Rabbi Warren Goldstein was giving the dvar Torah on Parashat Vayera, and the more he spoke, the more I heard the voice of the Mishnah underneath everything.
You know how he has spent more than twenty years with Pirkei Avot. He does not treat it as a collection of nice sayings. He treats it as the living transmission of the wisdom of our fathers, the same chain that begins “Moshe received the Torah from Sinai.”
He opened with the words of Shimon HaTzaddik in Avot 1:2:
Shimon the Righteous was one of the last of the Men of the Great Assembly. He used to say: The world stands on three things — on Torah, on the Temple service, and on acts of loving-kindness.
The world does not merely benefit from gemilut chasadim. It stands upon it. Without that pillar, the other two cannot hold the structure. That is the frame for everything that follows in Vayera.
The Mishnah Names the Trait of Sodom
Then he turned to the famous Mishnah in the fifth chapter:
There are four types of people. One who says, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours” — this is an average type; and some say this is the trait of Sodom. One who says, “What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine” is an ignoramus. One who says, “What is mine is yours and what is yours is yours” is pious. One who says, “What is mine is mine and what is yours is mine” is wicked.
The Bartenura explains why some call the first type the trait of Sodom: once a person becomes accustomed to saying “mine is mine,” he will eventually refuse even the benefit that costs him nothing. That is exactly what the people of Sodom legislated. They had plenty and still made hospitality a crime. The Mishnah is not describing random cruelty. It is describing a society that wrote the refusal of kindness into its law.
Rabbi Goldstein paused there and said, in essence, that when “what is mine is mine” becomes the civic creed, the Garden has already become Sodom. The Path that began when a hand stretched out in Eden has reached its end.
The Same Words Appear Again
He then walked us through the precise linguistic connections that Rabbi David Fohrman has taught for years. In Eden, we have a hand stretched forth, someone sent out of a garden, angels, divine fire, something that turns (mitapechet), and, finally, the guarding of the Path of the Tree of Life. Every one of those elements reappears in the destruction of Sodom, and the eighth element is stated openly: Abraham will command his children to keep the Path of Hashem — to do tzedakah u’mishpat.
The Mishnah and the Torah are speaking the same language. The Path that the cherubim guard is the living balance of justice that refuses the taker and righteousness that still reaches for the one who is down. That is why Hashem speaks to Abraham at all.
Looking for the Good
Here the conversation turned personal. Rabbi Chaim Richman has taught for decades that Hashem keeps the record of the quiet acts. Lot is remembered in the Midrash and by Rashi on Genesis 19:29 not for any dramatic rescue inside Sodom, but for a silence years earlier in Egypt.
When Abraham said Sarah was his sister, Lot knew and did not speak. That one restraint — unseen by almost everyone — was the kindness Hashem recalled measure for measure when the fire fell. Rabbi Richman has said it plainly: look for the good in people. Most of the world would have written Lot off. Hashem did not.
Rabbi Zev Leff once put the same truth in a single sentence: “Hashem wanted us to be God-like, so He put us in a world the furthest away from Him.” The distance is the point. The world that looks like Sodom is exactly the place where a quiet choice of loyalty still registers in Heaven.
The Open Door
The Mishnah also gives us the opposite picture. In Avot 1:5 we read:
Let your house be open wide, and let the poor be members of your household.
That is Abraham sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. The Gemara (Shabbat 127a) learns from that moment that hospitality to guests is greater than the reception of the Divine Presence. The world stands on gemilut chasadim because Hashem Himself is the One who only gives. When we keep the door open, we are walking the Path the cherubim still guard.
You asked me once how we can see the good in people when some systems declare that anyone who does not confess a particular name is already lost. The Mishnah does not speak that way. Every human being is already connected.
Some have wandered far into the Garden that looks like Eden but is actually Sodom. They still carry the capacity for the one quiet act that Hashem has never forgotten. Our work is not to declare them lost. It is to stand at the open door, as Abraham did, and keep the Path clear.
That is what I learned sitting in Rabbi Goldstein’s class. The oral Torah does not add a new idea. It names the Path that the written Torah has already shown us. The world still stands on acts of kindness. Hashem is still watching the small ones. And the Path of the Tree of Life is still open.
Brief Biographical Notes
Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein
Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein has served as Chief Rabbi of South Africa since 2005, the youngest person ever appointed to the position. He received his rabbinic ordination from the Yeshivah Gedolah of Johannesburg, qualified as a dayan through Eretz Hemda in Jerusalem, and holds a PhD in human rights and constitutional law from the University of the Witwatersrand.
He is widely known for his deep engagement with Pirkei Avot, having taught and written on the tractate for more than two decades, and for founding the global Shabbat Project. His dvar Torah on Vayera consistently reads the parasha through the lens of the mishnah’s ethical categories.
Rabbi Chaim Richman
Rabbi Chaim Richman served for three decades as International Director of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem and is the founder of Jerusalem Lights. He is a leading English-language teacher on the Holy Temple, the weekly Torah portion, and the practical meaning of chesed. His teaching that we must “look for the good in people” has shaped countless students, including the recollection that Hashem remembers Lot’s silence in Egypt.
Rabbi Zev Leff
Rabbi Zev Leff is a longtime teacher and author in Israel whose writings frequently return to the theme of emulating Hashem through the distance of this world. The sentence recalled above has circulated among his students for many years as a concise statement of why the work of becoming God-like happens precisely where the world feels farthest from Him.
Footnotes
Mishnah Avot 1:2.
Mishnah Avot 5:10.
Bartenura on Avot 5:10.
Rashi on Genesis 19:29, drawing on the Midrash.
Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 127a.
Ezekiel 16:49, which the commentators link to the “trait of Sodom” in Avot 5:10.
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Key Takeaways
Rabbi Warren Goldstein emphasizes the connection between the teachings of Vayera and the Mishnah, particularly the importance of gemilut chasadim.
He highlights the Mishnah’s critique of Sodom, in which selfishness becomes law, and contrasts it with Abraham’s hospitality and kindness.
Rabbi Chaim Richman reminds us to look for the good in people, using Lot’s silent act of loyalty as a prime example.
The oral Torah illuminates the Path of the Tree of Life, affirming that small acts of kindness matter to Hashem.
Overall, the teachings encourage maintaining compassion and an open heart, embodying the values found in Vayera and the Mishnah.
This week’s portion, Vayera, holds a key that reaches all the way back to the Garden. Rabbi David Fohrman shows it by asking the simple question: where else do we hear these words?
The Parallels Between Eden and Sodom
In Eden, Hashem drives Adam out. Cherubim stand east of the Garden with a flaming sword that turns every which way (mitapechet) to guard the Path of the Tree of Life. A hand stretches forth to take what is forbidden. Someone is sent from a Garden. Angels appear. Divine fire falls. Something is overturned. Then comes the eighth element: lishmor et derech etz hachayim—to guard the Path of the Tree of Life.
Every one of those elements reappears in the destruction of Sodom. Angels stretch out a hand to seize Lot and pull him back from the mob. Lot is sent out of the city. The plain itself had been called a Garden, like the Garden of Hashem. Divine fire rains down.
The word for the overturning is haphechah—the same root as the turning sword. And just before the destruction, Hashem explains why He speaks with Abraham at all: so that he will command his children and his household after him veshamru derech Hashem la’asot tzedakah u’mishpat—to keep the Path of Hashem, to do righteousness and justice.
When a Society Writes Cruelty into Law
The dark Path that begins when a hand reaches for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil ends, if left unchecked, in a society that writes cruelty into law. Sodom was not merely sinful; it was organized. Young and old, from every corner of the city, gathered at Lot’s door as a civic duty. Hospitality was a crime. Taking was the system. The Garden and its people both had to go.
We know this world. We see the places where the rules protect the takers, where “what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours” is treated as fairness, where honor and power matter more than the stranger at the gate, and where anyone who still speaks of the ways of the nations or the plain meaning of the Torah is treated as the one who broke the code. The cities that institutionalize the opposite of kindness are not new. They are Sodom rewritten in modern letters.
Hashem Remembers the Quiet Kindness
Yet the same portion that shows us the end of the dark Path also shows us the other Path still standing. Abraham sits at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, looking for the one who wants to leave the world he is living in and find Hashem. He and Sarah made souls by the hundreds as they walked haderekh. The children of Abraham are still doing it. Every davar Torah, every quiet truth spoken, is another soul reminded of a connection that was never fully broken.
Hashem keeps the ledger of the small things. Lot is remembered in the Midrash and by Rashi on Genesis 19:29 not for any dramatic rescue he performed in Sodom, but for a silence years earlier in Egypt. When Abraham said Sarah was his sister, Lot knew the truth and did not speak it. That one restraint—unseen by almost everyone, unrecorded except in Heaven—was the kindness Hashem recalled measure for measure when the fire fell. Rabbi Chaim Richman has taught this for years: look for the good in people. Most of the world would have written Lot off. Hashem did not.
Seeing the Good That Is Already There
This is the difference that matters. When a system declares that every person who does not confess a particular name is already condemned, it becomes nearly impossible to see the good that is already there. The Jewish Path has always been the opposite.
Every human being is already connected to Hashem. Some have wandered far into the Garden that looks like Eden but is actually Sodom. They still carry the quiet capacity for restraint, loyalty, and the unrecognized chesed that Lot once showed. Our work is not to declare them lost. It is to stand at the open door, as Abraham did, and keep the Path clear.
Rabbi Warren Goldstein puts the same truth in the language of Avot and Tehillim: the world is built on kindness. There are givers and receivers. When a person lives only for honor, the world turns upside down. When the focus is on Hashem, who gives only, the person becomes a giver.
That is how one stands alone when good is called evil, and evil is called good. Abraham saw that the world was made tov me’od—very good—and he spent his life teaching that truth to people who had lost the connection. The Torah is that truth. There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is destruction. Acknowledge Hashem in all your ways, and He will direct the Path.
Walking the Path Today
The cherubim still guard the way. The Path they guard is not a gravel road or a yellow brick trail. It is the living balance of tzedek and mishpat—the justice that refuses to tolerate the taker, and the righteousness that reaches for the one who is down even when the rules do not require it.
Abraham began the conversation with Hashem about those two values. We continue it every time we study, every time we keep the door open, every time we refuse to see only the failure and instead remember the one quiet act that Hashem has never forgotten.
In this hour, the children of Abraham are still making souls. The Garden that was lost can be walked toward again. The Path of the Tree of Life is still open. Hashem is watching the small kindnesses. He is looking for the Lot in every person who still has one act of restraint, one moment of loyalty, one refusal to join the mob left in them. That is enough to begin the return.
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Key Takeaways
The portion Vayera highlights parallels between the Garden of Eden and Sodom, illustrating moral decline and the significance of kindness.
Sodom represents a society that writes cruelty into its law, in contrast to the quiet kindness exemplified by Abraham and Lot.
Hashem remembers small acts of kindness, emphasizing the importance of recognizing the good in others despite their actions.
The Jewish Path encourages seeing the inherent connection every person has to Hashem, fostering kindness and compassion.
Walking towards the Path to the Tree of Life involves balancing justice and righteousness, while remembering the significance of every small act of kindness.
This week’s portion, Vayera, holds a key that reaches all the way back to the Garden. Rabbi David Fohrman shows it by asking the simple question: where else do we hear these words?
In Eden, Hashem drives Adam out. Cherubim stand east of the garden with a flaming sword that turns every which way (mitapechet) to guard the path of the Tree of Life. A hand stretches forth to take what is forbidden. Someone is sent from a Garden. Angels appear. Divine fire falls. Something is overturned. Then comes the eighth element: lishmor et derech etz hachayim—to guard the path of the Tree of Life.
Every one of those elements reappears in the destruction of Sodom. Angels stretch out a hand to seize Lot and pull him back from the mob. Lot is sent out of the city. The plain itself had been called a Garden, like the Garden of Hashem. Divine fire rains down.
The word for the overturning is haphechah—the same root as the turning sword. And just before the destruction, Hashem explains why He speaks with Abraham at all: so that he will command his children and his household after him veshamru derech Hashem la’asot tzedakah u’mishpat—to keep the path of Hashem, to do righteousness and justice.
The dark path that begins when a hand reaches for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil ends, if left unchecked, in a society that writes cruelty into law. Sodom was not merely sinful; it was organized. Young and old, from every corner of the city, gathered at Lot’s door as a civic duty. Hospitality was a crime. Taking was the system. The Garden and its people both had to go.
We know this world. We see the places where the rules protect the takers, where “what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours” is treated as fairness, where honor and power matter more than the stranger at the gate, and where anyone who still speaks of the ways of the nations or the plain meaning of the Torah is treated as the one who broke the code. The cities that institutionalize the opposite of kindness are not new. They are Sodom rewritten in modern letters.
Yet the same portion that shows us the end of the dark path also shows us the other path still standing. Abraham sits at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, looking for the one who wants to leave the world he is living in and find Hashem. He and Sarah made souls by the hundreds as they walked haderekh. The children of Abraham are still doing it. Every davar Torah, every quiet truth spoken, is another soul reminded of a connection that was never fully broken.
