The archive

Elazar Yair Wilensky, 13, a ninth-grader at the ORT Ma'alot yeshiva high school, was killed on a school hike on the Ramim Ridge above the Lebanese border when a Hezbollah submunition one of the boys had picked up exploded; twenty-four students and teachers were wounded, near a KKL-JNF sign reading “DANGER! NO PASSAGE!” Read with Noach in the ark: the ground drying while the Satan was still dancing there, the Be'er Mayim Chaim on why Noach waited for Hashem to open the door, and the three keys Hashem keeps in His own hand.

Three years after October 7, flares and al-Qassam flags outside the Nova memorial exhibit in Manhattan, 533 antisemitic acts recorded in France in six months, nearly 4,000 French Jews on aliyah this year and a chief rabbi of Paris saying there is no future for Jews in France. The 250 shluchim in France have not moved: they are opening schools and building mosdos. Read against the Rebbe's sicha of 23 Kislev 5752, spoken to French Jews who had come to 770.

Four days before Yom Kippur the Israel Antiquities Authority lifted a two-thousand-year-old mikvah whole out of the ground at Kiryat Gat, in a seam of country between the Judean Lowlands and the northern Negev where no Jewish settlement had ever been recorded — the bath they immersed in is what identified the people who lived there. Read against the halachos of the pool: the Rambam on drawn water and on immersion as a chok that takes nothing tangible off the body, the Kesef Mishneh on purity taking effect only as a person comes up out of the water, Rabbi Akiva’s “mikvah Yisrael Hashem” at the close of Yoma, and the Rebbe’s test — a man who comes up and goes home unchanged has left nothing for anyone to see.

Rabbi Avrohom Levi Lipskier, who taught baalei t’shuva for more than sixty years and stood in front of the first baal t’shuva yeshiva in the world, died on 28 Elul, the last full day of 5786. Read against the shofar: the Rambam on the sound that wakes a sleeping man, the Gemara on the verses that crown the King, the Kedushas Levi on the man who led the king out of the forest and asked to be dressed again in the clothes he wore that day, and the Gemara’s returnee, whom the Voice itself calls Rabbi.

At the first “Duel: Arena” event in Orlando on 29 August, a fighter walked out behind an Israeli flag, his opponent — a convicted white supremacist — gave the Nazi salute four times and took the microphone, and a swastika flag went up in the stands. Read against Nitzavim and Vayeilech, the two shortest portions, where a man hears the curses and blesses himself in his own heart; and against Achan, whose hidden theft the verse charges to the whole nation in the plural.

An internal CBC memo told reporters and editors not to call the September 11 attacks terrorist attacks, and supplied the replacement wording. Set against Ki Tavo, where the Torah is inscribed on plastered stone in seventy languages and twelve curses are proclaimed in a loud voice — because the things a man does in secret are precisely the ones that have to be said aloud.

A bochur left Beit Shemesh on a Sunday evening in Av to see his Rav and was not heard from again. Drones, search dogs, divers in the Kinneret, volunteers who drove up to walk fields they had never seen for a bochur they had never met — ten days of it. The Gemara finds the duty to save a life inside the law of the lost object: and you shall return it to him, read as restore him to himself. A person is himself among the lost things that must be returned.

The Torah tells us to prepare the road — a signpost at every crossroads reading REFUGE, planted long before anyone had to run. Elul is that city of refuge built into time.

In the Warsaw ghetto a group of Jews called Oyneg Shabbos collected everything — ration cards, tram tickets, posters, letters, the diaries of people who would not survive the month — and buried thirty-five thousand pages in tin boxes and milk cans. Yosef hid three treasures in Mitzrayim; the third is stored away for the righteous, for the time to come. Ganuz: put away, not lost and not destroyed.

A civic covenant is signed by people, and people can break it. The covenant of the parsha was sworn by Hashem — and what He swears, no one can break.

A nation can be ready to strike and still forget Who fights for it. The trumpet is the refusal to call the war an accident.