During Chanukah last year, I was invited to give a lecture at Aish Toronto (we had gone to visit family in Canada during winter break).

The talk began with a comparison of the two mitzvos that relate to lighting candles: Each Friday afternoon, of course, we light the Shabbos candles, and during Chanukah, we light the Menorah and its candles for the duration of the Festival’s eight days.

Both of these mitzvos require us to light candles, but upon examination they appear to be radically different, almost opposite mitzvos. By my count, there are at least 6 differences between the Shabbos candles and the Chanukah candles:

1. Utility: We are not allowed to benefit from the Chanukah lights (which is why a Shamash is added). By contrast, the whole purpose of the Shabbos candles is to benefit from them
2. Nature: The mitzvah of the Chanukah candles is the kindling (if the candles get extinguished, you have already fulfilled your duty and don’t need to tend to it). Shabbos candles are not about the action, but about the result: having the light in the home
3. Timing: Shabbos candles must be lit before darkness, by contrast, Chanukah candles can only be lit after darkness
4. Positioning: The Chanukah candles must be facing outside for public exhibition; Shabbos candles are only meant for the people inside the house
5. Variability: The Chanukah lights are dynamic: The Talmud teaches us that there are three levels of the mitzvah: at a minimum, one candle for everyone in the home. The righteous who seek mitzvos have one candle per person in the home. And the super-duper-uber committed successively add another candle each night, culminating in eight candles on the eighth and final night of Chanukah. The Shabbos candles don’t have these different levels.
6. Primacy: Halacha teaches us that both mitzvos are so important that if you don’t have candles, you even need to knock on doors and beg to be able to acquire them. But regarding Chanukah candles the sources add that should you find no other way to acquire Chanukah candles, you must even sell your clothing to purchase them. The Shabbos candles do not make that requirement.

These two mitzvos are obviously very different.

I don’t want to spoil it for you but if you have the time to listen to the entire talk you will discover that the candles are representative of our Soul, which has a long and dramatic and even spine-tingling history. The essence of Chanukah is to take that candle that is submerged within us and to make it surface and shine forth brightly. Shabbat represents something very different.

If you don’t have the time to listen to it, I hope you find these differences intriguing and thought-provoking.

Question of the week

Since the beginning of the Jewish calendar year, the Parsha Podcast has featured a recurring segment at the end of each episode called A&Q. A&Q is the opposite of Q&A. Q&A is when the audience asks the presenter a question and the presenter offers a (hopefully satisfactory) answer. In A&Q the audience is presented with a question and they must supply the answer. At the end of each week’s episode, I provide a question on that week’s Parsha, and solicit answers from the audience.

The response to this segment has been off the charts!

Every week the incredible and indefatigable Parsha Podcast audience offer wonderful and diverse answers, many of which are featured in the following week’s episode.

My friend Paul suggested that I include the question of the week in the newsletter. I’m not promising to give any answers, but it’s a good thing to cogitate upon if you missed this week’s episode, and hopefully it will encourage non-listeners to join the Parsha Podcast community or at least to sample it.

So here it goes: Joseph undergoes many transformations in his narrative in the Torah, and all of them are initiated by dreams.

He has dreams of grandeur that amplify the enmity of his brothers. As a result of his seemingly megalomaniacal dreams, they hate him and want to kill him, ultimately settling for selling him as a slave.
In Egypt, Joseph is imprisoned, seemingly without any hope, and when he correctly interprets the dreams of two of Pharaoh’s aides his bona fides as a gifted dream interpreter are established.
In next week’s Parsha, Pharaoh has two bothersome dreams and when he is desperately seeking for an interpretation Joseph is ushered out of his incarceration. After he skillfully interprets the dreams, Pharaoh installs him as viceroy of Egypt.

it’s clearly not a coincidence that every transition in Joseph’s life is precipitated by a dream.

Moreover, the dreams come in pairs: he has two dreams that spark his brother’s hatred, the Butler and the Baker have a dream apiece, and Pharaoh has two dreams that spur him to find an explanation. Seemingly every step in Joseph’s development could have been effectuated by a single dream: He has one dream that causes the brothers to hate him; the Butler’s dream is correctly interpreted, and Pharaoh’s single dream is resolved by Joseph.

