Mendel Bluming | Blogger

The choice of words the Torah employs to describe the role of the spouse — "a helper against him" — seems contradictory. If a wife is supposed to serve as a helper to her husband, she is obviously not poised "against him?" Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi explains that the woman becomes a "helper" for her husband by sometimes being against him. For a husband to become the maximum he can be, he must profess the courage to welcome the ideas and feelings of his spouse which may be "against" his own. Some men cannot tolerate their wives disagreeing with them, and conversely, some women cannot handle another opinion. They grow angry and frustrated, exploding or imploding. What often transpires, as a result, is that the woman, or the man, in order to maintain a peaceful atmosphere in the home, remain silent. Or, to avoid confrontation, they just drift away from each other emotionally. Conversely, the arguments and fighting never cease. The Torah is ...

In the days of the Holy Temple the entire nation would gather to hear the Jewish king read from the Torah on Sukkot after the Sabbatical shmitah year. It was exactly at this time. Each mitzvah has continuous application even those that we no longer keep in their original form. By gathering together this year in your home or in your sukkah, in your office or wherever it might be and sharing the values of the Torah together you continue this important tradition and link yourself with the entire Jewish people keeping the Hakhel tradition this year. Covid lockdowns and isolations have taken a toll and the antidote is Hakhel, joining together to rejoice and celebrate, to study and connect. Happy Hakhel’ing! Mendel (Menachem) Bluming

The Torah uses numerology, a method of connecting concepts via numbers. Every Hebrew letter has a numerical value. The first letter, Aleph, has the value of one. The second letter, Beit, is two, and so on.  When the letters of two words have the same value, it indicates an inner connection between them.   So if “nut” and “sin” add up to the same number, there is something in that. Which is one reason why the Code of Jewish Law (Rema, Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 583:2) discourages eating nuts on Rosh Hashanah. The problem is, they don’t add up. The Hebrew word for nut is Egoz  אגוז , whose letters add up to seventeen. The Hebrew word for sin is Chet  חטא , which adds up to eighteen. Oops. Well, there is a possible explanation. The last letter of the word Chet is a silent Aleph. It isn’t pronounced as part of the word. So it isn’t counted. Aleph is worth one, so if you take the Aleph out of Chet, you get seventeen, not eighteen. But that itself seems a st...