This Jewish Life - By Rabbi Yaakov Wolbe

Maimonides, in including this as the ninth of the thirteen principles of faith, makes it abundantly clear: If you do not believe that every word of the Torah is true you have no place in the Jewish people. The Talmud further clarifies (Sanhedrin 99a) that even if someone acknowledges that all the Torah is divine […]

Jacob’s life was a seemingly endless streak of suffering and challenges. His own brother was hellbent on murdering him; his father in law tricked him into marrying the woman whom he did not desire to marry; his father in law also marginalized him professionally. Joseph’s life path follows a similar line: His brothers conspire to […]

What does the Torah have to say about love? How can we be required to love God? Why is there an additional mitzvah to love a convert? This class was given in Cypress, TX at Shalom Cypress.

At the beginning of the Second Commonwealth Era the Jews were introduced to a reality that they were previously unexposed to; namely living in Israel under foreign rule. With relatively minor exceptions such as the successful Macabbean revolt in 67 BCE and the Bar Kochba Revolt in 132 CE, Israel will be thenceforth dominated by […]

Belief in the idea that God communicates to man is an essential principle of our religion. In fact, various elements of prophecy comprise four of the thirteen principles of the Jewish faith that Maimonides enumerates as necessary for inclusion in the religion. What does prophecy mean? How does one become a prophet? How are claims of […]

As Jews we believe that God is not only the Creator of the Universe, but also is constantly sustaining the world with spiritual and physical nourishment and individually supervising all humans. The extent of how involved God is with us in the most minute fashion is revealed when the Talmud declares “A person cannot bend […]

שלשה מעין עוה”ב, אלו הן: שבת, שמש, ותשמיש. תשמיש דמאי, אילימא תשמיש התטה, הא מכחש כחיש, אלא תשמיש נקבים (ברכות דף נז:) The Talmud does not dispense secrets like gumballs. Therefore the Aggadic secrets of the Talmud are masked in parables, fantastic stories, allusions and the like and only after much toil can one uncover their […]

It is probably impossible for us to truly recognize the enormity of the existential challenges confronting the Jewish people during the beginning of the Second Commonwealth, circa 350 BCE. The nation was still reeling from the trauma of the destruction of the first Temple and the subsequent exile 70 years prior and had just narrowly […]

Jews are not strangers to suffering. Jewish History is most easily described as an endless litany of expulsion, dispersion, exile, antisemitism, pogrom, Inquisition, Holocaust, blood libels, Autos-da-fé, ghettoization and ceaseless economic and social marginalization. When a person of faith is confronted with suffering – and especially when the sufferer is a person of good moral character – […]

The Jewish Bible consists of 24 books. All 613 mitzvot are instructed in the first five books collectively known as the Torah. The very end of the Torah tells the story of the death of Moses on the doorstep of Israel. The next section of the Bible, collectively known as the Prophets and beginning with the […]

תנא דבי אליהו ששת אלפים שנה הוי עלמא שני אלפים תוהו שני אלפים תורה שני אלפים ימות המשיח (סנהדרין דף צז.) “They taught in the Academy of Elijah: Six thousand years is the world; two thousand chaos, two thousand Torah, two thousand years Messiah” (Sanhedrin 97a) The core tenet of the Jews that the world had a […]

The clear and copious evidence that the Torah is of divine origin (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) is incontrovertible to all but the most unreasonable of skeptics. In this class we continue the exposition of presenting convincing proofs that the Torah could not be written by man and also explain how the text of the Torah was transmitted […]

Yom Kippur is a day unlike any other. Every other day of the year our spiritual growth is limited to small steps; like climbing a ladder – we cannot skip any rungs. Yom Kippur is a spiritual cornucopia – 24 hours to make meteoric spiritual ascensions before this golden opportunity expires. In this class we learn how […]

In the previous three classes in this series we have presented compelling evidence to the veracity and historicity of the Torah as being what it claims to be, i.e. the word of God as dictated to Moses. In this class we discuss some of the common questions that arise when people realize that belief in […]

Tikkun Olam, fixing the world, has been the rallying cry of the Jewish national mission for millenia. We live in a flawed and broken world and our people were entrusted with the sacrosanct and vital responsibility of fixing it. In this presentation we discuss where the world’s flaws lie, and, taking a lesson out of […]

Only two potential answers really exist to the question of who wrote the Torah: 1. The traditional perspective of it being written by Moses as per the dictation of God. 2. It not being written by Moses as per the dictation of God. In recent times a third option was invented that it was divinely […]

“I created a yetzer ra (evil inclination) and I created the Torah as an antidote” – (Talmud Kiddushin 30b) The essence of man is his capacity for free will; to make moral decisions; to favor his mind and intellect or to favor his bodily instinct – and the world is the playground where these decisions […]

A guiding principle in Jewish philosophy is that when God does something He does it perfectly. Hence, when God gives us instructions for living, aka the Torah, it is the complete book of instructions, instructions for how to live life and what to do in ever possible life scenario or situation regardless of how remote […]

The debate over the authorship of the Torah is a very important one; and not only for us Jews but the majority of humanity accepts this document as the dictation of God to Moses. In this class we continue our quest to logically assess both sides of the arguments as to the authenticity of the […]

The Torah weaves law and instruction with dialogue and narrative; often miraculous and supernatural events and stories like the Exodus narrative of the Ten Plagues, the splitting of the sea into 12 walkable dry paths and the momentous national prophecy at the foot of Mount Sinai. Supernatural narratives are not unique to our religion; rather […]