What does it
really mean when the Torah describes itself as “Esh Dat Lamo” — a Torah of fire?
As we reach the final words of the Torah on Simḥat Torah, we discover a
remarkable tradition surrounding the Baal Shem Tov and the name of his
daughter, Adele—a name connected to the very letters of Esh Dat Lamo.
From Ḥanokh the shoemaker to a pair of torn shoes that changed a family’s
future, an unexpected thread begins to emerge: Torah is not meant simply to be
studied or even held. It is meant to become a fire that we carry into ordinary
life and then pass forward. 

For
me, this teaching became deeply personal. My mother was Adele, and she lived to
98. At 95, she was still working out and teaching women a fifth of her age how
to train safely with weights—and there is a photograph I treasure of her at
that age holding her tiny great-granddaughter, Orly Adele. This week, another
Adele in our family celebrates with her husband the brit milah of their
long-awaited first child. On Simḥat Torah we finish the Torah and immediately
begin again, because in Judaism nothing holy is meant simply to end. The greatest blessing is not merely
that our children carry our names. It is that they carry our fire.  

 BRING IT BACK TO THE HEART 

The Secret of the Lulav, the Circle, and Hoshana Rabbah 

What would a stranger think walking into synagogue on Sukkot morning? A room full of intelligent, serious people holding palm branches and a strange yellow fruit, moving them in every direction—and then marching in circles around the Torah crying הוֹשַׁע נָא — “Please save us!”
We have performed these rituals since childhood, but perhaps familiarity has
caused us to stop seeing just how extraordinary they really are. 

In this class, we follow the Ben Ish Ḥai and the teachings of the Arizal into the
hidden meaning of these movements: the Or Makif of the sukkah that surrounds us, the shefa we spread outward with the lulav, and the holiness we draw back toward the heart. From the walls of Yericho to the protective circle of a marriage, from thirteen hakafot of אֶחָד and אַהֲבָה to the intimacy of Shemini Atzeret, we discover that Sukkot is teaching us which walls must come down, which walls must remain—and how to gather the scattered pieces of ourselves and bring them back to the heart. 

 Why did the greatest sages of Israel dance through the night over a pitcher of ordinary water? Why were there fifteen steps in the Beit HaMikdash, fifteen Shir HaMa’alot, and five days between Yom Kippur—the tenth of Tishrei—and Sukkot on the fifteenth? And why does the Mishnah make the astonishing claim that someone who never witnessed Simḥat Beit HaSho’evah “never saw joy in his life”? 

This holiday Breakfast & Class became much more personal than I expected. We
journey from the waters that cried at Creation, to David HaMelekh and the
fifteen Songs of Ascent, from a childhood memory of hearing my neighbor hammer together his sukkah immediately after Yom Kippur, to a Holocaust survivor riding endlessly on a Madison Avenue bus—and finally to my own experience of returning from Israel this year while my wife, children and grandchildren remained behind. Somewhere along those fifteen steps lies a remarkable Sukkot lesson: simḥah is not the absence of difficulty or loneliness. Simḥah is what happens when what appears separated discovers that it was connected all along. And perhaps the greatest discovery of all is realizing that we are never truly alone.  

 Step Into the Cloud 

What
exactly are we entering when we walk into the sukkah? The Torah tells us to
remember the Ananei HaKavod,
the Clouds of Glory—but why commemorate the clouds rather than the manna that
fed us or the miraculous water that sustained us? Perhaps because the manna
said, “HaShem feeds us,” and the well said, “HaShem sustains us,” but the cloud
said something entirely different: HaShem is here. And according to
the Vilna Gaon, Sukkot does not merely celebrate the cloud that protected us in
the desert. After the sin of the Golden Calf, the clouds disappeared—and after
Yom Kippur, they came back. Yom Kippur tells us, “We are forgiven.” Sukkot tells
us something even more intimate: HaShem still wants us close. 

In
this Erev Sukkot Breakfast & a Class, we explore the remarkable secret of
the sukkah: Sukkah
equals 91—the combined numerical value of Havayah and Adnut, and the numerical
value of Amen.
The Ben Ish Ḥai describes the sukkah as an Or Makif,
a Divine light that surrounds us. We don’t merely perform this mitzvah; we walk
completely inside it. And perhaps that changes the way we understand the
Ushpizin as well. Avraham, Yitzḥak, Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Yosef and David
aren’t simply coming to visit our sukkah. We have
stepped into the cloud, into the shade of the Shekhinah—and they are coming there too.
For seven days, HaShem invites us to bring our families, our meals, our
laughter, our worries and our lives beneath His cloud and simply experience: HaShem is here.  

 Everyone in the
tavern thought Yankel was the town fool. Night after night, they offered him a
choice: a twenty-dollar bill, a ten, a five, or one shiny silver dollar. And
every night, to their enormous amusement, Yankel chose the silver dollar. Until
one day the bartender pulled him aside and begged him to take the twenty.
Yankel smiled. “If I take the twenty once, the game is over. As long as I take
the dollar, they keep coming back.” Perhaps Yankel understood something that we
desperately need to remember as we enter Yom Kippur: sometimes the little thing
we collect every day is worth far more than the big thing we grab once. 

Every
Yom Kippur we are tempted to make enormous promises—to change everything, fix
everything, become someone completely different. But HaShem asks us to open an
opening ke-hudah shel mahat—as
small as the eye of a needle—and He promises to open the rest. Maybe this year
we don’t need the twenty-dollar kabbalah that disappears a week later. Maybe we
need one silver dollar: one small, specific change we can repeat tomorrow, and
the next day, and the day after that. Because a tiny commitment kept every day
doesn’t remain tiny. By next Yom Kippur, we may discover that the smallest
kabbalah was the one that changed us most.  

