On the final day of Moshe’s life, he gathered the entire nation – men, women, children, and according to the Talmud, all souls of future Jews – to pass them through a final covenant with God. The parsha also contains the prophetic predictions of the Messianic times, and it ends with a simple, binary choice: Moshe tells the nation, “Behold I have placed before you today, the life and the good, and death and evil… Choose Life!”

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Chapter 28 of Deuteronomy is arguably the most difficult portion in the Torah to read. Known as the Admonition, the chapter details the blessings that will be bestowed upon our nation when we adhere to the Laws of God. But it also has the curses that will befall our people in the event that we disobey the word of God and flout His Torah. The curses are bone chilling and blood curling, and unfortunately, not only academic. Over the course of our long and storied history, our Nation has experienced great highs unmatched by any other Nation, and lows of such frightening nature that they are unrivaled by any misery accounted for in the annals of human history. Every curse detailed in the Admonition has happened to our people at some point. When this section is read in the synagogues, it is read in an undertone and very rapidly. What will befall our people in such excruciating detail is highly unpleasant and something that many want to get over with quickly. In this Parsha podcast, we take the brave step of trying to study it properly, and specifically finding lessons and insights and perspectives that prove to be instructive and even insightful. We find the shimmering silver linings to the menacing and foreboding clouds. Some of the ideas may sound foreign and maybe even far-fetched, but we discover how learning even this part of the Torah can be elevating and edifying.

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The Torah has a surprising view on joy and how to attain it. The prevailing attitude in our society is that a person's state of joy is contingent upon circumstance: In good days, people tend to feel a bit more joyous. On bad days, it's more difficult to feel joy. Joy, according to society, is inextricably connected to circumstance. The Torah understands otherwise. The Torah teaches us that there is a dial of joy which can be easily manipulated. If you want more joy, all you need to do is rotate the dial in one direction. To reduce joy, spin it the other way. In this Parsha Podcast, we share the secret of the dial of joy. To boost your joy, listen carefully.

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The judgment on Rosh Hashanah is comprehensive: every single human has his or her moment of judgment before God. Even the dead are judged again each year. The judgment covers not only our behavior with respect to fulfilling our obligations to God, it also covers interpersonal matters. If we are meritorious, we will be forgiven for all our sins on Yom Kippur, but that atones only sins down between man and God. For interpersonal sins, we are not forgiven until we appease our friend and elicit their forgiveness. But these two domains are not entirely separate. In this short and sweet podcast sourced from the writings of my grandfather of blessed memory, we learn how important our interpersonal behavior is vis-a-vis our status before God. Now is the time to prepare.

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As the Book of Deuteronomy draws to its conclusion, the narrative makes a transition: Moshe finishes conveying the mitzvos to the nation, and sets up his final parting message to the people. First, he commands the nation to perform several elaborate ceremonies on the very first day that they cross the Jordan River; then he conveys a scathing, terrifying list of curses that will befall the people in the event that we deviate from the Torah.

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The death of one's spouse is always a tragedy, but there's something particularly sad about someone who dies without children. Leaving no living progeny behind leaves a person without continuity, without a legacy in this world. When a man dies childless, the Torah instructs his wife to seek to marry her deceased husband's brother in fulfillment of a law called Yibbum, known as levirate marriage. When this couple bears their firstborn child -- the Baby Yi-Boomer -- he will be named after the deceased husband/brother, and thereby provide a continuity to his soul. But if the brother refuses to marry his sister-in-law, if he eschews taking responsibility for his brother's soul, then a process called Chalitzah is done: the widow removes her brother-in-law's shoe, spits on the ground next to him, and derisively proclaims, "So shall be done to the man who refuses to build his brother's house." What could possibly be the meaning of these very strange laws? In this wonderful Parsha podcast, we discover the answers that illuminate this law, but also provide us with a newfound understanding of messiah and the imperative for selfless dedication on behalf of us.

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Our parsha begins with the unusual law of the marriage of a Jewish warrior and an enemy captive woman. When a Jewish warrior spots a prisoner of war that he desires to marry, there is a process and a protocol for how he may marry her. The Talmud (also featured by Rashi) offers a very unusual classification of why the Torah permits this union. On its surface, this reason compounds the difficulties of this law. In this very special edition of the Parsha podcast, we share a novel and instructive approach to this very unusual law.

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A great corpus of Torah law governs the relationships between men and women. The Second Order of Mishnah contains books on the initiation of marriage, on marital responsibilities, on the annulment of marriage via divorce, on the suspected adulteress, and on levirate marriages. The Order also contains two seemingly unrelated books: a book on vows and oaths and a book on the laws of a Nazir. In this podcast we explore the nature of these books, and earn some basic literacy in this massive portion of Oral Torah.

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DONATE: Please consider supporting the podcasts by making a donation to help fund our Jewish outreach and educational efforts at https://www.torchweb.org/support.php. Thank you!

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TORAH 101