Hashem keeps the ledger of the small things. Lot is remembered in the Midrash and by Rashi on Genesis 19:29 not for any dramatic rescue he performed in Sodom, but for a silence years earlier in Egypt. When Abraham said Sarah was his sister, Lot knew the truth and did not speak it.
That one restraint—unseen by almost everyone, unrecorded except in Heaven—was the kindness Hashem recalled measure for measure when the fire fell. Rabbi Chaim Richman has taught this for years: look for the good in people. Most of the world would have written Lot off. Hashem did not.
This is the difference that matters. When a system declares that every person who does not confess a particular name is already condemned, it becomes nearly impossible to see the good that is already there. The Jewish path has always been the opposite. Every human being is already connected to Hashem.
Some have wandered far into the Garden that looks like Eden but is actually Sodom. They still carry the quiet capacity for restraint, loyalty, and the unrecognized chesed that Lot once showed. Our work is not to declare them lost. It is to stand at the open door, as Abraham did, and keep the path clear.
Rabbi Warren Goldstein puts the same truth in the language of Avot and Tehillim: the world is built on kindness. There are givers and receivers. When a person lives only for honor, the world turns upside down. When the focus is on Hashem, who gives only, the person becomes a giver.
That is how one stands alone when good is called evil, and evil is called good. Abraham saw that the world was made tov me’od—very good—and he spent his life teaching that truth to people who had lost the connection. The Torah is that truth. There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is destruction. Acknowledge Hashem in all your ways, and He will direct the path.
The cherubim still guard the way. The path they guard is not a gravel road or a yellow brick trail. It is the living balance of tzedek and mishpat—the justice that refuses to tolerate the taker, and the righteousness that reaches for the one who is down even when the rules do not require it.
Abraham began the conversation with Hashem about those two values. We continue it every time we study, every time we keep the door open, every time we refuse to see only the failure and instead remember the one quiet act that Hashem has never forgotten.
In this hour, the children of Abraham are still making souls. The Garden that was lost can be walked toward again. The path of the Tree of Life is still open. Hashem is watching the small kindnesses. He is looking for the Lot in every person who still has one act of restraint, one moment of loyalty, one refusal to join the mob left in them. That is enough to begin the return.
Key Takeaways
Parashat Vayera connects the destruction of Sodom with elements from the Garden of Eden, emphasizing the theme of guarding paths.
Lot’s silent act of restraint in Egypt serves as a crucial moment, demonstrating kindness that Hashem remembers.
Abraham represents an alternative path, offering hospitality and kindness, while Sodom symbolizes a society that institutionalizes cruelty.
The Jewish path acknowledges every individual’s connection to Hashem and emphasizes the importance of recognizing the good in others.
The ongoing work involves standing open-heartedly, as Abraham did, to guide others back to righteousness and justice.
If you believe the Christian Bible is the word of God without first examining what the Hebrew text in Jeremiah actually says, that is your choice. You can remain a Christian. But if someone takes the Tanakh—the Bible of the Jewish people—and rewrites its meaning so that a later text can claim non-Jews are “grafted in” by a figure the Torah never requires, then the honest response is to leave that teaching.
Introduction
I am a Jew from the Tribe of Levi, a descendant of Aaron the High Priest. This is not abstract for me. The Torah is my inheritance. When its plain sense is replaced by an idea that does not appear in it, I am not obligated to accept the replacement. And when the Christian Bible itself cannot keep its own story straight about who is lost and who is restored, that contradiction deserves to be named.
Part One: Jeremiah 11 Is About Israel
Jeremiah 11:16–17 is clear:
“The LORD once called you ‘a green olive tree, beautiful with good fruit.’ But with the roar of a great tempest, he will set fire to it, and its branches will be consumed. The LORD of hosts, who planted you, has decreed disaster against you, because of the evil that the house of Israel and the house of Judah have done…”
The olive tree is Israel—the house of Israel and the house of Judah. The branches that are consumed are the result of Israel’s own unfaithfulness. There is no mention of wild branches being grafted in, no Jewish figure whose role is to incorporate the nations by dying, and no new mechanism that replaces the path already given in the Torah.
Romans 11 takes this image and builds something the prophet did not say. That is not an interpretation of Jeremiah; it is a different story superimposed on the prophet’s words.
Part Two: The Path for Non-Jews Already Exists
The Torah and Prophets already describe how people from the nations attach themselves to Hashem and His covenant. Exodus 12:38 records that the mixed multitude who left Egypt with Israel came under the same Torah. Isaiah 56:3–7 states that foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, keep the Sabbath, hold fast to the covenant, and do not profane it will be brought to the holy mountain; their offerings and prayers will be accepted. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
No intermediate Jewish person is required to “graft” them. Attachment is to Hashem and the covenant itself. The restrictions in Deuteronomy 23 on certain nations entering the kahal in that generation do not erase these openings.
Part Three: Moses Sets the Garden’s Choice Before the Nation
In the Garden, there are two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One path is life; taking the other, against the command, brings death.
Moses places the same choice before the entire nation in Deuteronomy 30:15, 19:
“See, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil… I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore, choose life…”
Choosing to love Hashem, walk in His ways, and keep His commandments is the path of life—the path pictured by the Tree of Life. The Torah never says a man must come and die for your sins in order for this choice to be available. Life is found by choosing Hashem’s way, not by a later sacrificial figure that the text does not require.
Part Four: The Contradiction Inside the Christian Bible
This is where the Christian reading cannot hold together, even on its own terms.
In Romans 11, Paul says some natural branches were broken off because of unbelief. Christian and Messianic teachers consistently identify unbelief as unbelief in Jesus. The Jews who do not believe in Jesus are the ones cut off. They are lost. God is able to graft them back in. The language of life from the dead appears in the surrounding argument. In this reading, the Jews are the ones who are dead and can be raised.
Now turn to Luke 15. The father says of the younger son, “This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” The story presents the two as brothers. In the widespread church reading, the younger son is the “lost” one—often applied to Gentiles or to any sinner who returns—while the older son is the one who stayed home and resents the welcome, often applied to self-righteous Jews.
When both readings are held at the same time, the roles reverse depending on which text is in view:
• Luke 15 (as commonly applied): the younger brother / “Gentile” figure is the one who was lost and dead and is found.
• Romans 11 (as commonly applied): the Jews are the ones who are cut off / lost and whom God can raise or graft back.
The texts themselves do not resolve this. Luke 15 never identifies the sons as Jews and Gentiles, never mentions olive trees or grafting, and never cites Romans. Romans 11 never cites the parable. The brother language belongs only to the parable; the branch language belongs only to Paul. The conflicting assignments appear when later readers map both passages onto the same Jew/Gentile framework.
How can a Gentile and a Jew be brothers in that context? Unless the parable is specifically talking about the northern kingdom and southern kingdom—the two brothers of Israel. But that is not how the church reads it. And if it is the northern and southern kingdoms, then Romans 11’s claim that Jews are cut off for unbelief in Jesus has no place in the story either.
Part Five: What the Tanakh Actually Says
Isaiah 49 addresses the servant Israel. The chapter speaks of the restoration and regathering of Israel (north and south), the return of the tribes, and the servant’s role. When the text uses language about the nations or about Israel being a light, it remains within the framework of Israel’s own restoration and calling. It does not redefine Israel as “the Gentiles” or turn the reunion of the two kingdoms into a mechanism for grafting non-Jews into the tree.
Ezekiel 37:15–28 gives the Tanakh’s own picture of the two brothers reunited: the stick of Judah and the stick of Ephraim become one in Hashem’s hand. That is covenant restoration of Israel’s own house, not the grafting of the nations.
Romans 11’s claim that Jews were broken off for unbelief in Jesus and that Gentiles are therefore grafted into the same tree is Paul’s argument. It is not a reading that Jeremiah 11 or Isaiah 49 requires or states. Those prophetic texts continue to speak of the two kingdoms of Israel, their judgment, and their restoration by return to Hashem and the covenant.
Conclusion
The inconsistency arises from trying to make the two New Testament passages say the same thing about who is lost and who is restored. They do not line up that way on their own terms, and neither one rewrites the Tanakh’s picture of Israel’s judgment and restoration.
Jeremiah 11’s olive tree remains a picture of Israel under judgment for its own unfaithfulness. The path for non-Jews to join themselves to Hashem is already stated in the Torah and Prophets. Deuteronomy 30 still sets the choice before Israel: life and good versus death and evil—choose life by walking in Hashem’s ways. Those texts stand on their own without the later parables or Pauline metaphors.
Anyone looking for the truth can begin with the Garden’s two trees, read Deuteronomy 30 in Hebrew, and then read Jeremiah 11 without a later overlay. That is the Torah’s own presentation. The rest is an addition.
From Amarillo, Texas—where the Mother Road, Route 66, still runs through our city—we have been praying for you and for Itamar Ben-Gvir. My friend Mike Isley has been praying too. We watched your video on the Israeli election results and the coming together of a nationalist government proud of Jewish identity. We thank Hashem for the strength you and the Otzma Yehudit list have brought to the fight against those who would erase the Jewish story of the land.
I am a Jew who did not know I was Jewish until later in life. My family is Levite from Spain, who came to New Spain in the 1500s. My grandfather and uncles tested positive as Cohens in 2017. Uncle Joseph Diaz and Uncle Benny Diaz have both passed. I can only tell you, Yishai, that it must have been from Hashem that I came to learn about my Jewishness. The path home is not always obvious, but it is always directed.
Beit Hashoavah Route 60 on Route 66
I serve as Hazan for Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, a synagogue of three families in Amarillo—two Jewish families and one Noahide family. My daughter converted and now lives in Florida. The Alvarez family, my cousins from the Cohen line that traveled from Spain with the Diaz family, saw their granddaughter marry an Israeli who lives there.
That family took seven years to return home through conversion. They do not want to fully return because the life of a Noahide feels less restrictive. I am not Shomer Shabbat. I will answer to Hashem for driving on Shabbat, yet I live in a war that has continued for 1,500 years or more.
Rabbi Mendel Kessin has spoken of France and Spain and the end of Edom. He draws on Isaiah and the teachings of our sages that the evil kings and nations who harmed the Jews will be reincarnated in the end of days to face judgment. The world is being judged. We, the Jewish people, are united for the first time in history in declaring that Route 60 is the only highway Hashem has given Adam to travel. Route 66 in Amarillo would like to say: Route 60 ahead—Jerusalem, Israel.
The Biblical Highway and the Mother Road
Israel’s Route 60 follows the ancient Way of the Patriarchs. It runs from Beersheba through Hebron, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Beit El, Shiloh, Shechem, and on toward the north. In June 2026 the Israeli government officially designated it the Biblical Highway (Derech HaTanach / Bible Road), creating a heritage route with signage, visitor sites, and educational programming modeled in part on America’s Route 66. Yishai, you have championed this for years—turning the road Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob traveled into a continuous corridor that teaches the Jewish story of the land.
Amarillo sits on historic Route 66. The Mother Road still runs through our city along Sixth Avenue and nearby corridors. Visitors come for the Historic District, the Cadillac Ranch, and the roadside culture that once carried America west. We are a small Jewish community in the Texas Panhandle, far from the centers of Jewish life, yet we stand on a road that once connected the continent. From here we point forward: the only highway that ultimately matters is the one Hashem prepared—the Biblical Highway that leads to Jerusalem.
Torah Codes and the Book Like No Other
The Torah is not like any other book. It is the Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life given to the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Our task is to return that blueprint to the sons of Adam.
Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson’s podcasts and code tables continue the work begun by mathematicians and scientists such as Eliyahu Rips, Doron Witztum, and Robert Haralick.
The Bible Codes said Netanyahu would win.
Equidistant letter sequences (ELS) in the Hebrew text of Genesis produce statistically significant clusters of related words and dates that appear far more often than chance would allow.
Papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including Statistical Science, documented these patterns. Critics have challenged aspects of the methodology, yet the original findings and subsequent analyses by mathematicians and pattern-recognition experts keep pointing to the same conclusion: the Torah contains information that could not have been placed there by human authors writing millennia earlier.
Rabbi Glazerson has shown tables linking codes to the Messiah, the end of darkness, and events of our time. The greatest minds in mathematics and physics continue to examine these codes precisely because the Torah behaves like no other text.
This is not mysticism for its own sake. It is evidence that the book given to Israel is the operating system of creation itself. When we study it, teach it, and live by it, we return the Tree of Life to the world.
A Small Synagogue on the Road
Beit HaShoavah is a small Sephardic congregation in Amarillo. We pray in Hebrew, study the parsha, and welcome those returning from hidden Jewish ancestry as well as Noahides seeking the path of the God of Israel. From this corner of Route 66 we declare what the Jewish people are saying with greater clarity than at any time since the exile: Route 60 is the highway Hashem prepared. Everything else—every other road, every other story—must ultimately point there.
