We are trained to look at the first time that the Torah expresses an idea, utilizes a word, or introduces a character, as being the Torah’s way of encapsulating and defining that person, idea or thing.

Our Parsha marks the beginning of the Torah’s mitzvos. Hitherto the content of the Torah has been exclusively stories and narratives. In our Parsha, the Torah transitions to interspersing mitzvos amid the storyline. Can we identify the essence of mitzvos by analyzing the first one given to our people?

Let’s take a look and see what we find.

“This month shall be for you the first of the months” (Exodus 12:2). The first commandment revolves around calendars. Our calendar is a hybrid of lunar months and solar years. We abide by a solar year (~365.25 days long) and thus the festivals always occur in the same season each year, but our months follow the lunar cycle (~29.5 days long).

The commandment to maintain the calendar is thus twofold: Because the lunar month is 29 and a half days long, the court must decide which day is Rosh Chodesh: Will the month skew longer and day 30 is the final day of the previous month, making day 31 Rosh Chodesh, or will the previous month end after 29 days, and day 30 marks the first day of the following month? That is the first component of this mitzvah.

The second aspect is to oversee the harmonization of the solar year with the lunar month by intercalating months. Given that a lunar month is 29.5 days long, a lunar year is 354 days, 11 days shy of the solar year. Left untouched, each year would see the same date fall out 11 days earlier in the season cycle, resulting in Passover falling out in the spring, and then in the winter, and then in the fall, and then in the summer. Without rebalancing, each 33 solar years would feature 34 Passovers. A 100 year old would look back wistfully at 103 Seder nights.

The first mitzvah requires that our calendar adjust for this by establishing adding an extra month (Adar II) every couple of years to compensate for the lost days.

If we had to think of a mitzvah to personify all mitzvos you would imagine there would be a lot of candidates vying for that job. I would imagine if we polled Jews they would give us many other mitzvos before the commandment to organize calendars. Why is the calendar the first one given to our nation, and how does it embody all the mitzvos?

Here is my speculation:

Determining the new moon requires a fair amount of astronomic calculation. The Talmud reveals to us the exact length of a lunar moon down to milliseconds. It breaks down an hour not into 60 minutes but into 1080 chalakim, meaning that each minute is 18 chalakim long, and it states that a lunar month is exactly 29 and 1/2 days and no less than 793 chalakim. Or 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes and ~3.3 seconds.

With the most advanced scientific and astronomical tools and technology at our disposal today, that precise number holds up true – and it’s featured in the Talmud, a nearly 2,000-year-old work. All other ancient calendars were notoriously haphazard and imprecise, yet the calendar system that we have been using for millennia is accurate with atomic precision. How did the Jews of antiquity know this precise formula?

Our explanation is that the Almighty revealed it to Moses who passed the secret of the precise length of a lunar moon on to us. The Creator of Heaven and Earth and all the constellations is also the Giver of the Torah and the mitzvah of the calendar intersects the two.

So perhaps the reason why this mitzvah is the first mitzvah that we’re told is to reinforce the principle that mitzvos contain precise, atomic precision. The commandments of the Torah are not arbitrary. Just as maintaining a calendar relies on astronomic precision, the rest of the Torah is also perfectly calibrated. Soon we will read about the prohibition against wearing garments of wool and linen and about the sprinkling of the red heifer – mitzvos that seem totally illogical. If we weren’t initiated into mitzvos with the calendar we may be skeptical about the importance and indispensability of those mitzvos. The calendar mitzvah is measurable evidence that the Almighty gave us correct and precise wisdom. And even when we cannot measure the precision of His wisdom, we can be comforted in knowing that it too stems from a Higher Power and we can rely on it being necessary and useful.

There is a second reason why this mitzvah was chosen to go first. The calendar is in our hands, not God’s. The Mishnah tells us that if the human court makes a mistake and assigns the wrong day as Rosh Chodesh, it nevertheless is accepted by God and the heavenly Court as being authoritative.

Which day is Rosh Chodesh? The day that the human court decides. This mitzvah teaches us about the partnership between us and the Almighty. The Almighty is in charge of all, but He yielded some decision-making power to us. Via the mitzvos we can take a seat at the table and have a say in what happens to us and to the world. The calendar thus highlights the outsized role that we must play in determining what happens to this world.