So here’s the question of the week: Why is every stage in Joseph’s progression caused by dreams, and why are the dreams all doubled? if you have any answers. email them to me rabbiwolbe@gmail.com

When people thank me for producing my podcasts, I always feel that I should be thanking them! It has been a true blessing of a lifetime and immensely gratifying for me to be able to teach Torah on a global scale and to become friends with so many incredible and talented and amazing people. Our nation is composed of such wonderful people, and it is the greatest honor that I get to witness a slice of some of this brilliance and genius and wonderfulness firsthand.

This joy and delight reached a fever pitch this past week when I was honored to officiate at the wedding of David and Chana Borowsky.

David was a listener of my podcasts when he, together with other members of his community in Harrisburg, PA, invited me to deliver a series of lectures in December of 2017. Over the course of my 24 hour visit, I gave three lectures (you can listen to them here, here, and here), and David and I really became close friends. We maintained our relationship afterwards, and began studying together over Skype. David is a brilliant young man, and I proposed to him to consider spending some time in yeshiva in Israel for a couple of months, explaining that the marriage between his incredible brain and advanced Talmud study would be absolutely symphonic. David ended up at Machon Shlomo, a yeshiva for the best and the brightest young minds of our nation. After spending a few months there, he emailed me and told me how there were a bunch of the students there who were also listeners of my podcasts (the yeshiva is full of bright and talented students, after all) and asked if I would be willing to give them a lecture over FaceTime. I agreed, of course, and we had a great discussion in which I shared with them reflections, stories, and lessons of my grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe. (it can be found here). After the discussion, I snapped a screenshot from my iPad.

Fast forward a couple of months. COVID hits, David returns to the States, he gets engaged to Chana, and invites me to officiate at the wedding.

People who know me know that I have an unfortunate weakness for microphones. When I saw that gorgeous microphone under the Chuppah, I just couldn’t stop talking! I hope I didn’t pontificate and drone on for too long! Thank you so much for inviting me to your wedding and for asking me to officiate. It was a true honor!

Mazal Tov David and Chana! May you share a wonderful life together and experience only happiness and joy and harmony and prosperity, and may you build a beautiful Jewish home together!

I always view the podcast audience as a big, globally distributed family. When there is a celebration in the lives of one of us, it is a joyous occasion for us all!

In addition to David and Chana, more podcast listeners got married this past week: Mazal Tov Michael and Daniella Rosen! May you share a life of nothing but joy and happiness together!

Things I am thinking about – Modern Insights in the Ancient Literature

One of the things that always intrigues me is when scientists, sociologists, and scholars in the greater world discover truths that are found in the Torah and ancient Jewish literature and have been part of the collective knowledge of our people for many centuries.

We believe that the Torah is the Almighty’s wisdom and the rules of nature and physics are His handiwork. Both the Torah and the world originate in the same source and it should come as no surprise, therefore, that they are going to mirror each other in all kinds of ways.

When we look at this week’s Parsha and the encounter between Jacob and his brother Esau, we find some examples of this. When Jacob sent his gifts to his brother as a bribe to quell his violent plans, he didn’t send them all at once. Instead, he divided the gift into many parts and spaced them out. Rashi explains that he did that in order to maximize the impact that it would have on Esau. You receive a gift, and it seems like that’s it, but then something else comes! And then something else and then something else! The way it is processed psychologically, Rashi tells us, is that the impact of the spaced out gift is amplified because each part of the gift creates a new excitement.

Whenever I read this I think of the study that was made recently with respect to waiters. Waiters of course always try to maximize the tips that they receive. They are thus incentivized to treat the patrons well in order to elicit a larger gratuity. So someone made a study that showed that when the waiter delivered a mint or a candy with the bill it raised the average tip size by 3% over the control group. When there were multiple mints or candies then the tip size grew on average by 14%. But here is what garnered the largest tips: when the waiter gave one mint and then left and then came back with a second one – when the gift was spaced out. Apparently, Jacob already knew the results of this study when he gave his gift to Esau organized in a way that’s most likely to bring about positive reciprocity

When Jacob prepares for conflict, he splits his people into two camps, saying that if Esau decimates one the other will survive. To me the sounds like the principle that we used in modern times called diversification. You don’t want to expose all of your assets to risk. Interestingly, the Talmud (Bava Metzia 42a) describes the ideal asset allocation of a diversified portfolio that is still today used by money managers the world over.