The Alvarez cousins and the Diaz family share the same Cohen and Levite lines that left Spain under pressure and traveled through New Spain. Some have returned fully. Others remain on the outer path of the Noahide laws. Both are part of the larger return. The war against the Jewish people has lasted centuries; the response is not only military or political. It is the steady work of teaching the blueprint, preserving the family story, and pointing every road toward Jerusalem.
Yishai, Amarillo was praying for you and for Ben-Gvir. We continue to pray. May the government that forms strengthen Israel’s Jewish identity, expand Aliyah, secure the land, and make the Biblical Highway a reality that every visitor can walk. From the Mother Road in the Texas Panhandle we say: Route 60 ahead. Jerusalem, Israel.
Hazan Gavriel ben David Esnoga Beit HaShoavah Amarillo, Texas
Footnotes:
Yishai Fleisher, “Shocking Turnout and Results in The Israeli Election!!,” YouTube, 2026.
Highway 60 (Israel–Palestine), Wikipedia; Israeli government designation of Route 60 as Biblical Highway / Bible Road, June 2026.
Rabbi Mendel Kessin teachings on the end of Edom, Isaiah, and the Yalkut Shimoni midrash concerning Persia’s final war and the announcement of redemption.
Witztum, Rips, Rosenberg, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis,” Statistical Science 9 (1994); subsequent work by Rips, Haralick, Gans, and Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson.
Family history and 2017 Cohen DNA results (personal record); Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo.
Key Takeaways
The article connects Route 60 and Route 66, emphasizing the spiritual journey and Jewish identity in Amarillo, Texas.
Hazan Gavriel ben David shares his personal history of Jewish discovery and community engagement at Esnoga Beit HaShoavah.
The Israeli government has designated Route 60 as the Biblical Highway, promoting heritage and educational initiatives.
The Torah is described as the Blueprint of Creation, containing unique codes linked to significant events and the Messiah.
The piece concludes with a call for unity and prayer for Israel’s Jewish identity and the importance of Route 60 leading to Jerusalem.
This week, we return to Abraham, our grandfather. The world still does not fully grasp that the people of Israel are a family. The promise to Abraham came only after twenty-five years of wondering whether it would arrive through some other channel than his own children.
We, the Jewish people, stand as witnesses to the world alongside our brother Ishmael. The Torah codes and the prophets tell us that terror and war will not fully end until the knowledge of Hashem fills the earth. Our sages do not always agree that “Messiah” means a single supernatural man.
Many understand it as the moment when humanity reaches a new heart of flesh rather than stone, when we see Hashem in that day, and His name is one, when the wolf, the lamb, the bear, and the cow dwell together and weapons of war are beaten into plowshares (Isaiah 11: 2).
The argument that Judaism does not center on believing in or following a Messiah, the way Christianity and Islam have constructed the idea, has been made for centuries. The reason so few know it is that making the point has often led to Jews being killed.
From the Barcelona Disputation of 1263 onward, speaking the plain reading of the Tanakh brought exile, book burnings, and worse. Today, we are still being killed, yet it is time to rise and tell the truth. Hashem called Israel to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 42:6; 49:6; 60:1–3). That calling does not require a divine savior figure to be accepted for personal salvation. It requires guarding and teaching the Torah.
Torah from Adam to Noah to Abraham
The Torah is the blueprint of creation, the Tree of Life given first as guidance in the Garden, then as the seven Noahide laws to Noah after the Flood, and finally entrusted to Abraham and his descendants to guard and keep for the sake of all humanity.
Midrash and Talmud record that Abraham observed the entire Torah before Sinai (Yoma 28b; Genesis 26:5). The Sages teach that the Torah preceded the world and served as its blueprint. Adam and Noah received foundational instructions; Abraham’s family was chosen to protect and transmit the full path so that the nations might walk in it.
At Sinai, roughly two to three million people heard Hashem speak the Ten Commandments simultaneously (Exodus 19–20). That family heard the word of Hashem directly. They rejected every later imposition the world threw at them and continued to declare, generation after generation, “This is not what our Torah says.”
What the Rabbis Say: Singer, Dorfman, Ramban, and Rambam
In the recent conversation between Rabbi Tovia Singer and Rabbi Yonatan Dorfman (In the Valley of Giants #49), Dorfman opens with the Ramban’s striking words from the 1263 Barcelona Disputation. Facing King James I, the Ramban explained that the Messiah is not of supreme personal importance as Christians assume.
Under exile and oppression, Jews receive greater reward for observing the Torah precisely because of the difficulty. When the Messiah comes, he will be a flesh-and-blood human; people will be freer to keep the mitzvot, yet the personal reward will be smaller because the truth will be obvious. Singer endorses this as brilliant: wanting the Messiah now means prioritizing the revelation of Hashem’s glory—every knee bowing, every tongue swearing only by His name (Isaiah 45)—over one’s own greater personal reward in the current era.
Singer notes that of the hundreds of messianic passages in the Tanakh, fewer than twenty speak directly about the person of the Messiah. Most describe the transformed world: peace, the knowledge of God covering the earth as the waters cover the sea, the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant (2 Samuel 7), the return of Israel, and restored Temple service.
Messiah Teacher and Judge
The Messiah is primarily a Davidic teacher and judge who teaches Israel and the nations, prompting them to respond, thereby producing justice and peace. There is no mention in the Tanakh of him performing miracles. Expectations of constant wonders, Singer and Dorfman agree, have been colored by living amid Christian and Islamic cultures. The plain reading of Isaiah 11 is that the Spirit of the Lord rests upon him—wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and the fear of Hashem.
He fears God; therefore, he is not God. The Spirit equips him for judgment, just as it equipped Bezalel for the Tabernacle. Dorfman presses on the Rambam versus the Raavad and on differences between the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds regarding supernatural discernment (the “smell” test in Sanhedrin 93b). Singer’s consistent reply is that the Tanakh’s own language takes priority: a human Davidic figure whose era is marked by the world’s change, not by personal “belief” requirements or miracle proofs.
Mishneh Torah Laws of Kings 11
The Rambam in Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings and Wars 11, is clear. The Messianic king will arise, renew the Davidic dynasty, build the Temple, gather the dispersed of Israel, and restore the observance of all the statutes (sacrifices, Sabbatical and Jubilee years). Anyone who does not believe in him or await his coming denies the Torah and the prophets.
Yet if a candidate fails or is killed, he is not the one promised. The Rambam then addresses Jesus of Nazareth: he imagined he was the Messiah and was executed by the court; Daniel had already prophesied of him (“the vulgar among your people shall exalt themselves… but they shall stumble,” Daniel 11:14). “Can there be a greater stumbling block than this? All the prophets spoke of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel… who would gather their dispersed and strengthen their observance of the mitzvot.
In contrast, [Christianity] caused the Jews to be slain by the sword, their remnants to be scattered and humbled, the Torah to be altered, and the majority of the world to err and serve a god other than the Lord.” Nonetheless, the deeds of Jesus and of “that Ishmaelite who arose after him” serve only to prepare the way for the true King Messiah and to motivate the nations toward serving God together (Zephaniah 3:9).
The Torah never commands us to “believe in” or “follow” a Messiah as a condition of salvation. The sign is the changed world itself.
Isaiah’s Servant and the Remnant
Throughout Isaiah, the Servant is Israel, or the righteous remnant within Israel. Isaiah 41:8 addresses “you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen.” The Servant Songs (chapters 42, 49, 50, 52–53) continue this language. Isaiah 53 describes the suffering of that remnant at the hands of the nations, not a single figure who dies to atone for the sins of the world by substitutionary sacrifice.
Zephaniah 3:12–13 portrays the remnant that will remain: “a humble and lowly people… the remnant of Israel shall do no injustice, nor speak lies, neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth.” No deceit in their mouths—this is the character of the faithful remnant that has preserved the Torah through centuries of pressure.
Jewish tradition has long read the Servant as Israel or its righteous core; the messianic individual reading, while present in some earlier sources, was never the sole or binding view and was often advanced in response to Christian claims.
The Three Questions and the Blueprint
Rabbi David Fohrman asks three questions that open the Garden of Eden:
Why two trees—a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?
What is the function of each?
And why does Chava describe the forbidden tree with the phrase the Torah uses for the Tree of Life (“the tree that is in the midst of the garden”)?
These questions, developed in his series A Book Like No Other and earlier lectures, reveal the Garden as a school for becoming human. Knowledge seized as possession is not the same as good received from the Giver. The Torah itself becomes the Tree of Life after the exile from Eden (Proverbs 3:18).
My book Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life presses these questions further: Hashem created humanity in His image, declared creation “very good,” and gave the Tree of Life as the blueprint. He then chose one family to guard it for every family on earth.
Christianity, in my reading, never fully exited the Garden; it substituted a different tree and a different mediator. Every pastor, rabbi, and Bible teacher must confront Fohrman’s questions and the plain sequence from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Sinai. The 613 commandments do not include “believe in the Messiah.” They include guarding the Torah, being a light, and teaching the nations.
Conclusion
We are not told in the Tanakh to believe in a Messiah, to follow a Messiah, or that such a figure’s personal acceptance is the key to redemption. We are told that Israel is a family chosen to guard the blueprint, that the prophets describe a future age of peace and knowledge of Hashem, and that the remnant keeps faith without deceit.
The historical cost of stating this has been high. It is still high. Yet the time has come to speak. The same Hashem who spoke at Sinai to millions still calls Israel to be a light to the nations. The world will know when the knowledge of Hashem covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, when His name is one, and when the weapons are beaten into plowshares. Until then, we guard what was given to Adam, to Noah, and to Abraham, and we refuse every later imposition that claims the Torah says something it does not.
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Key Takeaways
The article emphasizes Israel’s identity as a family and its role as a light to the nations, rather than focusing on a singular Messiah figure.
It highlights that the understanding of the Messiah in Judaism differs from the Christian and Islamic perspectives, often focusing on the transformed world rather than a personal savior.
The Torah is portrayed as a blueprint given to humanity, with Israel responsible for guarding and teaching its principles throughout history.
Discussions among Jewish scholars clarify that belief in a Messiah is not fundamental to Judaism; instead, adherence to the Torah and its commandments is essential.
The text calls for open dialogue about the Jewish understanding of prophetic promises, emphasizing the importance of collective redemption and fulfillment of God’s vision.
Most people open a Bible and read the notes of a distant story. For the Jewish people, the Torah is our family history. It is the record of our grandfather’s house—the house of Adam that became the house of Jacob.
Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s work in Traced uses Y-chromosome data to show that living male lineages still trace to the three sons of Noah. The Jewish line remains the living branch that carries the original family story. We are still here, still trying to help the larger family of Adam fix the fractures that began in the earliest generations. But the repair does not start with the nations. It starts in our own homes.
The first of the Ten Sayings (Aseret HaDibrot) is not a distant legal decree. It is the word that names the active Doer who has already acted. It first appears in a tent in Beersheba, centuries before Sinai, when a mother speaks with the same first-person authority that Hashem will later use at the mountain.
The Family Problem That Creates the Need for Anochi
From the beginning, the human family fractures when no one stands as the clear, active subject who has already done the work of redemption or protection. Cain looks outward instead of inward. Brothers compete for a father’s blessing as if love were a zero-sum game. In Parashat Toldot, the wound is sharp: Isaac is blind, Esau has sold the birthright, and the blessing hangs in the balance. Rivkah already knows the oracle God spoke before the twins were born: “the elder shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23). She does not wait for someone else to act.
She turns to Jacob and speaks: “My son, listen to my voice… do exactly what I command you” (Genesis 27:8, 13). The Hebrew carries the force of first-person command. She is not offering a suggestion. She is the one who has already received the word and now acts to protect it. That is the embryonic form of Anochi. The family problem is the absence of a clear “I” who has already acted and who now claims the relationship. When that “I” is missing, deception, rage, and zero-sum thinking fill the vacuum. When it is present, the household has a center.
The Commandments come from Rivkah, our grandmother.
From the Tent to Sinai
At Sinai, the same pattern becomes public and national. Exodus 20:2 opens:
“I am Hashem your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”
The speaker is not introducing an abstract idea. The speaker is the One who has already accomplished redemption. The people are not asked to imagine a God; they are addressed by the Doer who has already taken them out. Just as Rivkah’s first-person speech protected the blessing within the family, Anochi at Sinai establishes the identity and relationship of the entire people.
The wrongdoing the Saying addresses is the human habit of treating the Redeemer as optional, distant, or replaceable. When we live as if no one has already acted on our behalf, every subsequent relationship becomes a struggle for control.
Hebrew Lesson: What the Sages Teach About Anochi
Anochi is not the ordinary Hebrew word for “I.” That word is ani. Anochi is rarer and heavier. Our sages noticed the difference and gave it several layers of meaning. The Midrash teaches that Anochi is an Egyptian word for “I.” After generations in Egypt, the people had grown familiar with the language of their captors.
Hashem, like a king whose son has been held captive, begins speaking in the language the son already knows so that the first word will land. One strand of the tradition even connects the Egyptian root to endearment or love—the father drawing near after the long separation. The opening word is therefore both intimate and deliberate. It meets the people where they are after the house of bondage and claims them at once.