I think that if we merge these two ideas we get to the heart of mitzvos.

On one hand they are a precise, divinely-determined formula for perfection. But that’s not to say that we are locked out of any influence and have no say. Quite the contrary. With the Almighty giving us the Torah and its mitzvos He also forfeited (to a certain degree) the sole power to determine what happens in this world. He gave us the tools to control the world. As strange as it sounds, we actually agree with the anti-Semites who say that the Jews control the world. We do. Or at least we can, provided that we harness the implements that the Almighty gave us to do so.

Our nation’s sacred mission is to become a light unto the nation; to become the people that lead all of humanity back to God, back to morality, back to faith, back to universal kindness – to be the people at the vanguard of leading the world to achieve the purpose of creation. This began with Abraham and our nation was formally entrusted with this mission at Sinai. We accepted it and all its concomitant responsibility.

We are not helpless in our pursuit. The Almighty gave us the precise formulas to do it. The ones that we can measure mathematically such as the calendar are astonishingly exact. Through this mitzvah we can be assured that the instructions to achieve our destiny are precise. But this mitzvah also reminds us that the ball is in our court. In this critical mission the Almighty yielded some degree of control of the world’s destiny to us. The destiny of the world is in our hands. Our free will is indeed quite vast. Should we choose to exercise it, we will become the nation and the people to bring the world to its perfection.

Moses was the greatest leader of our history, and arguably the greatest leader of any people’s history. But he had a very unusual backstory: He was raised not amongst his Jewish brethren, but in the king’s palace as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, reared on the lap of one of our people’s most heinous enemies. How did Moses become the leader and savior of the Jewish people despite being raised in a completely Egyptian environment? More specifically, what was the pivotal moment that made Moses the person he became?

Here’s my speculation.

The very first episode that the Torah relates to us about Moses is that he went out and saw the suffering of his brethren and he saw an Egyptian man striking a Hebrew man. The verse (Ex. 2:12) describes how Moses reacted: “he turned to and fro and saw that there was no man and he struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.” On a simple level this means that Moses killed the Egyptian man who was perpetrating a crime against the defenseless Hebrew slave after ascertaining that there were no witnesses to the crime.

Many years ago I heard a novel interpretation of this verse:

Moses was a conflicted man. His pedigree was Jewish, he was, after all, the grandson of Levi and the great-grandson of Jacob. But his upbringing was entirely Egyptian. Moses had dual identities. He was half Hebrew and half Egyptian and he straddled these two worlds.

The first thing the Torah tells us about Moses is the time where he has to choose between these two identities: He turned to the right and he turned to the left, he looked at his Jewish identity and he looked at his Egyptian identity, and he saw that there is no man. You cannot be both an Egyptian and a Hebrew. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You must make a choice.

What did Moses do? He struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand. He slayed his internal Egyptian identity and buried it in the sand. And he paid a heavy price: He had to face trial, he had to flee, and he forfeited the trappings of luxury and power as a prince in Pharaoh’s court. Moses made a choice. He chose to forever be a Hebrew come what may. He vacillated no longer.

There are many aspects of Moses’s storyline that can be informative and relevant to us. But this first episode of Moses’s life, this pivotal inflection point where he had to make a choice which identity to embrace, is something that all of us must make.

We all live at the crossroads of our existing self and our idealized self. Each one of us knows how great we can become; how powerful our latent abilities are, and how vast our potential is. That idealized self is something that we theoretically want and really hope we could get one day.

Moses shows us how to actually get it. You look to and fro, you look at your dual conflicting identities and you make a choice. It’s only if we seize our destiny and make that tough choice that we can unlock our greatness. Wanting it is wonderful but wanting something will not actualize it. You have to choose which version of yourself you want and then you slay the Egyptian, bury it in the sand, and forget about it forever.

With that choice Moses began a trajectory that led him to the top of Mount Sinai and to the greatest heights ever reached by a man. If we want to access our own Sinai and achieve our own potential we must make the choice.