 Can a judgment that has already been made be reconsidered? Rosh Hashanah has passed. The books have been opened. Yom Kippur is approaching. And perhaps we wonder: if the judgment has already been written, what can another prayer, another tear, another act of teshuvah possibly accomplish? An extraordinary story in the Zohar, set in the ancient Galilean village of Peki’in, gives us a remarkable answer. A little boy stands before HaShem with nothing but Torah, tears, and a prayer — and somehow, the case is opened again. 

This week, Chantelle and I found ourselves climbing the narrow mountain roads into Peki’in, walking through a place where the world of our Ḥakhamim suddenly felt
very close. There I was reminded of the story of Rabbi Yossi of Peki’in and the
child who refused to accept that the story was over. It may be one of the most
powerful lessons we can carry into Yom Kippur: as long as there can be another
tefillah, another tear, another act of teshuvah, there can be new evidence. And
perhaps the question is not simply whether HaShem will give us another year —
but what unfinished purpose we can place before Him as the reason we are asking for it.

 

 We spent Rosh
Hashanah in Givot Eden, and what was supposed to be a short two-day trip
through northern Israel somehow became a journey filled with enough stories for
weeks. Most of that was because of my wife Chantelle, who has a wonderful habit
of making me stop when I am ready to keep driving. One of those stops brought
us to the extraordinary Tunisian synagogue in Akko, a building covered from
floor to ceiling with millions of tiny mosaic stones. And because Chantelle
insisted that we stay, we found ourselves listening to an Israeli Air Force
officer speaking to a group of young men and women about Yom Kippur—and
teaching a lesson I needed to hear myself. 

We
can fast for twenty-five hours. We can beat our chests, cry through Kol Nidrei,
confess every sin and remain in synagogue until the final HaShem Hu HaElokim.
But the Mishnah teaches that there is one door Yom Kippur cannot open for us: עֲבֵירוֹת שֶׁבֵּין אָדָם לַחֲבֵירוֹ—the
hurts that remain between one person and another. Before we ask HaShem to
forgive us, there may be a phone call we need to make, an apology we need to
offer—or perhaps an old resentment we finally need to put down. In this
morning’s Breakfast & a Class,
The
Door Yom Kippur Cannot Open, we discuss
forgiveness, reconciliation, and what those millions of stones in an Akko
synagogue can teach us about repairing the mosaic before Yom Kippur.  

 When the Excuses Run Out 

We all have explanations for why we are the way we are. It was our parents. It was
the home we grew up in. It was our environment, our circumstances, our personality, perhaps even our DNA. And sometimes those explanations are
absolutely true. But somewhere between understanding where we came from and
deciding where we are going, explanation can quietly become excuse. In this
morning’s Breakfast and a Class, as we prepare for Rosh Hashanah through the
opening words of Ha’azinu, we meet one of the most unlikely heroes of teshuvah
in the entire Talmud: Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya. 

He first turns to the mountains, then Heaven and Earth, then the sun and moon, and
finally the stars, begging each of them to help him. Until suddenly there is
nowhere else to turn and no one else to blame. And then he speaks five words
that change his eternity: אֵין הַדָּבָר תָּלוּי אֶלָּא בִּי — “The matter depends on
no one other than me.” Perhaps that is where teshuvah really begins—not when we deny our past, our wounds, or the forces that shaped us, but when we realize that none of them gets to write our future. Join us for “When the Excuses Run Out.”  

 Ask almost any Jewish child what we eat on Rosh Hashanah and the answer comes immediately: apples and honey. It is one of the most beloved and recognizable customs of the year. But not every Jewish community followed that tradition. In Baghdad, in Aleppo, in Damsacas and throughout the near east, following the custom recorded by the Ben Ish Chai, the apple was cooked in sugar rather than dipped in honey. In our own family, we never used honey at the Rosh Hashanah table; even after coming to America, our great-grandparents continued the tradition of using sugar instead. 

Why would anyone avoid honey on the very night when we are asking Hashem for a
sweet year? The answer takes us from the ancient customs of Ashkenaz to the
Kabbalists of the Sephardic world, and reveals two remarkably different ways of
understanding honey, judgment, and sweetness. Along the way we discover why bee honey may actually be the perfect symbol of transforming din into rachamim,
why the Ben Ish Chai preferred white sugar, and why the apple itself—with its
taste, appearance, and fragrance—carries a much deeper Rosh Hashanah message
than we might ever have imagined. Two customs, two approaches, and ultimately
one prayer: שנה טובה ומתוקה — a truly good and sweet year.  

 As we approach
Rosh Hashanah, we naturally begin thinking about what needs fixing. The
mistakes we need to correct. The habits we need to break. The parts of
ourselves that still need work. But what if that is only half the story? What
if Torah was not given merely to make us less bad, but to help us
discover how much greater we are capable of becoming? 

In
this morning’s Breakfast & Class,
we explore a remarkable teaching of Rabbi Frand built around the words לֹא בַשָּׁמַיִם הִוא — “It is not in
Heaven.” Why did HaShem
create us unfinished? Why does the Torah hide an allusion to milah
inside the words “Who will ascend for us to Heaven?” And if the angels have no
yetzer hara, why did they
want the Torah? The answers lead to a beautiful message for these final days of
Elul: HaShem
gave us wheat and asks us to make bread. He did not create us finished—He
created us with the extraordinary ability to become.