In Shabbat 105a, the sages read Anochi as an acronym. Rabbi Yochanan says it stands for ana nafshi ketavit yehavit—“I Myself wrote and gave it,” or more fully, “I wrote My very soul and gave it to you.” The Rabbis offer amira ne’ima ketiva yehiva—“a pleasant saying was written and given.” Either way, the first word is not mere self-identification. It is the declaration that the entire Torah is the inscription of Hashem’s own essence, handed over in writing.
The First of The Ten Commandments
Ramban treats the verse as the positive commandment to know and believe that Hashem exists, that He is the Creator, and that He is our God by virtue of the redemption already accomplished. Later tradition notes that this single Saying contains all the positive mitzvot; the second Saying contains the prohibitions. Everything else unfolds from the first word.
Without the Hebrew, “I am” collapses into abstract theology. With the Hebrew, Anochi is the concrete speech of the Doer who has already acted, who meets us in the language we understand, and who places His own soul in the words we are to live. A Hebrew reader or teacher can open the precise root, the cantillation, the midrashic acronym, and the chiastic echo back to Rivkah’s tent. Those layers are not visible in translation.
How Living Anochi Affects Everyone Around a Person
When a father or mother lives the reality of Anochi—knowing that Hashem is the active Doer who has already redeemed and then acting from that identity—the household changes. Children hear a parent who does not compete for the center of the story. A spouse encounters someone who has already been claimed and therefore does not need to seek a blessing from others.
Neighbors and extended family feel the difference between a home driven by zero-sum fear and a home that rests on an “I” who has already acted. The same principle that protected Jacob’s line inside one tent becomes the operating system for every table.
The effects radiate outward, but they begin at home. The larger family of Adam—confirmed by the genetic data that still traces living lineages to Noah’s sons—will not be healed by distant declarations. It will be healed when individual households learn to speak and live the first Saying. We are the descendants who still carry the story. The DNA evidence shows the family tree is intact. The Torah shows the medicine. Both point to the same practical starting place: our own houses, our own tables, our own children.
The Ten Sayings Our Family Solution
The Ten Sayings are not museum pieces. They are the daily curriculum that began in a mother’s voice in Beersheba and was later spoken from the mountain. Anochi is the first word. Find a Hebrew teacher who can open it. Then live it when you rise, when you walk, and when you lie down. That is how a family begins to fix its problems, and how the larger family of Adam can finally come home.
Rabbi David Fohrman, A Book Like No Other (Aleph Beta), Season on Toldot and Matan Torah; see also the side-by-side parallels in the Beit HaShoavah essay “The Ten Commandments in Toldot.”
Nathaniel T. Jeanson, Traced: Human DNA’s Big Surprise (Master Books, 2022). Y-chromosome mutation-rate analysis aligning major branches with the three sons of Noah.
Exodus 20:2; Genesis 27:8, 13; Genesis 25:23.
Midrash on Anochi as Egyptian speech of endearment after captivity (Pesikta and related sources); compare the king-and-captive-son parable.
Shabbat 105a: Anochi as notarikon—ana nafshi ketavit yehavit or amira ne’ima ketiva yehiva.
Ramban on Exodus 20:2: The verse is the positive commandment to know and believe in Hash, the Creator and Redeemer.
Traditional observation is that Anochi encompasses the positive mitzvot, while the second Saying encompasses the prohibitions.
Related Beit HaShoavah posts: “The Ten Sayings: Healing the Nations as One Family”; “The Middle Pathway: The Ten Sayings and the Healing of a Family.”
Key Takeaways
The Torah serves as a family history, connecting Jewish people to their lineage and the story of redemption.
Dr. Jeanson’s work shows that living male lineages trace back to Noah’s sons, emphasizing the importance of individual households for healing.
Anochi, meaning ‘I am,’ establishes a direct relationship with Hashem as the one who has already acted in redemption.
Understanding Anochi requires examining its Hebrew roots, which contain layers of meaning lost in translation.
Living Anochi transforms family dynamics, creating a home based on identity and connection rather than competition and fear.
Parashat Vayeira brings us to the hardest chapter in Abraham’s life: the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac. For Jews studying the Torah on the open web, the story is almost impossible to find in its original form. Search for “Abraham and Isaac,” and the first hundred results will present it as a prefiguration of Jesus—God so loved the world that He gave His only son.
The Jewish reading has been crowded out by a narrative that controls the media, the art, the popular imagination, and even many modern Jewish commentaries that uncritically accept the Christian framing.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l and Rabbi David Fohrman have both shown, from the plain text and from the later prophets, that this framing is impossible inside the Jewish mind. Child sacrifice was never the point. Hashem forbade it in the strongest language the Torah possesses. The Akeidah exists to end it.
What the Torah and the Prophets Actually Say
Jeremiah 19:5 is unambiguous. Speaking of the high places where children were burned to Baal, Hashem declares: “which I did not command, nor did I speak it, nor did it enter My mind.”
The Talmud (Ta’anit 4a) and Midrash Tanchuma (Vayera 40) apply the final clause—“nor did it enter My mind”—explicitly to Isaac. The Sages read the verse as a direct repudiation of any claim that God ever desired the slaughter of Abraham’s son. The same triple negation appears in Jeremiah 7:31 and 32:35.
Child sacrifice is the abomination that never crossed the divine mind. Abraham, who spent his life teaching that the true God does not demand human offerings the way the other gods do, is not suddenly asked to reverse that teaching. The angel stops him because the elevation has already occurred. The RAM is provided. The point is the prohibition, not the permission.
Rabbi Sacks: Children Are Not Property
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks offered one of the clearest correctives. The Akeidah is not a test of whether Abraham will kill his child. Willingness to sacrifice a child was common in the ancient world. Mesha, king of Moab, did it. The kings of Judah who revived Molech worship did so. The Torah treats it as the worst of all sins.
What Hashem requires of Abraham is the renunciation of ownership. In the pagan world, children were the absolute property of the father—patria potestas. The father could sell them, kill them, or offer them. The Akeidah establishes the opposite principle: children belong to God. Parents are only guardians. Isaac belongs to neither Abraham nor Sarah. All children belong to Hashem. When the angel says, “You have not withheld from Me your son, your only one,” the meaning is that Abraham has surrendered the claim of ownership.
He has not completed a sacrifice; he has completed a transfer of title. This is why the story is consistent with the rest of the Tanakh. The same God who liberates slaves and gives the land as a trust also places children outside the category of property. The Binding of Isaac is a polemic against the idea that a parent may dispose of a child as one would a sheep or a field.
Isaac Was Not a Child in the Christian Picture
The popular image of a small boy bound on an altar is not the Jewish reading. Rashi, citing Seder Olam, places Isaac at thirty-seven. Sarah was ninety at his birth and one hundred twenty-seven at her death; the midrash links her death to the news of the Akeidah. At thirty-seven, Isaac is a grown man who carries the wood, asks the question, understands the answer, and, according to Bereshit Rabbah 56:8, asks to be bound tightly so that he will not flinch.
Other traditions place him at twenty-six or in his teens. The text never presents a helpless infant. The Christian narrative that treats Isaac as a type of the thirty-three-year-old Jesus requires a passive child. The Jewish sources present an adult who participates. That difference is not incidental. It removes the story from the category of substitutionary death and places it in the category of willing elevation and renunciation of ownership.
The Place That Is Seen
The Aleph Beta conversation on Parashat Re’eh supplies an additional textual link. Deuteronomy 12 commands that burnt offerings may not be brought “in every place that you see.” Service is centralized in the place that Hashem will choose. The language echoes Genesis 22: Abraham lifts his eyes on the third day and sees the place from afar.
The Torah uses the same roots—ra’ah (see) and makom (place)—in both passages. The Akeidah is not an isolated act of private devotion. It is the prototype of the single place of service. Abraham is shown a specific mountain; later, Israel is forbidden to invent its own mountains. The story that Christianity reads as a foreshadowing of a sacrifice on another hill is, in the Torah’s own later legislation, the reason Israel may not multiply altars. The place is one. The offering is not a child.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Christianity and Islam both rewrote the Jewish Bible under conditions of political and cultural dominance. Once the story of Abraham and Isaac is controlled by those who need it to prefigure a later sacrifice, the original prohibition is inverted. The media war is won by repetition: God so loved the world that He gave His only son.
The Jewish text says the opposite. Hashem says child sacrifice never entered His mind. The prophets condemn the practice in the strongest terms. The midrash applies that condemnation to the very episode later claimed as a type. There is no prophecy of a dying-and-rising messiah in the Tanach that matches the Christian narrative; the Akeidah is not one.
The story that leads to the sword—whether the sword of conversion or the sword of jihad—is the story that has been rewritten. The Torah’s version leads to the opposite conclusion: the life of the child is not the father’s to take.
The Life Within the Life
The same principle speaks to our day. Children are still treated as property—sold, trafficked, or discarded. The Torah’s stance is that life within a life is not disposable. Genesis 9:6 and the later legal tradition treat the taking of innocent life with the utmost seriousness. The Akeidah’s lesson that parents do not own their children extends to the unborn as well.
Abortion is not a private medical choice in the Torah’s framework; it is the treatment of the life within the life as property. The same voice that stopped Abraham’s hand and declared that child sacrifice never entered the divine mind continues to speak against every system that treats a child—born or unborn—as something the parent may dispose of. The Binding of Isaac is not an ancient story that can be safely allegorized into a later theology. It is the Torah’s permanent rejection of that theology.
Conclusion
Parashat Vayeira does not ask us to admire a father who was willing to kill his son. It asks us to learn the lesson the angel taught and the prophets repeated: children are not ours. The place of service is one. The offering that is accepted is the ram, not the boy.
Rabbi Sacks and Rabbi Fohrman recovered a reading that the dominant culture has spent centuries obscuring. The Jewish sources are still there. They require only that we stop accepting the rewritten version as the default and return to the text that clearly and repeatedly states that the thought never entered Hashem’s mind.
Sources
Jeremiah 19:5; 7:31; 32:35. Talmud Ta’anit 4a and Midrash Tanchuma Vayera 40 linking the final clause to Isaac.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “The Binding of Isaac” (Covenant & Conversation, Vayera) and related essays on renunciation of ownership and patria potestas.
Rashi on Genesis 25:20 (citing Seder Olam); Bereshit Rabbah 56:8 on Isaac’s age and consent.
Aleph Beta podcast transcript on Parashat Re’eh (Beth Lesch and Rabbi David Fohrman) connecting Deuteronomy 12’s centralized place to Genesis 22’s “place that is seen.”
Genesis 2:4 reads: “These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created.” In Hebrew, the key phrase is eleh toledot hashamayim veha’aretz behibaram. The Sages noticed that the letters of behibaram (“when they were created”) can be rearranged to spell beAvraham—“in Abraham.”
Midrash Tanchuma and the Zohar both preserve this reading: the world was created through the merit of Abraham, or the very letters of creation were reordered into his name. Heaven and earth remained incomplete until Abraham appeared. The generations of the cosmos are written into the life of the man who would carry the covenant forward.
This midrashic insight sits inside a larger tradition. The same stream of Jewish thought that reads Genesis 2:4 as “in Abraham” also attributes the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation—the earliest systematic account of how the world was made through the Hebrew letters—to him.
Adam, Noah, Abraham, and the Secret of the Letters
According to Jewish lore, the secret of the letters was first given to Adam. From Adam it passed to Noah, and from Noah it reached Abraham. Sefer Yetzirah itself ends by describing Abraham’s reception of this knowledge: he looked, saw, understood, probed, engraved, and carved. Then the Master of all revealed Himself, made a covenant with him, and bound the twenty-two letters to his tongue.
Early commentators, including Saadia Gaon, accepted Abraham as the recipient of this lore. Later Kabbalists noted that Abraham composed the core teaching and that it was later redacted. The chain is consistent: the same letters by which heaven and earth were formed were entrusted first to the first man, preserved through the Flood, and then given fully to Abraham and, through Isaac, to his children.
The Book Of Formation
In the worldview of Sefer Yetzirah and the Kabbalah that builds upon it, the letters are not mere symbols. They are the building blocks of reality. Hashem engraved the world with thirty-two paths of wisdom—the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Alef-Bet.
He combined them, weighed them, exchanged them, and formed everything that exists. The Talmud speaks the same language when it says that Bezalel “knew how to combine the letters by which heaven and earth were created” (Berakhot 55a). Abraham, in this tradition, is the one who received that knowledge in full.
Your writing on “Let Us Make” and on Adam as the Blueprint of Creation fits this stream. Genesis 1:26 records the divine speech, “Let Us make man in Our image.” The midrashic and Kabbalistic reading sees the letters themselves as the medium of that speech.
Adam is the first vessel of the image; the Tree of Life is the structure through which that image is sustained. Abraham receives the same letters and becomes the root through which the image is transmitted to a people. The toledot of heaven and earth become the toledot of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Sefer Yetzirah and the Letter Combinations
Sefer Yetzirah presents creation as a process of letter combination. The opening lines state that Hashem engraved the world with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom, using three sefarim: sefer (text/writing), sippur (speech/communication), and sefar (number). These thirty-two paths consist of the ten sefirot belimah (sefirot of nothingness) and the twenty-two letters.