I view the generous people who support our work at TORCH as our partners and investors in our spiritual enterprise. In this final email newsletter of 2020, I want to present you with your Investor Report so you know that your charity investment dollars are being well spent.

If you have yet to join the world’s most lucrative spiritual investment club, think of this email as a prospectus. To update your investor status, visit https://www.torchweb.org/support.php

This email will focus exclusively on my podcasts, and the reader is encouraged to visit our website to see all the other amazing projects that TORCH does.

At a Glance

Over the course of 2020 I have been fortunate to have released 162 podcast episodes across six podcast channels (The Parsha Podcast, The Jewish History Podcast, TORAH 101, This Jewish Life, The Ethics Podcast, The Mitzvah Podcast).

With the help of the Almighty, the response from the audience has been incredible. Several of the shows have perennially ranked on the top ten on iTunes in the category of Judaism, and the download numbers have seen consistent growth.

And the numbers are truly staggering.

In the 12 months from January 1, 2020, until December 30, 2020, the podcasts have been downloaded 437,927 times, a more than 60% increase over the 273,280 downloads in 2019.

In addition, in 2020 the podcasts have been added to Spotify and have accumulated 45,387 “starts” (the metric that Spotify tracks) on that platform. It should be noted that “starts” on Spotify are not aggregated as server-side downloads, but downloads and streams from all other podcast apps (Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, etc.) are included.

This is a long way of saying that the people who have supported TORCH on this initiative have partnered with us in spreading Torah and Jewish knowledge on a scale never before seen in history.

Impact of the Pandemic

The pandemic had a mixed effect on our podcasting efforts. In the immediate months following the pandemic our numbers dipped (see the graph below) as people’s commutes and routines were disrupted. But as people began to adjust to the new realities the growth that we have experienced over the past couple of years resumed.

The full impact of the pandemic on the world of Jewish outreach, education, and learning is still unknown. Many believe that when the pandemic ends everything will go back to the way they always were.

I disagree. In my opinion, the impact of the pandemic on our industry will be far-reaching and permanent as the epicenter of Jewish education and outreach transitions from brick-and-mortar to digital. This transition was already afoot and the pandemic accelerated and amplified it.

Thankfully, TORCH is well positioned to be at the vanguard of the new world of Jewish outreach and education thanks to our expertise in creating unique digital products in this space and to our robust catalog of evergreen content (more than 1,000 podcast episodes and 1,000 YouTube videos).

Many of the people in the Jewish education and outreach space decry the proliferation of smartphones and Internet devices, saying that it shortens people’s attention span and makes them focus on more ephemeral pursuits in lieu of immersion in Torah and the wisdom of our glorious heritage.

Of course there is legitimacy to that claim, but history teaches us that every curse is accompanied with opportunity. What we can accomplish today thanks to the internet and smartphones exceeds anything we could have possibly done in Jewish outreach and education in a brick and mortar world. Instead of shunning technology, at TORCH we seek to harness it to its fullest extent. Our success in podcasting is a reflection of this perspective. If you want to partner with us on this mission we’d love to have your support.

Highlights of 2020

Beyond the big picture, I want to share some of the highlights of this past year in podcasting and some of my favorite episodes.

A&Q

When we began the fifth year of The Parsha Podcast after Simchat Torah, we launched a new segment called A&Q: at the end of every episode I present the audience with a question on the parsha for them to mull over and if they like, email me responses. The best answers are revealed in the following week’s episode. We are now 12 weeks into the new cycle and the audience has responded very enthusiastically.

Moreover it is a step in the direction that we hope to take the entire ecosystem towards. Podcasts are consumed passively. With A&Q, the audience is encouraged to become active: to think about the questions on their own, to discuss it around the Shabbat table, and to submit answers. Activating the audience is something that we’re thinking about a lot at TORCH and we hope to continue moving in that direction.