Obviously, these examples are two relatively minor ones, but something I am thinking about is how Torah is much more than ancient wisdom; it contains all the secrets of the world. We can discover truths about the world both from the Almighty’s mind and His handiwork.

Suppose you have two children: One is a star. Bright, precocious, gifted in every way – clearly has a bright future ahead of them. The other is struggling. There are all sorts of challenges and difficulties hampering their ability to succeed. Now imagine that you have the resources to help only one of them. You cannot help both of them, you can only help one. Which do you choose to boost? Do you try to supercharge the precocious child to give them the best chance to catapult to the next level, or do you help the struggling child not fall behind their peers?

Maybe we can speculate that Isaac and Rebecca disagreed on how to navigate this quandary. They had twin boys, Jacob and Esav. Jacob was a star. He was studious and diligent and talented in every way, and certainly had a bright future ahead of him. Esav was a challenge. He had violent tendencies, he had promiscuous proclivities, he loathed studying, he was a loafer – he was at severe risk. Isaac had a blessing that he could give to only one of his sons. Isaac wanted to direct that blessing to Esav; Rebecca thought that Jacob deserved it. Perhaps their disagreement was that Isaac wanted to boost the weaker son, and Rebecca wanted to supercharge the stronger one. Ultimately, Rebecca subverted Isaac’s will and orchestrated a usurpation of the blessings.

In his own dealings with his descendants, Jacob followed Rebecca’s lead. In the end of Genesis, Joseph presents his two sons, Ephraim and Menashe, to Jacob to receive deathbed blessings. Despite Menashe being older, Jacob does a dramatic switcheroo, and crisscrosses his hands, and places his dominant right hand on Ephraim and his weaker left hand on Menashe. His reasoning: Ephraim deserved a stronger blessing because he is destined for a brighter future than Menashe. Again, with only one dominant blessing to offer, Jacob chooses to supercharge the more gifted in lieu of balancing things out – of creating equality – by lifting the weaker to parity with the stronger.

The greatest pedagogue of the 20th century, the Alter of Slabodka, R’ Nosson Tzvi Finkel, said that the sole purpose of his institution was to develop one prodigy, R’ Ahron Kotler, into a giant Torah scholar. Someone questioned him, “but your yeshiva has 400 other students. If R’ Kotler is the whole goal, your yeshiva could be much smaller!” The Alter responded, “R’ Kotler needs to study in the right kind of environment in order to flourish. And that’s why we need the 400 other students.” In the Alter’s eyes, creating an army of well-educated foot soldiers is not as important as creating the one general who can influence the masses.

Benjamin Franklin is a secular example of the impact a single person can have. One man can essentially found a republic, negotiate peace for that republic, invent the bifocals and lightning rods and all kinds of other things, and found a world-class university. It’s tempting to try to calculate how many ordinary citizens would you need to put on the other side of the scale to equal the accomplishments of one Benjamin Franklin.

I also think that the Jewish concept of Messiah fits in with this idea. We believe that a single transformational person will emerge who will succeed in getting the entire world to adjust its outlook and perspective. In effect, the idea of Messiah highlights the potential power of a single solitary person.

There is a pedagogical approach that argues that we ought to do whatever we can to create the next R’ Kotler, the next Benjamin Franklin, the next Steve Jobs, and who knows, maybe even the Messiah. Clearly, this is not the only legitimate approach to this dilemma. According to our insight, Isaac believed otherwise. As a parent, my instinct is to follow the Isaacian approach and to dedicate the lion’s share of my time and thought to the weaker children. But nevertheless I think the other side of the equation is definitely something worth pondering. There is an argument to be made that we should “put all our eggs in one basket”, we should go “all-in”, we should shoot for the stars with the best candidate for superstardom.