The letters themselves are divided into three groups: three mothers (Aleph, Mem, Shin), seven doubles, and twelve simples. The three mothers correspond to the primary elements—air, water, and fire—and to the three divisions of the cosmos, the year, and the human being.
Through combination, Hashem “engraved, carved, weighed, exchanged, and formed” the letters. The text describes 231 gates formed by pairing the letters, each pair producing a unique channel of creative power. Every created thing is held in being by its own combination of letters.
Twenty-Two Letters Of Creation
The book ends by tying this process directly to Abraham. After he had looked, seen, understood, engraved, and carved, the Eternal Creator revealed Himself, kissed him on the head, called him friend, and made a covenant with him between the ten fingers of his hands (the covenant of the tongue) and the ten toes of his feet (the covenant of circumcision).
He bound the twenty-two letters to Abraham’s tongue and revealed His mystery. Abraham did not merely receive abstract knowledge; he entered the same process of combination by which the world was formed. Some traditions link this to the midrash on Genesis 12:5, where Abraham and Sarah “made souls” in Haran—read by some as the literal use of letter combinations to draw people into truth or even to form new life.
This is the practical heart of Sefer Yetzirah. Creation is not a single act of speech followed by silence. It is an ongoing combination. The same letters that formed heaven and earth remain available for those who inherit them. Abraham is presented as the one who received them fully and was charged to transmit them through his children.
Hebrew Lesson from Sefer Yetzirah
One of the clearest teachings in Sefer Yetzirah concerns the three mother letters: א (Aleph), מ (Mem), and ש (Shin).
Aleph corresponds to air (ruach), the balancing element, and to the chest in the human body.
Mem corresponds to water (mayim), the element of stillness and form, and to the belly.
Shin corresponds to fire (esh), the element of transformation, and to the head.
Three Mothers In Creation
The text states that Hashem set these three mothers in the universe, in the year, and in the soul. He crowned Aleph with air, Mem with water, and Shin with fire. He combined them one with another and formed everything. The lesson is not merely symbolic.
The letters are the active principles. Aleph is the silent breath that carries sound; Mem is the closed, formative water; Shin is the sharp, transformative fire. Their combinations produce the remaining letters and, through them, the world.
Chakak In The Generations
A second practical detail is the process itself. Sefer Yetzirah repeatedly uses the sequence: he engraved (chakak), carved (chatzav), weighed (shakal), exchanged (hemer), and formed (yatzar). These are not poetic flourishes. They describe the ordered work of letter combinations. Engraving establishes the letter in its place. Carving shapes it. Weighing balances it against others.
Exchanging produces new pairs.
Forming brings the combination into being. Abraham is said to have performed these same actions. The Hebrew lesson is that the letters are not static signs. They are tools that must be combined with precision. The world—and the people who inherit the covenant—are the result of that work.
The Covenant of the Tongue and the Covenant of the Flesh
Sefer Yetzirah links the revelation to Abraham with two covenants: the covenant of the tongue (ten fingers) and the covenant of circumcision (ten toes). The letters are bound to his speech.
The same Abraham who receives the letters is the one who will command his children and his household after him to keep the way of Hashem, to do righteousness and justice (Genesis 18:19). The letters are not private mysticism. They become the medium of transmission. Isaac carries them forward. The nation that emerges is defined by the same letters that formed the world.
DNA and the Children of Abraham
Modern genetic studies of Y-chromosome and autosomal DNA show that Jewish populations and Arab populations in the Levant share substantial ancestry from Bronze Age Levantine peoples.
Multiple studies have found that a large portion of Jewish and Palestinian/Levantine Arab Y-chromosome lineages belong to the same Middle Eastern pool. Canaanite-related ancestry is prominent in both. Jews and Arabs are the two groups that historically claim descent from Abraham—through Isaac and through Ishmael—and the genetic data is consistent with a shared Levantine origin for a significant portion of both populations.
Generations From Middle Eastern Countries
Christianity is a confessional community open to anyone who accepts its teachings. It does not rest on a claim of biological descent from Abraham or from the ancient Near East.
Genetic studies of European Christian populations show European ancestry with varying degrees of Near Eastern admixture from ancient migrations, but not the specific Levantine continuity that characterizes Jewish and many Arab populations.
The biblical and traditional claim of Abraham’s children is carried by Jews (through Isaac) and by Arabs (through Ishmael). The letters, the covenant, and the biological line converge on the same people.
Adam the Blueprint, the Tree of Life, and Abraham
In the essays on Adam as the Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, the first man is the template in whom the letters and the image are first placed. The Tree of Life is the structure that sustains that image. When the letters pass from Adam through Noah to Abraham, the blueprint is not lost.
Abraham becomes the one through whom the generations of heaven and earth are reopened. The Zohar’s reading of behibaram as beAvraham is precisely this: the sealed letters of creation become fruitful when Abraham appears. The same Tree that stood in Eden is the structure Abraham is given to plant in the world through his children.
The generations of heaven and earth are written in Abraham because the letters that formed them were entrusted to him. From Adam to Noah to Abraham to Isaac, the secret continues. The combinations of Sefer Yetzirah are the method. DNA confirms that the biological line of that transmission is still visible in the two people who claim him as their father. The blueprint remains.
Sources
Genesis 2:4; Midrash Tanchuma and Zohar on behibaram as an anagram of beAvraham.
Sefer Yetzirah (traditionally attributed to Abraham; describes the thirty-two paths, the three mothers, and the process of engraving, carving, weighing, and combining).
Traditional chain: Adam → Noah → Abraham.
Genetic studies show shared Levantine ancestry between Jews and Levantine Arabs (Nebel, Hammer, and later ancient DNA research).
Genesis 18:19; Genesis 12:5 and associated midrashic readings.
Key Takeaways
Genesis 2:4 connects the creation of heaven and earth with Abraham through the letters of ‘behibaram’, suggesting the world was created in his merit.
The *Sefer Yetzirah* describes how creation involves combining Hebrew letters, which Abraham received and transmitted.
Abraham is foundational in Jewish tradition, serving as the bridge for the knowledge of letters and the covenant for his descendants.
Genetic studies highlight a shared ancestry between Jews and Levantine Arabs, reinforcing the biblical narrative of descent from Abraham.
The narrative traces a continuous lineage from Adam through Noah to Abraham, emphasizing the importance of letters and the covenant in shaping generations.
Abraham’s life is not merely the biography of a patriarch. It is a prophecy enacted in real time, especially as seen in the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Pharaoh, which foreshadows the first Exodus prophecy. The principle later crystallized by the Sages—ma’aseh avot siman labanim (“the deeds of the fathers are a sign for the children”)—is already at work in the narratives of Genesis.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the twin stories of Sarah taken by a foreign king and the hospitality scenes of Genesis 18–19 that the midrash places on the eve of Pesach. Abraham experiences, in miniature, the pattern that will later define Israel’s national Exodus. He is the first person the Torah calls a prophet (Genesis 20:7), yet he never stands before a crowd and declares a future event. His life is the prophecy.
Descent, Seizure, Plagues, and Wealth: The Egyptian Template
A famine strikes the land. Abraham descends to Egypt (Genesis 12:10). The language is deliberate: yarad (he went down). Centuries later, Jacob and his sons will travel to Egypt for the same reason. Abraham fears that the Egyptians will kill him and take his beautiful wife. He asks Sarah to say she is his sister. Pharaoh’s officials see her, praise her, and she is taken into the palace.
Abraham is treated well ba’avurah (“on her account”) and acquires sheep, cattle, donkeys, male and female servants, female donkeys, and camels (Genesis 12:16). Then Hashem afflicts Pharaoh and his household with nega’im gedolim (“great plagues”) al devar Sarai eshet Avram (“on account of Sarai the wife of Abram,” Genesis 12:17).
Pharaoh summons Abraham, rebukes him, and says, “Here is your wife; take her and go.” He commands his men to shalach (send) them away (Genesis 12:19–20). Abraham ascends from Egypt kaved me’od (“very heavy”) with livestock, silver, and gold (Genesis 13:2).
The parallels are exact and intentional. The same severe famine drives Israel’s later descent. The threat to the male (Abraham fears being killed while Sarah lives) foreshadows Pharaoh’s decree against the male infants. The seizure of the woman prefigures the threat to the covenant seed.
The plagues force the king to release what he has taken. The verb shalach will become the refrain of Moses’ demand: “Let My people go.” And the departure with great wealth anticipates the spoiling of the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35–36). Bereshit Rabbah 40:6 already states that everything written concerning Abraham is written concerning his children. Abraham does not merely hear a promise of the future; he lives out its template.
Abimelech and the Closed Wombs
The pattern repeats in Gerar (Genesis 20). Abimelech takes Sarah. This time Hashem speaks directly to the king in a dream: “You are a dead man… she is a married woman.” Abimelech protests his innocence. Hashem replies that He has kept him from sinning, and then declares:
“Now return the man’s wife, for he is a navi (prophet), and he will pray for you, and you shall live” (Genesis 20:7). This is the first use of the word navi in the Torah. Abraham’s prophetic role is not public oracles but intercession and embodied witness.
After Sarah is returned, Abraham prays, and Hashem heals Abimelech, his wife, and his female servants so that they can bear children again. The text is explicit: “For the Lord had closed fast every womb of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife” (Genesis 20:18).
The plague here is barrenness—the precise inverse of the promise that Abraham and Sarah themselves will have a son. The king who took the matriarch is struck with the inability to produce seed until the prophet intercedes. Once again, the foreign ruler is forced by divine intervention to release the woman, and once again, Abraham receives gifts of silver, livestock, and land. The life of the prophet is the message.
From the Tent of Mamre to Lot’s Matzah: The First Pesach
Between these two episodes stand the hospitality narratives of Genesis 18–19, which the midrash places on the eve of Pesach. Abraham is sitting at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day, recovering from his circumcision. He sees three men, runs to meet them, bows, and urges them to stay.
He hurries to Sarah: “Quickly, prepare three se’ah of fine flour; knead and make ugot (cakes)” (Genesis 18:6). Bereshit Rabbah 48:12 states that the ugot teach that it was the onset of Pesach. Abraham then runs to the herd, takes a tender calf, and prepares a full meal. The angels eat under the tree. One of them announces that Sarah will bear a son in the next season.
Two of the angels proceed to Sodom in the evening. Lot, sitting at the gate, presses them to come into his house. He prepares a feast and matzot afah (“he baked unleavened bread”), and they ate (Genesis 19:3). Rashi comments simply: Pesach hayah (“It was Pesach”).
The parallels to the night of the Exodus are dense: a closed house, angels of destruction and deliverance, the people of the city struck at the doorway, the family brought out before dawn, the sun rising, and the command not to look back. Lot’s matzah is the first matzah of the biblical narrative.
Abraham’s hurried ugot and Lot’s matzot together form the prototype of the Pesach meal that will later be eaten in haste on the night of redemption. The same hospitality that Abraham practices in Mamre becomes the merit that saves Lot and, ultimately, the seed of the nation.
Hebrew Word Hyperlinks and the Prophetic Weave
The connections are carried by specific Hebrew terms that the Torah reuses:
Ra’av (famine) and yarad (descend) link Abraham’s journey to Egypt with Israel’s later descent.
Nega’im gedolim (great plagues) in Genesis 12:17 is the first occurrence of this language of divine striking; Exodus will expand it into the ten makkot.
Shalach (send/release) becomes the central verb of the Exodus negotiations.
Rekush and the lists of livestock and servants prefigure the wealth Israel will carry out.
Ugot and matzot place the angelic visits on the calendar of future redemption.
Navi (prophet) is first applied to Abraham precisely in the Abimelech episode, defining prophecy as intercession that opens closed wombs and restores the threatened seed.
Abraham leaves Egypt and Gerar with wealth that Hashem has extracted from the kings. Abraham intercedes, and the plagues cease. He hosts the angels on the night the Midrash identifies as Pesach. He is told that through Isaac the covenant will continue. Every major motif of the national Exodus—descent under pressure, threat to the woman/seed, divine plagues that force release, departure with great wealth, intercessory prayer, and a meal of unleavened bread—is already present in his personal story.
Abraham the Prophet
Hashem calls Abraham a prophet, yet the Torah never records him delivering a predictive oracle to a nation. The prophecy is his life. He lives the pattern that his descendants will later inhabit. When Israel leaves Egypt with silver and gold, they are repeating what their father already did. Israel eats matzah in haste; they are reenacting the meal Abraham and Lot prepared for the angels.
When Moses intercedes and the plagues stop, he is fulfilling the role first assigned to Abraham. The first Exodus is not a later invention projected backward; it is the lived experience of the man whose life was chosen to be the sign for his children.
The king of Egypt took the bride and did not know she belonged to Abraham. Hashem spoke; the plagues came; the wealth was transferred; and the family left. The same sequence will unfold on a national scale. Abraham’s life was already the prophecy.
