This episode is the next stage of my personal journey to discover the soul of Pirkei Avot. It is a search for what lies at the heart of the human being, and what Pirkei Avot empowers us to become.

In the previous episode, I shared a discovery that had taken me years to reach. I thought I had finally discovered the central idea of Pirkei Avot. I assumed, at that point, that the journey was almost over. Then I realized that sometimes a breakthrough is not the end of a journey, but the beginning of one.

In pursuit of a deeper understanding, I opened the Rambam - Maimonides - who wrote an eight-chapter introduction to Pirkei Avot. An introduction that is longer than the book itself. If anyone could confirm what I had found and show me what it meant, it was this great sage.

Instead, the mystery deepened.

KEY QUESTIONS

· If you stripped away everything you do - every obligation, every role, every action - what would be left? What are you, underneath all of that?

· The Rambam says we have free choice not just over our actions but over our character and intellect. What does it actually mean to choose who you are?

· What is the difference between a person who does good things and a person who has become good?

· If the core of who we are is our character and understanding, why does so much of Jewish life feel focused on what we do?

· What would it mean to take your inner life as seriously as your obligations?

I spent years learning it, teaching it, writing about it. Then one day I stopped and realised I had never asked what Pirkei Avot actually is.

What I found changed how I understand almost everything else.

Many of us grew up with Pirkei Avot. Its teachings feel like something we have always known. If not now, when? Acquire yourself a friend. The world stands on three things. There is a warmth and familiarity to this book that is unlike anything else in Jewish life.

And that familiarity, I have come to realise, is precisely what hid the question from me.

After more than two decades as Chief Rabbi — after years of giving shiurim on this text, writing commentary, serving as general editor of an encyclopedic work on Avot — I stopped one day and found I could not answer the simplest question about it.

What is this book?

Not what does it say. What is it? The Mishnah is an elaboration of Jewish law — more than sixty tractates, each one unpacking what a Jew is obligated to do. Every single tractate deals with commandments. Except Avot. Avot contains no law, no ritual, no halakhic ruling of any kind.

So why is it in the Mishnah? Why did the greatest compiler in Jewish history put this book there, among all the laws — and why have we been reading it every Shabbos for over a thousand years without ever finding that strange?

This is the question I could not let go of. And the answer — traced through the Maharal, the Maharasha, and the Vilna Gaon, three towering minds writing centuries apart who arrived, independently, at the same conclusion — turns out to be unlike anything I had expected.

This episode is where that journey begins.

KEY QUESTIONS

· How can a book feel deeply familiar your whole life, and still contain a question you have never thought to ask?

· What does it mean that the one tractate in the Mishnah without a single law is also the one people love most?

· Is there something Avot has been doing all along that we never had a name for?

· What would it mean to discover, after decades of learning, that you had never quite asked the right question about a text you thought you knew?

· If the greatest minds in Jewish thought all arrived at the same unexpected answer about Avot - what is it that they saw?

We are always looking for something new. A new place to go, a view we haven't seen, a fresh experience to inspire the spirit. There is a deep restlessness in being human, and no superficial experience ever quite settles it.

In this week's talk for Shavuot - the festival whose name means weeks, the festival of the journey - the Chief Rabbi opens with this restlessness, and what it tells us about who we are.

Drawing on Pirkei Avot's image of the human being as a traveller from another world, on the Maharal's reading of 'Adam' as pure potential, on the strange Mishnah about those who walk and learn, and on the Chief's own observation that animals don't get bored, this is a talk about a profound psychological need that we have, and why no destination ever quite scratches the itch.

What are we searching for, and where do we find it?

Key Questions

• Why is the human need for change so deep, and so easily disastrous?

• What does it mean to be a traveller from another world?

• Why are we never quite satisfied by the new things we find?

• What is the difference between travelling outwardly and travelling inwardly?

We all reach for structure. Routines, habits, the small repetitions that hold a day together. Without them, life can feel like chaos.

In this week's talk on the Parsha of Bamidbar, the Torah describes the Israelite camp arranged with extraordinary order around the Mishkan, every tribe in its place. The Chief Rabbi argues that structure is not just helpful. It is one of the deepest psychological and spiritual needs of the human being. The architecture beneath every meaningful life.

But there's a problem. Too much structure crushes the soul. Where does the joy go? The spontaneity? The love?

Drawing on the Maharal, on Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz's image of pearls held by a string, on the Mishnah's strange instruction to pray with structure but not as routine, and on the very word Siddur, the Chief Rabbi traces the paradox at the heart of Torah, and the way it holds structure and passion in tension.

