T'ruma: Is It Time To Rebuild The Temple?

By Baruch Gordon

Baruch Gordon explains the order in which Redemption must take place, and how we will know when the time has come to rebuild the Temple.

[2.5-minute video]

Where We Can Attain Prophecy

By Rav Moshe Kaplan, https://meirtv.com/en

Rav Moshe Kaplan focuses on one of the several conditions that needs to be met in order to attain prophecy.

[4.5-minute video]

T'ruma: Man Owns Nothing

by Rav Yehuda HaKohen, visionmag.org

The notion of giving everything to HaShem illustrates the difference between the mentality of redemption and that of the exile.

Modern day Israeli soldiers

Mishpatim: The Morality of Conquest

by Baruch Gordon

Baruch Gordon probes the question of how it can be "moral" for the Jewish People to have entered the Land of Canaan, killed its inhabitants, conquered the Land, and called it the Jewish homeland.

Q&A: Why Do Good People Suffer?

Translated by Hillel Fendel

Car accident

Q. It is hard for me not to have difficult questions when I hear about terrible calamities, such as an entire family being wiped out in a car crash while returning from visiting graves of the righteous, or an entire observant family losing their lives in a fire caused by an electric short. In light of stories like these, how do we continue to believe in a Creator Who is both just and all-powerful?

Mishpatim: There Is No Private Judaism

by Rav Yehuda HaKohen, visionmag.org

Mishpatim

Mishpatim deals primarily with the civil laws that govern our communal interactions. The fact that these decrees are given at this specific point – directly after the Hebrew tribes receive the Ten Commandments – shows a clear distinction between Western religions and Israel’s Torah.

In truth, the Jewish people has no such concept as “religion” in the formal sense of the term, as we reject the notion of anything existing outside of HaShem. Israel’s earthly mission necessitates elevating every aspect of Creation by infusing it with Divine meaning and raising it to its highest potential in our world.

Western civilization generally views religious observance as something limited to an individual’s private sphere of belief, ritual and prayer. This approach constructs a false division between private service to G-D and the way a person treats his fellow man.

Jerusalem: The Eternal City

By Rav Moshe Kaplan

Rav Moshe Kaplan reveals the uniqueness of Jerusalem as the "gateway" from Yerushalayim she'Lemata (the three dimensional Jerusalem of this world) to Yerushalayim she'Lama'la (the parallel Jerusalem in the spiritual world).

Parshat Yitro: The Secret to Living a Long Life

by Baruch Gordon

Baruch Gordon examines the commandment to honor one's parents, and the particular way one must do so in order to reap the promised reward of long life.

[2.5-minute video]

Conditions for Actualizing the Divine Ideal

by Rav Moshe Kaplan, meirtv.com/en

Rav Moshe Kaplan outlines the three conditions for revealing the Divine Ideal in this world, and explains why and how Exile is the antithesis to this ideal.

[6-minute video]

Parshat Yitro: The Mission That Gives Context to the Mitzvot

by Yehuda HaKohen, visionmag.org

Receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai

The Torah is not a “religion” relegated to the houses of study or prayer. Nor is it a set of rules meant to coercively modify human behavior.

Rav Kaplan: The World is One Soul

by Rav Moshe Kaplan, meirtv.com/en

"The world, humanity, all of history, seems like scattered separate events, people, separate forces, that's how the senses perceive, they pick up each thing individually... when the truth we saw is that the world is one body, one organism, with one life source, one ideal, one neshama [soul], that transcends the particulars that is revealed through them..."

[6-minute video]

Parshat Beshalach: The Holiest Most Heavenly Food on Earth

by Baruch Gordon

In this week's email, Baruch Gordon looks at the holiest, mostly heavenly food that the Israelites ate while in the wilderness. He asks the question: why did they not receive this special food after they entered the Land of Israel?

[2-minute video]

Parshat Beshalach: the Modern Slave Mentality and the New Generation of Israel

by Rav Yehuda HaKohen, visionmag.org

Splitting of the Sea

“Pharaoh approached; the Children of Israel raised their eyes and behold! – Egypt was journeying after them, and they were very frightened; the Children of Israel cried out to HaShem. They said to Moshe, ‘Were there no graves in Egypt that you took us to die in the Wilderness? What is this that you have done to us to take us out of Egypt? Is this not the statement that we made to you in Egypt, saying, Let us be and we will serve Egypt? – For it is better that we should serve Egypt than that we should die in the Wilderness!’ Moshe said to the people, ‘Do not fear! Stand fast and see the salvation of HaShem that He will perform for you today; for as you have seen Egypt today, you shall not see them ever again! HaShem shall make war for you, and you shall remain silent’” (Sh’mot 14:10- 14).

Acknowledging that Israel greatly outnumbered the Egyptian military at the Sea of Reeds, the Ibn Ezra provides a remarkable explanation of these verses.