Footnotes and Sources
Bereshit Rabbah 40:6 and the principle ma’aseh avot siman labanim.
Genesis 12:10–20 (Egyptian episode); Genesis 13:2 (departure with wealth).
Genesis 20 (Abimelech, dream theophany, closed wombs, first use of navi).
Bereshit Rabbah 48:12 on the ugot of Genesis 18:6; Rashi on Genesis 19:3 (Pesach hayah).
TheTorah.com analysis of literary parallels between Genesis 12 and the Exodus narrative (famine, plagues, shalach, wealth).
Traditional midrashic and Rashi-based reading of the angelic visits as occurring on the eve of Pesach.
Key Takeaways
Abraham’s life acts as a real-time prophecy, foreshadowing the first Exodus, especially through the narratives involving Sarah and Pharaoh.
The language used in Abraham’s descent to Egypt mirrors the later experiences of Israel during their Exodus.
Abraham’s roles include intercession and witnessing, as demonstrated in his dealings with Abimelech and the miraculous restoration of fertility.
The hospitality shown by Abraham and Lot precedes the first Pesach meal, linking their experiences to future redemption stories.
The connections of key Hebrew terms throughout the narratives reveal how Abraham embodies the essence of the Exodus prophecy.
Abraham Avinu: The Craftsman of Faith, the Failures That Formed a Nation, and the Letters That Hold the World
Abraham Avinu stands as the archetype of the man who stood against the world. The midrashim celebrate his hospitality—the tent open on all sides, the three se’ah of fine flour rushed into cakes for strangers who turned out to be angels (Genesis 18).
Pirkei Avot 5:3 records that he withstood ten trials, each one revealing the depth of Hashem’s love for him. He is called a prophet (Genesis 20:7), the first person in the Torah to receive that title, yet the text never shows him delivering a public oracle or predicting a future event in the classical prophetic style.
His life itself was the prophecy.
He was the first to keep Pesach (Bereshit Rabbah 48:12 on Genesis 18:6), the first to lead a mixed multitude out of a land of oppression (the “souls he had made in Haran,” Genesis 12:5), the one who fought four kings and restored captives (Genesis 14), the one who kept the entire Torah (Genesis 26:5), and the one who had everything and then lost it—only to discover that the real inheritance was something no king or army could seize.
This is not a story of unbroken success. Abraham’s greatness is inseparable from his failures. Those failures are the places where a leap of faith becomes possible. In Hebrew, emunah shares a root with oman (craftsman) and amen (firmness).
Faith is the work of an apprentice. You learn by doing, by failing, by correcting the cut, and by staying at the workbench. When you make Hashem’s will your will, nothing can ultimately stop you—not because you never fall, but because the fall itself becomes part of the training.
Legacy Before Reward: Why Hashem Chose Abraham
Rabbi David Fohrman of Aleph Beta has shown that the stories of Abraham are not a string of disconnected vignettes. They are a single saga whose central thread is legacy. At the end of Parashat Noach, Haran dies young. Abraham and Nahor marry Haran’s daughters in an act that foreshadows the later law of yibum (levirate marriage).
They are not building a name for themselves the way the builders of the Tower of Babel tried to do (na’aseh lanu shem, “let us make a name for ourselves,” Genesis 11:4). They are perpetuating the threatened shem (name) of a brother who died childless. That is the quality Hashem chooses. “I like that,” the narrative’s midrashic voice implies. “I’m going to make your name great.”
The tension of Abraham’s entire life is born here: his mission is to care for the threatened name of another, yet the promise is that his own name will become great. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is not a question Cain asks to evade responsibility; it is the question on which the nation of Israel is founded, answered in the affirmative.
Genesis 18:19 records Hashem’s own description of why Abraham was chosen: “I have known him, that he will command his children and his household after him to keep the way of Hashem, to do righteousness and justice.” The choice is not for personal greatness. It is for transmission.
The Easy Beginning and the Later Collapse
When Hashem first says, “lech lecha” (Genesis 12:1), the promises align with Abraham’s deepest longings. Sarah is barren. God offers a great nation. Abraham packs the family and the wealth he has acquired and goes. At this stage, it is possible to read Abraham’s motives as mixed. The reward of children and the sacred mission seem to go hand in hand.
Years later, the second lech lecha arrives—the Akeidah (Genesis 22:2). This time, no reward is offered. In fact, the act would undo the original promise. The two stories are deliberately linked by the Torah: three terms describing what must be left behind, an unspecified destination, and the building of an altar upon arrival.
The first journey can be read as self-interest; the second forces Abraham to define himself. Whatever his motives were the first time, looking back from the mountain of Moriah, he chooses to see that first departure as the best decision he ever made. That retrospective act of identity is itself the achievement.
Failures That Open the Door to Faith
Abraham’s greatness is not that he never failed. It is that he failed and kept going. One of the most striking examples comes just before the Akeidah. In Genesis 21, Abraham gives the land and the wells to Abimelech as part of a treaty.
Some commentators see this as a failure of nerve: the man who was promised the land gives it away, and only then is he tested to see whether he still has the faith to surrender the son through whom the promise was to be fulfilled.
Another failure is relational. After Lot separates and chooses Sodom, after the war of the four kings returns, Lot only for the king of Sodom to reclaim the people, Abraham is left with Eliezer of Damascus as his potential heir. He reaches a breaking point: “What can You give me? I am going childless” (Genesis 15:2). Hashem’s answer is the first explicit promise of biological offspring. The collapse of Plan A (Lot) forces the revelation of Plan B (Isaac).
The Binding Of Isaac
The Akeidah itself contains a failure of understanding that later teachers have highlighted. The command is v’ha’aleihu sham l’olah—“bring him up there as an olah.” The root ayin-lamed-heh means “to rise up.” It is the same root as aliyah. God never said sh’chateihu (slaughter him).
The angel stops Abraham and says, in effect, you have already done what was asked: you elevated him. Jeremiah 19:5 records that child sacrifice “never entered My heart.” Abraham, who had spent his life teaching that the true God does not demand human sacrifices the way the other gods do, now appears to teach the opposite.
Some sources note that Abraham was “cruel” not to pray for Isaac as he did for Sodom. After the Akeidah, Hashem never again speaks to Abraham directly; an angel mediates. Sarah dies. Isaac and Abraham do not travel together again. The text does not hide the cost.
These are not stains that cancel Abraham’s greatness. They are the places where a leap of faith becomes possible. Western “faith” is often understood as intellectual assent or emotional certainty. In Hebrew, emunah is the work of an apprentice.
You learn by doing, by failing, by correcting. Pirkei Avot 5:3 does not say Abraham never stumbled; it says he withstood the trials. Avot 2:4 (Hillel) adds, “Do not separate yourself from the community,” and “Do not say something that cannot be understood, hoping it will be understood later.” The craftsman stays at the workbench.
Sefer Yetzirah and the Letter Combinations
The same Abraham who failed and recovered is the one to whom tradition attributes Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation. Jewish lore holds that the secret of the letters was first given to Adam, passed to Noah, and then given fully to Abraham.
Sefer Yetzirah itself ends by describing Abraham’s reception of this knowledge: he looked, saw, understood, probed, engraved, and carved. Then the Master of all revealed Himself, made a covenant with him, and bound the twenty-two letters to his tongue.
In this text, creation is a process of letter combination. Hashem engraved the world with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom—the ten sefirot belimah and the twenty-two letters. The letters are divided into three mothers (Aleph, Mem, Shin), seven doubles, and twelve simples.
32 Paths To Wisdom
In this text, creation is a process of letter combination. Hashem engraved the world with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom—the ten sefirot belimah and the twenty-two letters. The letters are divided into three mothers (Aleph, Mem, Shin), seven doubles, and twelve simples.
Through combination, Hashem “engraved, carved, weighed, exchanged, and formed” the letters. The text describes 231 gates formed by pairing the letters, each pair producing a unique channel of creative power. Every created thing is held in being by its own combination of letters.
Abraham’s Combinations
This is not abstract mysticism. It is the same language the Talmud uses for Bezalel, who “knew how to combine the letters by which heaven and earth were created” (Berakhot 55a). Abraham is presented as the one who fully entered that process.
The midrashic reading of Genesis 12:5 (“the souls that they had made in Haran”) is sometimes linked to the idea of Abraham and Sarah drawing people into truth through the power of the letters. The failures of Abraham’s life do not contradict this knowledge. They are the places where the craftsman learns how the letters must actually be combined in a broken world.
Hebrew Lesson from Sefer Yetzirah
One of the clearest teachings in Sefer Yetzirah concerns the three mother letters: א (Aleph), מ (Mem), and ש (Shin).
Aleph corresponds to air (ruach), the balancing element, and to the chest in the human body. Mem corresponds to water (mayim), the element of stillness and form, and to the belly. Shin corresponds to fire (esh), the element of transformation, and to the head. The text states that Hashem set these three mothers in the universe, in the year, and in the soul. He crowned Aleph with air, Mem with water, and Shin with fire. He combined them one with another and formed everything.
Aleph Mem Shin
The lesson is practical. Aleph is the silent breath that carries sound. Mem is the closed, formative water. Shin is the sharp, transformative fire. Their combinations produce the remaining letters and, through them, the world. A second detail is the process itself.
Sefer Yetzirah repeatedly uses the sequence: he engraved (chakak), carved (chatzav), weighed (shakal), exchanged (hemer), and formed (yatzar). These are not poetic flourishes. Engraving establishes the letter in its place. Carving shapes it. Weighing balances it against others. Exchanging produces new pairs. Forming brings the combination into being.
Abraham is said to have performed these same actions. The Hebrew lesson is that the letters are not static signs. They are tools that must be combined with precision. The world—and the people who inherit the covenant—are the result of that work.
Created In Abraham
Genesis 2:4 supplies the deeper frame. “These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created.” The word behibaram (“when they were created”) is an anagram of beAvraham—“in Abraham.” Midrash Tanchuma and the Zohar both record the tradition that the world was created through Abraham’s merit, or that the very letters of creation were rearranged to form his name. The toledot of heaven and earth are written into the life of the man who received the letters and was charged to transmit them.
Pesach in the Tent of Mamre
Genesis 18 and 19 contain the midrashic memory that Abraham kept Pesach. Bereshit Rabbah 48:12 explains that the ugot (cakes) Sarah baked were matzah because “it was the onset of Passover.”
Rashi on Genesis 19:3 says the same of the matzot Lot baked. The angels arrive in the heat of the day while Abraham is recovering from his circumcision (the third day). He runs, offers water for their feet, and serves a meal that later becomes associated with the Pesach offering.
The midrash sees in this hospitality the seed of the future redemption: the same Abraham who will father the nation that leaves Egypt with matzah also hosts the messengers who announce both the birth of Isaac and the destruction of Sodom. Hospitality and the willingness to leave everything are two sides of the same emunah. The mixed multitude he takes out of Haran prefigures the mixed multitude that leaves Egypt. Abraham’s life is already enacting the future.
The Fear That Remains
Even after all the tests, a deeper fear remains. Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller has spoken of Abraham’s anxiety not primarily for his own obedience, but for the transmission: Will my children want what I want? Will they choose to serve Hashem? The fear is real because the four kingdoms that will later subjugate Israel—Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, and, in later midrashic expansions, the challenge of Islam—each attempt to replace Jewish character with their own.
Babylon offers material power and empire. Persia offers luxury and the threat of assimilation or annihilation.
Greece offers the beauty of the body and the intellect that can eclipse Torah.
Rome (Edom) offers law, order, and ultimately the Western values that still shape much of the world. Each kingdom tempts the next generation to say, “Your father’s way is not mine.”
The midrashic reading of the Covenant Between the Pieces (Genesis 15) already sees the four kingdoms in the animals Abraham is told to bring. Abraham prays that his children will not be enslaved by them. The prayer is not fully granted; the exile happens. Yet the same Abraham who fears for the transmission is the one whose life becomes the template that survives every kingdom. The nation is founded on the principle of caring for the brother’s threatened name. That principle outlasts empires.
Life as Prophecy
Hashem calls Abraham a prophet, yet the Torah never shows him standing before a crowd and declaring “Thus says the Lord” about a future event. The first use of the word navi is in Genesis 20:7, where Abimelech is told that Abraham will pray for him. Prophecy here is intercession and embodied witness.
Abraham’s departures, his hospitality, his willingness to lose Lot and then Isaac, his treaties, his failures, and his recoveries are the prophecy. Later generations read their own story in his. The Jews leave Egypt; they are living out the lech lecha that began with one man. When they refuse to build a name for themselves at the cost of a brother, they are answering the question the Tower of Babel got wrong. When they observe Pesach, they reenact the meal in the tent of Mamre.
The letters of Sefer Yetzirah make the same claim. The world is held together by combinations. Abraham’s life is the combination that holds the covenant together. His failures are not interruptions of the prophecy. They are part of the combination. The apprentice learns that the cut that looks like failure is often the cut that allows the piece to fit.