The Shabbat Gift

In August, I released an episode on the This Jewish Life Podcast titled, “The Shabbat Gift”. This episode has an interesting backstory: In the previous Yom Kippur I made, as is customary, a resolution to God in order to lobby Him to give me a favorable judgment. At the conclusion of the Neilah services I promised God to record a podcast over the course of the upcoming Jewish calendar year where I would share with the audience the transformative power and meaning of Shabbat. I had optimistically assumed that by Chanukah it would be done. But Chanukah came and went, and Purim came and went and I had not yet produced this episode. Then the pandemic hit and my children were home from school and everyone’s lives were upended. During our family’s annual drive back from Canada at the end of the summer I resolved to fulfill my pledge pronto, and in August, barely a month before the end of the Jewish year, I finally recorded and released this episode. I’m very happy with how it came out, and I hope the Almighty believes that I kept my part if the deal.

Pandemic Podcasts

When the pandemic hit, everyone was scrambling to deal with this new terrifying virus. In three episodes (this, this, and that) I shared what I thought was a Torah perspective on the pandemic. Afterwards I felt that there was so much discussion about COVID in the news and it was dominating people’s lives so completely that it would be more helpful for me to make the podcast a refuge from all the COVID stuff, and therefore I stopped making it a focus of the podcasts.

Other Noteworthy Podcasts of 2020

I am very proud of all the episodes of 2020, but here are a few that I am particularly fond of:

Thanks a Million – When my podcasts cumulatively reached a million downloads, I recorded a special episode in which I told some of my personal story and outlined the surprising twists and turns in the journey to accomplishing this feat.

600,000 Letters of the Torah – Our Sages tell us that the Torah contains 600k letters, matching the number of Jewish souls. There is only one problem: It doesn’t. In this podcast I proposed a novel reconciliation that results in the total vindication of our Sages.

Age of the Universe: Reconciling Torah and Science – Science reports that the universe is ~13.8-15.4 billion years old. Our tradition teaches that we are in the year 5781. That is more than a slight rounding error. In this podcast I shared a mind-blowing answer.

A Grandson Remembers – Longtime podcast listeners know how much I revere my late grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe zt”l. In this episode I share personal stories and reflections about the life and legacy of my grandfather.

Esau’s Fatal Flaw – Choosing which Parsha Podcast episode to appear on this list is hard because I am so fond of all of them. But this one is unique because it was conceived in a miraculous fashion. It was the night before I needed to record a new podcast on Parshas Toldos and I had nothing to say. I had read the Parsha and tried to gain an insight but I had nothing. I sat down by my desk at 11 PM and I started thinking about the Parsha. Within 20 minutes I had a complete podcast. What was so strange about it was that I felt like the Almighty deposited an entire podcast with a novel insight and a valuable lesson into my head like manna from Heaven. It popped into my head, fully formed, and ready for prime time. My takeaway from this story is that the Almighty is pleased with our work at TORCH and every once in a while He will wink at us and remind us that He’s got our back.

Chazon Ish, R’ Avraham Grozinsky, and Chacham Ovadia – On the Jewish History Podcast, I spent much of the year telling the stories of Torah giants of the 20th Century. Listening to the stories of these veritable giants inspires us to seek greatness ourselves.

A History of Oral Torah – The Jewish bookshelf is bursting with volumes ostensibly from the “Oral” Torah. In a series of episodes on the TORAH 101 Podcast channel, I traced the history of Oral Torah from Moses to Modernity. This series shatters the fiction of “Rabbinic Judaism”.

Akiva and Yehoshua Wolbe interview – This is a podcast that I did not record, but one that appears on my colleague Dan Kullman, President of the Board of TORCH’s, excellent podcast, The Shema Podcast. He interviewed my two oldest sons, Akiva and Yehoshua, about what it’s like to be a young boy in a Jewish community. It’s fair to say that if I have any podcasting ability, it was transmitted to my sons.

The Bottom Line

Our organization, TORCH, subsists solely thanks to the generosity of our friends and donors – our partners and investors. When you invest in TORCH, you can be confident that you will be partnering with an organization that is working tirelessly to produce the highest quality Torah education to the Jewish masses.

In 2020, 192 different people whose connection with TORCH was created over podcasts chose to donate to support the cause. These are the people who were personally impacted by our organization and chose to partner with us. Were you impacted by TORCH? Do you want to invest in our organization? If yes, please visit https://www.torchweb.org/support.php.