A Quick Torah Thought

My grandfather used to ask Yeshiva buchurs, "What was the name of the father of Yehoshua Bin Nun?" More often that not they didn't know.  Yehoshua's father's name was Nun, the word bin meaning no other than "son." Why then, in this week's Parsha, when Yehoshua is first introduced, does his father's name evaporate into thin air, so conspicuously absent? In Shemot, Chapter 17:9, the Torah states: "Moshe said to Yehoshua, 'Pick some troops for us, and go out and do battle with Amalek. Tomorrow I will station myself on the top of the hill, with the rod of God in my hand.'" In other words, Yehoshua, totally anonymous - you may as well have called him, Davie or Jon, is commanded to be the chief of armed forces, form an army of freed slaves and defeat a very formidable enemy, and the question is: Why is the context, needed at face value, so absent? It would seem that the nature of the beast is that Hashem wanted to communicate the mira...

“Be gone from me! Take care not to see me again, for the moment you look upon my face you shall die." (Exodus 10:28) Pharaoh had banished Moshe from his palace. Moshe responds that he surely will never see Pharaoh again, but more intriguingly is Moshe's feelings upon leaving Pharaoh's company.  "And he left Pharaoh’s presence in hot anger ." (Exodus 11:8) Why was Moshe so angry?  Rashi states that it was Pharaoh's vitriol and biting rhetoric, "for Pharaoh had said, do not persist in seeing my countenance."  Why, in the name of God, was Moshe Rabbeinu angry - or embittered - by Pharaoh's words?  Pharaoh was an evil man. His predecessor had killed all the Jewish males born in Egypt, and he, his heir, had exacerbated the plight of the Jewish people, with backbreaking labor that knew no end. Generations of Jews had been born into slavery, and the role of a Pharaoh was no less than that of a sadist. The previous Pharaoh had bathed in Jewish blood, th...

There seems to be a very odd verse in Parshat Va'era. Moshe and Aharon had already moved on to the plague of hail, hail laced with scorching fire. And yet, even though the Egyptian people had already suffered from boils, Moshe on Hashem's instructions rewinds and says prior to afflicting the Egyptians with hail: "I could have stretched forth My hand and stricken you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been effaced from the earth." In other words, Hashem backtracks; pestilence is already passé, the Egyptian's livestock has already been struck and the people can't stand for the boils which leave them no peace of mind. Why does God go back to the pestilence? It would seem that the answer is what guided, or directed, Rabbi Yehuda to break up the plagues into triads of three. Each set of three had a structure of its own. First, there was an speech where Moshe told Pharaoh the point of the set of the next three plagues - and then, Moshe told the non-...

Moshe Rabbeinu, at the burning bush, is commanded to speak to the elders and go with them to Pharaoh to request that he allow the Jewish people to go to the desert to worship Hashem. "He will not let you go," Hashem instructs Moshe, but after that, Hashem tells Moshe I will begin smiting Egypt, first turning their water to blood and ultimately striking their firstborn.  This initial plan, though, is far from what in effect actually happens. First-off, the elders don't go with him. Secondly, Moshe's resistance to Hashem's command leads Hashem to command Aharon as well to join Moshe. Furthermore, Moshe's statement that the elders won't believe him lead Moshe to get tzara'at (often translated as leprosy), and very intriguingly, Moshe's query into how to define God's role - "What name should I tell the Jewish people that you are embodying here?" - leads Hashem to give Moshe clear instructions as to how to present the Almighty ("I wil...

The culmination of the Book of Breishit is the blessing Jacob gives Ephraim and Menashe. From the dawn of humanity, no pair of siblings was able to combine two unique qualities, upright morals and loving brotherhood. Some had the latter, namely Shimon and Levi, the only two siblings who were referred to as "brothers" by Yaakov himself, though their brotherhood was tempered by a bloodlust and thirst for vengeance. And so, Yaakov says that any blessing any future parent will give their children will be that of Ephraim and Menashe: "Hashem should make you like Ephraim and Menashe." Of all the pairs of brothers, it would seem that Ephraim and Menashe would be the least likely to have attained the two abovementioned qualities; for one, they lived in exile, casting severe doubt on their parents' ability to raise them in an upright way. But even more so, they could have inherited their father's trauma, being at first left for dead, and then sold into slavery,...