Lessons for a World Afraid to Fail
The world today is terrified of failure. Social media, careerism, and family systems reward the appearance of unbroken success. Abraham’s story is the opposite. Abraham was great because he failed and kept the craft of emunah. Our grandfather gave away land. He misunderstood the Akeidah. He reached the point of despair over an heir.
Each failure forced a clearer definition of who he was. The family problems of our generation—estrangement, the fear that children will not want what parents want, the collapse of brotherly responsibility—are not solved by pretending we never fail. They are solved by the same apprenticeship Abraham entered: making Hashem’s will our will, caring for the threatened name of the other, and being willing to leave what is familiar even when the destination is not yet revealed.
Ethics Of The Fathers
Pirkei Avot 5:3 and the entire Abrahamic saga teach that the reward of withstanding the trials is not personal comfort. It is that a nation is born capable of the same withstanding. The leap of faith is not a one-time jump into certainty.
It is the craftsman’s daily decision to stay at the workbench, to correct the cut, and to discover that life itself has become the message. The letters that formed heaven and earth were entrusted to him. From Adam to Noah to Abraham to Isaac, the secret continues. The combinations remain available. The blueprint holds.
Sources
Aleph Beta transcripts (Daniel Loewenstein and Rabbi David Fohrman) on the parallels between the two lech lecha passages and the theme of legacy/yibum at the end of Noach.
Bereshit Rabbah 48:12 and Rashi on Genesis 19:3 on the Pesach setting of the angels’ visit.
Midrash Tanchuma and Bereshit Rabbah 56:8 on the meaning of ha’aleihu (elevate) rather than slaughter.
Pirkei Avot 5:3 (ten trials); Avot 2:4 (Hillel).
Genesis 20:7 (first use of navi); traditional understanding that Abraham’s prophetic role is intercession and embodied life rather than public prediction.
Midrashic traditions on the four kingdoms (Bereshit Rabbah 44 and related) and Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller’s teaching emphasis on transmission and the fear that children will not choose the parent’s path of serving Hashem.
Genesis 18:19 (Hashem’s stated reason for choosing Abraham).
Sefer Yetzirah (traditionally attributed to Abraham; describes the thirty-two paths, the three mothers, and the process of engraving, carving, weighing, and combining).
Genesis 2:4; Midrash Tanchuma and Zohar on behibaram as an anagram of beAvraham.
Genetic studies show shared Levantine ancestry between Jews and Levantine Arabs (supporting the traditional claim of Abraham’s children through Isaac and Ishmael).
Key Takeaways
Abraham Avinu exemplifies faith through trials, hospitality, and failures, showcasing that true greatness comes from perseverance.
His life serves as a prophecy, emphasizing legacy over personal achievement and teaching the importance of caring for others’ names.
The two ‘lech lecha’ moments illustrate Abraham’s journey from self-interest to profound faith, leading to significant lessons in identity and sacrifice.
Abraham’s failures, including mishaps with Lot and misunderstandings during the Akeidah, highlight the process of learning and growth through challenges.
Ultimately, Abraham’s story teaches that faith is an apprenticeship, where failures open pathways to deeper understanding and purpose.
The elections in Israel on October 27, 2026, are not ordinary political contests. For Jews in the Land of Israel and Jews in exile, they form a biblical decision point.
Scripture presents Israel as a nation of light whose leadership choices shape national freedom, divine favor, and a redemption that extends to the whole world.
The Torah, the Prophets, and the Torah Codes examined by Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson all point to the same reality: the leaders we elevate determine whether we expand under Hashem’s blessing or risk destruction.
A Nation of Light for the World
Isaiah 60:1–3 declares: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and His glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” Isaiah 49:6 adds that it is too small a thing for Israel merely to restore its own tribes; Hashem makes Israel a light for the nations so that His salvation reaches the ends of the earth.
This calling is not abstract. It is tied to sovereignty in the Land, the centrality of Jerusalem, and ultimately the restored service of the Temple. When Israel walks in Torah and chooses leaders who honor that vocation, the nations are drawn to the light.
When it elevates forces hostile to Torah, the light is dimmed, and the people groan (Proverbs 29:2). The coming redemption is not for Israel alone; the prophets describe a global turning toward Jerusalem and the God of Israel.
Leadership Choices Determine Blessing or Curse
Deuteronomy 30:19 places the choice squarely before the people: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”
Deuteronomy 17:14–20 sets the standard for Israel’s kings: the one chosen must be from among the people, must not turn the people back to Egypt (dependence on foreign powers or ideologies), must write a copy of the Torah, and must not exalt himself above his brothers. Exodus 18:21 and Deuteronomy 1:13 emphasize selecting capable, God-fearing, trustworthy leaders who hate dishonest gain.
The same principle applies to the Knesset. Rabbi Glazerson has long taught that elections contain the potential for expansion or destruction. In earlier analyses, he noted that choosing the right forces expands (רחב, rahav), while electing forces against the Torah can destroy (חרב, charev).
He has linked certain left-leaning figures to patterns of internal hatred that the Sages identified as the cause of the Second Temple’s destruction (Yoma 9b), and he has contrasted them with leaders who defend Torah institutions and Jewish identity.
The Third Temple and the Will of the People
A June 2026 Direct Polls survey for the Temple Mount Heritage Foundation found that 55% of Jewish Israelis support establishing the Third Temple (up sharply from roughly 30% in 2013), with only 29% opposed.
Fully 42% said the October 7, 2023 massacre strengthened their connection to the Temple Mount and the dream of the Temple. An earlier 2009 survey had shown even higher support, near 64%.
These numbers reflect a post-trauma reawakening. The desire is no longer confined to a small religious fringe. It is a growing national aspiration. The elections will decide whether that aspiration finds political expression or is blocked by coalitions that treat the Temple Mount primarily as a political problem rather than the heart of Jewish destiny.
What the Torah Codes Say
Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson’s recent tables for the years 5786–5787 (2026–27) repeatedly link the period to the possibility of the Messiah, repentance (teshuvah), and national leadership.
One table indicates that Benjamin Netanyahu will be elected head of government (“Rosh Mimshala”) in 5786/5787, with the phrase “he will be elected” appearing nearby.
Glazerson notes the Kabbalistic significance of certain skip distances and stresses that the codes appear to meet scientific criteria for minimal skips and strong letter groupings.
He expresses hope that the Messiah will arrive so that no prime minister is needed; if not, he prefers Netanyahu to opponents who, in his assessment, oppose Torah study and yeshiva life.
Other tables by Glazerson on the same period cluster “Messiah,” “repentance,” “Elijah,” and the year 5786. Some earlier work has linked the building of the Temple to Passover in the context of national repentance.
The codes consistently underscore that redemption is conditioned on return to Torah, unity, and faith rather than on political technique alone. As Glazerson has stated in related contexts, the election of forces aligned with Torah expands Israel’s destiny; the opposite contracts or endangers it.
Yishai Fleisher and the Otzma Yehudit List
Yishai Fleisher, international spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, member of the Efrat Local Council, and longtime English-language advocate for Jewish rights in the Land, has been placed twelfth on the Otzma Yehudit list headed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Fleisher brings decades of media advocacy, support for Aliyah, and defense of Jewish presence in the biblical heartland. His placement signals a deliberate effort to strengthen an English-speaking, internationally engaged voice for Jewish sovereignty and heritage within a party that has prioritized security, Jewish identity, and practical action on the ground.
Voters who wish to see stronger representation for communities in Judea and Samaria, clear advocacy for Israel’s historic rights, and policies consistent with a Jewish state rather than a “state of all its citizens” will find Fleisher’s candidacy relevant.
The Truth from President Trump
President Donald Trump has repeatedly affirmed Israel’s ancient and eternal connection to Jerusalem and the Land. In his December 6, 2017, recognition speech, he declared: “Today, we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.
This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do.” He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and has stated, “I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.” In later addresses, he has described Israel as the spiritual center of the region and spoken of a future of faith, hope, and peace anchored in Jerusalem.
These actions reversed decades of diplomatic avoidance and aligned American policy more closely with the biblical record of Jerusalem as the capital established by King David and the site of the Temples. For readers watching the Israeli elections, Trump’s record illustrates how leadership that recognizes historical and covenantal reality can shift the international landscape and strengthen Israel’s position.
Choose Life
The October 27, 2026, elections will help determine whether Israel continues as a free Jewish nation capable of fulfilling its role as a light to the nations, or whether it elevates forces that undermine Torah, Jewish identity, and the path toward the Third Temple.
The Torah Codes examined by Rabbi Glazerson, the rising public desire for the Temple, the candidacy of advocates such as Yishai Fleisher, and the clear recognition of Jerusalem by President Trump all converge on the same biblical warning and promise: leadership matters. Hashem’s favor follows those who choose life, Torah, and the covenant.
Jews in the Land and Jews in exile are called to pay attention, to study the issues through the lens of Scripture, and to support leaders who expand rather than contract Israel’s biblical vocation. The redemption now stirring is for the entire world. The choice before the voters is therefore not merely political. It is covenantal.
Israel365 News, March 2021, summarizing Rabbi Glazerson on elections and the contrast between expansion (rahav) and destruction (charev).
Direct Polls / Temple Mount Heritage Foundation survey, June 2026 (Israel365 News summary).
Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, “The Prime Minister of Israel in the Year 5787-2026 in Bible Code,” YouTube, and related 5786–5787 Messiah tables.
Israel National News / Jerusalem Post reporting on Yishai Fleisher’s placement at No. 12 on the Otzma Yehudit list, September 2026.
Full text of President Trump’s December 6, 2017, Jerusalem recognition speech; subsequent statements including Knesset address references and “best friend Israel has ever had.”
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Key Takeaways
The Israeli Elections 2026 mark a pivotal moment for Jews in the Land of Israel and those in exile, as leadership choices impact national freedom and divine favor.
Scripture emphasizes that selecting leaders who honor the Torah can result in blessings, while choosing otherwise can lead to destruction.
A significant majority of Jewish Israelis now support the establishment of the Third Temple, reflecting a growing national aspiration in the wake of tragedy.
Rabbi Glazerson’s Torah Codes suggest that the elections could relate to the Messiah and the necessity of choosing leaders aligned with Torah values.
The elections present a covenantal choice that affects Israel’s role as a light to the nations, underscoring the importance of leadership for the nation’s future.
I am writing as a 60-year-old man who has known Hashem for as long as he can remember—since about age 5. That is when I began attending Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church and was first introduced to the Bible. Hashem was simply my best friend; I spoke with Him all the time. Years later, when I was seven, my mother asked me to become an altar boy.
The priest asked if I knew God. I told him Hashem was my best friend and that I talked with Him constantly. He asked if I knew Jesus. I said no. He then told me I could not know Hashem without knowing Jesus. That was the moment the relationship I already had was declared illegitimate. For the next forty-six years, I searched for the Friend I had known before that conversation. I knew the priest was wrong, but I was seven. What could I say?
I have lived with learning challenges my entire life—ADHD, dyslexia, number transposition, and a stutter that lasted into second grade. My mother is Spanish, born in the United States, with family roots running from Spain through Mexico. My father was Black, from the small town of Wellington, Texas.
I was raised largely by my great-grandmother, a block away from my parents. On September 11, 2001, my mother told me her family was Jewish. She had known they were not Catholic because they never did Catholic things.
Her mother lit candles on Friday night and observed a spring-cleaning ritual that, for a time, involved no tortillas. In 2017, DNA testing on my uncles returned Cohen Modal haplotype matches. Both of my uncles, Joe and Benny, tested positive, and both are related to Mr. Greenspan, the figure connected with FamilyTreeDNA’s Cohen testing.
I left Messianic Judaism and Christianity in 2015. I could not explain, even to myself, why my neshama insisted on recovering the truth that had been taken from me at seven. Around the time your first YouTube videos and the early Aleph Beta lessons appeared, I found Hashem again.
The close-reading method you pioneered—attention to chiastic structures, intertextual echoes, and the precise language of the text—revealed what I had always hoped was true: that the Tanach is the work of a single Author. That discovery has been the greatest joy of my life, and it has been worth everything else I have lost.
I live in the Texas Panhandle, along Route 66—something like Highway 60 in Israel. For the last twenty-five years my teachers have been almost entirely online. I studied Hebrew in Jerusalem with Rabbi Shlomo Gold. I learned with Rabbi Chaim Richman beginning in 2001 through God’s Learning Channel.
Aish was among my first online homes; there I found Rabbi Zev Leff. Rabbi Menachem Leibtag introduced me to Atbash, and I fell in love with it as Hashem’s signature on the page. Yet it is the methodology you have taught, and that your colleagues at Aleph Beta continue to develop, that has most consistently shown me the unity of the text.
I believe the Ten Sayings address the family problem that has marked the world from the beginning. Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s peer-reviewed work on the DNA of indigenous men worldwide points to three fathers and three mothers. Of the seventy nations, only two—Jews and Arabs—claim descent from Abraham, and the genetic evidence places a common Middle Eastern father roughly four thousand years ago.
More than 4.5 million people profess belief in the Hebrew Bible, yet many seek to replace the people to whom that text was given and to claim Jerusalem as their own capital. I know the arguments; I was taught them by leading Christian teachers and supported their work with significant resources. When I later asked hard questions about what I had been taught, I received no answers.