And asks what holds a life together, and what sets it free.

• Why do we need structure to feel alive?

• Can routine crush the very thing it's meant to protect?

• What is the difference between Torah as structure and Torah as rote?

• How does the same Mishnah tell us to pray with order, and yet not by rote?

Something astounding has just happened in America.

In an official presidential proclamation marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, the President has called on Jewish Americans to observe a national Shabbat — from sunset Friday 15 May to nightfall Saturday 16 May.

In over 3,300 years of Jewish history, no head of state has ever officially recognised Shabbat in this way and called on Jews across an entire nation to keep it. Never before. Not in America. Not anywhere.

In this address, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein — founder of the global Shabbat Project — calls on every Jewish American to answer the proclamation. To rally every family, every community, every Shabbos table. To make this Shabbat a moment of unity, pride, and Jewish connection across the United States.

Above politics. Shabbat is a gift. And this is the moment to open it.

We live in an age of headlines.

One event follows another so quickly. Wars and crises. History can begin to feel fragmented and almost impossible to understand.

But the Torah asks us to step back and see something larger.

In this week's talk on the Parsha of Behar-Bechukotai, the Torah confronts us with one of the most difficult questions in Jewish thought: how do we understand suffering, history, and the unfolding story of humanity itself?

Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Maharsha, the Rambam, and the broader sweep of Jewish history, the Chief Rabbi argues that current events have a shape, even when they feel like chaos.

Key Questions

• Are we living through random events, or part of a larger story?

• What changes when history stops feeling random?

• What does it mean to see yourself as part of history, rather than merely watching it?

• How do ordinary lives shape the moral direction of the world?

We all have values. Family. Faith. Integrity. Honesty in business. Loyalty in marriage. We list them so easily it can feel like having them is settled.

In this week's talk on the Parsha of Emor, the Chief Rabbi opens with a question that sounds simple. It turns out not to be: what is a value?

We begin somewhere unexpected: economics.

In economic terms, something is worth only what someone is prepared to pay for it. What does that say about the things we claim to value?

Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Sefer HaChinuch, and the structure of the mitzvah of Sefirat HaOmer, the Torah introduces a deeper question about value. One that is not so easily reduced to price.

And leaves us with a question many would rather not answer.

Key Questions

• Is a value still a value if you're not prepared to pay for it?

• Where does the very idea of intrinsic worth come from?

• Can a society have objective values without God?

• Why are the values we say we have so often the values we don't live?

In this Day of Remembrance address, Chief Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein responds directly to Pope Leo, and says what the world needs to hear.

Yom HaZikaron is a day of remembrance. A day to mourn those who lost their lives, and to stand with the families who carry that loss.

It is also a day on which something must be said.

In a world of moral confusion, where religious leaders like Pope Leo fail to distinguish between the aggressor and the defender, silence is not an option.

When we call our fallen soldiers "Kedoshim Utehorim" - holy and pure - we are not only honouring them, but making a declaration: Israel's wars are just wars, and that those who gave their lives defending civilization itself are sacred.

We all have a sense of who we are. It feels obvious. Familiar.

But that picture is likely incomplete.

Where does the self begin, and where does it end?

In this week's parsha, we encounter the command: "Love your neighbour as yourself."

What is the "self" we are being asked to understand?

Drawing on the teachings of Pirkei Avot and the insights of our sages, including the profound perspective of Rabbi Shimon Shkop, the Torah opens a deeper question about identity, one that lies at the heart of how we relate to ourselves and to others.

It is a question that challenges some of our most basic assumptions about selfhood.

In this week's talk on Parshat Acharei-Kedoshim, Chief Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein explores a question that reshapes how we think about identity, responsibility, and what it means to be human.

Key Questions

• Where does the self begin, and where does it end?

• Is self-love the opposite of selflessness? Or is it a part of it?

• What does it really mean to love your neighbour "as yourself"?

The way we speak feels simple. We describe what we see, respond to what happens, and share our thoughts with others. Words appear to express reality.

But the Torah presents a very different perspective.

In this week's talk on the Parsha of Tazria-Metzora, Chief Rabbi Dr Warren Goldstein explores a deeper understanding of how the way we speak shapes the world in which we live.

We are taught what to do when we encounter tzara'at, an experience that reveals the profound impact of speech and the way it shapes how people are seen and understood.

Words do not only express reality. They change how it is seen and influence the way we experience life.

Key Questions

• How do the stories we tell about others influence how we see them?

• What does Torah offer as the framework through which we understand reality?

• Do words simply describe reality, or do they shape it?