedom? When we examine the Exodus carefully we learn about […]

On Purim we read the Book of Esther, which tells the story of the Purim miracle. The Persian king Achashverosh conspires with his Amalekite viceroy Haman to eradicate the entire Jewish nation, but God refused to allow their plans to unfold. Queen Esther, together with her relative Mordechai, spearhead the effort to turn the plan on […]

Purim is a tantalizing festival. We get the dress up in costumes, read about close brush with destruction that our nation endured many centuries ago, and to drink alcohol guiltlessly. It’s a great party (certainly for extroverts). But what’s the deeper secret behind the day? What did Haman actually try to do to our nation? […]

The festival of Purim commemorates the story of salvation that our nation experienced in Persia more than two thousand years ago. Haman the heir of Amaleik schemed a plot to eradicate the entire Jewish people in one randomly selected day, the 13th day of Adar. But the Almighty would have none of it. In His […]

The fifteenth day of the Jewish month of Shevat – known as Tu B’Shevat – is the New Year for trees and fruits. All the fruits that sprout before this cutoff are associated with the previous year’s yield and the ones that come afterwards are attributed to the new year’s. If that was all that […]

Every year, Chanukah falls out during the weeks in which we read about Joseph and his exploits in Egypt. Our Sages tell us that there is a deep connection between Joseph’s and the Maccabean heroism. Many connections have been proposed, and in this podcast I suggest a new approach to understanding how Joseph precisely embodies […]

About 2,200 years ago, the Jewish Nation faced an existential threat: The Assyrian Greek Empire led by Antiochus and his Hellenist henchmen undertook a concerted campaign to systematically eradicate the Jewish religion. They sought to make the Jews forget the Torah and depart from the mitzvos; they defiled the Temple; they harassed the Jewish daughters; […]

The Festival of Sukkot ends with a three-day constellation of significant days: The seventh day is Hoshana Rabbah, the eighth is Shemini Atzeres, and the ninth is Simchas Torah. These days have unique customs not found in any other day in the Jewish calendar. In this sweeping podcast episode, we explore these days, plumb their […]

We are amid the incredible Festival of Sukkos. Each day (except Shabbos) we shake the Lulav and Esrog, we celebrate with our family, and we dwell in our temporary residence, the Sukkah. But what happens when the weather does not comply? What do we do when it gets swelteringly hot? In this podcast, we demonstrate […]

Over the course of the Festival of Sukkos (sometimes spelled “Sukkot”, sometimes “Succos”, rivaled only by the nightmare of trying to find the definitive spelling of Chanukah – Hannukah, Hanukkah), we must dwell in a temporary structure, a Sukkah. Why? “In order that your generations know that [God] made Sukkahs for us during the Exodus.” […]