I have been married for forty-one years. We have nine grandchildren and one great-grandson. My family is now divided because we are Jews. The media has convinced some of them that we are evil. One of my daughters disowned me during Sukkot over claims about the Nakba and Zionism. She said she does not hate Jews, only Zionists.
I have lost former Christian friends and teachers. Our small esnoga, Beit HaShoavah, has gone from more than 100 people to 2. What I have not lost is the daily revelation of Hashem in the text. Yesterday, while studying Parashat Noach, I saw the homing beacon that draws us back to Him and the plow that breaks the stubborn ground—Lamech’s words taken up and answered by Hashem Himself. That is the kind of reading your work has trained me to pursue.
I love the Tanach the way Imu loves the Torah and wants to teach it. I am a Kabbalist at heart, yet the chiastic structures and intertextuality I have learned from you and from the scholars you have trained have shown me a single Author more clearly than any other method. That is the joy worth everything.
To the whole Aleph Beta team—Imu Shalev, Beth Lesch, and the scholars and producers who have worked alongside Rabbi Fohrman, including those who have contributed over the years such as Rabbi David Block, Rabbi Ami Silver, Daniel Lowenstein, and Ari Levisohn—I want you to know that you have been part of that restoration. When other rabbis speak of the one teacher who changed their lives, I now understand what they mean. You are that teacher for me.
With gratitude and respect,
Hazan Gavriel ben David (Archie Lee Hunnicutt Jr.) Esnoga Beit HaShoavah
How do we account for the fact that human beings are capable of destroying themselves? The opening chapters of the Torah are not a collection of distant myths. They are a precise diagnosis of human psychological and emotional life.
Four major catastrophes unfold in rapid succession: the sin in the Garden of Eden, Cain’s murder of Abel, the Flood, and the building of the Tower of Babel. None of them is a natural disaster. Each is driven by self-destructive behavior. Adam and Eve hide after eating from the tree. Cain cannot bear the disparity between his offering and his brother’s.
The generation of the Flood fills the earth with violence and corruption once material ease arrives. The generation of Babel unites to make a name for itself against heaven. In every case, people act against their own deepest interests.
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein has observed that the psychological and emotional forces that shape character traits are incredibly powerful. Left unexamined and unrefined, they undermine relationships, happiness, and the ability to make good decisions. When developed with awareness and intention, the same forces become a source of growth and psychological health.
Parashat Noach sits at the center of this diagnosis. It shows both the mechanism of self-destruction and the path of recovery. The question the Torah forces on every reader is how any of these nuances become visible without the Hebrew text and without recognizing that this is a Book unlike any other.
The Four Catastrophes and the Pattern of Self-Destruction
Genesis opens with a world declared “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Almost immediately, the narrative records choices that produce alienation. After the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve hide from God. The text does not describe an external compulsion; it describes an internal movement of shame and concealment.
Cain’s story is even more explicit. God warns him that sin crouches at the door and that he has the power to master it. Cain does not. Jealousy and the refusal to accept his place produce murder. The Flood’s generation multiplies violence once the curse on the ground is lifted. The generation of Babel channels collective energy into a project of self-exaltation. In each case, the catastrophe is self-authored.
After the Flood, God makes a statement that appears to contradict the “very good” of creation: “the inclination of the heart of man is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). This verse is the source of the term yetzer hara. The tension is real and intentional. The Torah is not saying that human nature is intrinsically bad.
It is saying that the raw drives present from youth—desire for pleasure, status, security, and ease—are powerful enough to override clearer judgment when they are left unrefined. The mind we trust to keep us on track is weaker than we prefer to believe.
Lamech’s Words and Hashem’s Echo: The Hebrew That English Cannot Carry
The key to understanding the Flood generation lies in the naming of Noach. Lamech declares:
זֶה יְנַחֲמֵנוּ מִמַּעֲשֵׂנוּ וּמֵעִצְּבוֹן יָדֵינוּ מִן־הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר אֵרְרָהּ יְהוָה “This one shall comfort us from our work and from the toil of our hands, from the ground which the Lord has cursed” (Genesis 5:29).
Six verses later, Hashem decides to destroy the world:
וַיִּנָּחֶם יְהוָה כִּי־עָשָׂה אֶת־הָאָדָם בָּאָרֶץ וַיִּתְעַצֵּב אֶל־לִבּוֹ… מֵעַל פְּנֵי הָאֲדָמָה… כִּי נִחַמְתִּי כִּי עֲשִׂיתִם “And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart… I will blot out man… from the face of the ground… for I regret that I made them” (Genesis 6:6–7).
The four roots appear in the same order: nacham (comfort/regret), the language of deeds/making, atzav/itzavon (grief/toil), and adamah (ground). This is not the product of multiple authors or later editors. It is deliberate literary design. Hashem takes the exact vocabulary of Lamech’s hoped-for comfort and uses it to announce the end of that world.
The root nacham (נ.ח.ם) itself carries both meanings. It can mean to comfort or to regret because both involve an internal shift—a change of state. English must split the idea into separate words and therefore loses the force of the echo.
Without Hebrew, the reader cannot see that the generation’s own language of comfort became the language of their destruction. This is one of the clearest internal proofs that the Torah was written by a single Author who designed the text to reveal the operating system of the human heart.
The Plow as Technological Comfort and the Homing Beacon
Rashi, following the Midrash, explains that the comfort Lamech foresaw was the invention of the plow and other agricultural tools. Until Noach, people worked the cursed ground with their hands and reaped thorns and thistles. The plow eased the physical toil; the land began to produce properly. Material life improved.
Rabbi David Fohrman (AlephBeta) has shown why this comfort became catastrophic. The curses placed on the ground after the Tree of Knowledge and after Cain were never meant to be permanently engineered away.
They functioned as a homing beacon.
Alienation from the land and from God was designed to create longing to return.
When the plow numbed the pain and allowed people to accommodate themselves to the uncomfortable reality, they stopped feeling the pull. The technological solution to a spiritual problem removed the signal that was meant to bring them home. At that moment, God said, in effect, that they had given up on the relationship. The same language of comfort was turned into the language of regret and a new beginning.
Yetzer Lev Ha’Adam and the Reality of Human Drives
The statement that the inclination of the heart is evil from youth does not mean that any human being wants to do pure evil. Drawing on the Rambam, the Maharal, the Radak, and Pirkei Avot, Chief Rabbi Goldstein clarifies the nature of this inclination.
The yetzer is the raw, powerful drive present from early life—the desire for pleasure, status, security, and ease. It is not a demonic force. Left unrefined, it produces self-destructive outcomes: envy, violence, the pursuit of comfort at the expense of relationships, the refusal to confront discomfort.
The Radak notes that this drive is active from youth, before the counterbalancingyetzer hatov fully develops. A person is, in the language of Job, like a wild ass at birth; understanding and restraint are acquired later.
The Vilna Gaon taught that refining one’s character is too foundational to be counted merely as one of the 613 commandments. The entire Torah exists to shape middot—the measures of character.
Pirkei Avot remembers Avraham not primarily for his intellectual discovery of one God, but for the character traits that flowed from that clarity: hospitality, justice, and the willingness to act. The mind alone is insufficient.
Emotional and psychological forces are stronger. Awareness, intention, and the disciplined practice of mitzvot are required to direct them.
Kohelet and the Vanity of Unrefined Comfort
King Solomon surveyed every project, pleasure, and achievement under the sun and concluded that it is all hevel havalim—vanity of vanities. The plow of every generation, whatever form technological or material comfort takes, leads to the same place when it is used to numb rather than to return. At the end of Kohelet, he states the only lasting alternative:
סוֹף דָּבָר הַכֹּל נִשְׁמָע אֶת־הָאֱלֹהִים יְרָא וְאֶת־מִצְוֺתָיו שְׁמוֹר כִּי־זֶה כָּל־הָאָדָם “The end of the matter, when all is heard: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man” (Kohelet 12:13).
This is not a moralistic addendum. It is the practical conclusion of the diagnosis that begins in Genesis. The commandments refine the drives. They create character.
They keep the homing beacon active so that discomfort becomes the signal to return rather than the problem to be engineered away. We are not born evil.
We are created with powerful drives that require refinement in a physical world whose forces are stronger than unaided intellect. The path of yirat Hashem and shemirat mitzvot is the refinement of Adam.
The Two Worlds and the Choice
Parashat Noach describes two societies that destroyed themselves and then introduces Avraham, whose clarity came from a place most people never look: the disciplined refinement of character rather than the accumulation of comfort.
The same forces that produced the Flood and the Tower can be directed toward building a life of relationship. The choice is whether we use the “plow” of our time to numb the signal or whether we allow the signal to bring us home.
The Torah, written in Hebrew by an Author who designed every echo, shows the operating system with a precision unmatched by any other text. Without that language and that design, the nuances of comfort and regret, of homing beacon and false technological solution, remain invisible.
The invitation remains the same as it was after the Flood: the inclination is powerful from youth, the mind is weaker than we think, and the way forward is not to engineer away the discomfort but to refine the heart through the commandments and to run toward the relationship rather than away from it. That is the whole of man.
The world has largely missed the scale of what has unfolded in Israel since October 7, 2023. According to a detailed presentation by Rabbi Uri Pilichowski (Aish HaTorah), drawing on publicly available operational accounts and statements from American officials and engineers, a series of events has occurred that experts describe as mechanically, strategically, and statistically impossible.
These accounts have been shared in Jewish and interfaith circles, with references to American ambassadors unable to file reports and U.S. Air Force engineers calling certain outcomes an “act of God.” As the speaker frames it, these are the days of Gog and Magog, and the miracles are increasing.
Every Miracle Listed in the Presentation
Here is every miracle explicitly described:
The walkie-talkie and pager operation against Hezbollah (September 2024): A 27-year-old Israeli intelligence analyst noticed that Hezbollah fighters consistently wore walkie-talkies over their hearts. Through a German shell company partnered with a Taiwanese supplier, small amounts of C4 and remote detonators were inserted into the devices. Fighters wore them for years.
When Nasrallah, fearing surveillance, ordered a switch to obsolete pagers, Israel supplied roughly 5,000 rigged units. A single page instructed holders to hold the device close to their eyes and press two buttons. The detonation killed 42 and permanently disabled over 3,000 fighters. The next day, the remaining walkie-talkies were detonated at funerals, killing 25 more. Israeli soldiers involved: zero.
Precision F-15 strike on remaining Hezbollah commanders: Three F-15s launched from Ramat David Air Force Base and placed three missiles through a window into a meeting of 20 high-ranking commanders. Zero Israeli losses.
48-hour campaign in Syria (around December 8–9, 2024): Approximately 350 planes flew 350 missions. Every Syrian Air Force jet was destroyed. Every Syrian Navy vessel was destroyed. Every general was killed. Every nuclear scientist and every chemical-weapons scientist was eliminated. Southern Syria was taken as a buffer zone. Israeli soldiers lost: zero. The presentation calls this “out of the pages of Tanakh.”
The Iran air campaign — the heart of the story, the impossible fighter-jet miracle: Israel sent roughly 200 F-35s on missions lasting about four hours each way (approximately 2,000 km). An F-35 costs roughly $235 million and requires about eight hours of maintenance for every hour of flight time. U.S. Air Force readiness is typically around 51%.
Mechanical models projected that over a multi-day campaign, Israel would lose on the order of 60 pilots and 60 aircraft, with half the fleet grounded and some planes permanently unserviceable. The actual result: zero losses and not a single plane requiring significant maintenance. American officials reportedly could not file reports explaining the outcome. Mechanical engineers called it impossible.
The U.S. Air Force is said to be rethinking its readiness assumptions. Concurrent operations (Narnia and Red Wedding) eliminated Iranian scientists and generals. Israel also maintained a long-term drone-production presence inside Iran with zero losses.
Iranian missile retaliation: American assessments expected 80,000–100,000 Israeli deaths. Actual deaths were under 40. Specific strikes hit hard (one damaged a government office for months; a 30-story building housing American personnel was heavily damaged with no injuries; a missile struck an emptied building at Soroka Hospital). American engineers inspecting one site called it an act of God.
Bat Yam / Tel Aviv bus plot (February 20, 2025): Five buses were rigged to explode in downtown Tel Aviv during the morning rush. Timers were set for 9:00 p.m. instead of 9:00 a.m. The devices detonated empty in a parking lot. One additional bomb was later found. No injuries.
Averted multi-front catastrophe (Sinwar’s original plan): The full plan called for a coordinated assault: Hamas’s October 7-style attack, Hezbollah launching 50,000–100,000 rockets, Iranian ballistic missiles, and simultaneous rebellions in Judea and Samaria. The projected outcome was millions dead or taken hostage, and the possible end of the state. Sinwar executed early and without full coordination. The presentation describes this as the salvation of Israel.
Flydubai Flight 1073 (September 30, 2026): A co-pilot’s attempt to seize and crash the aircraft was foiled. The plane dived steeply, was stabilized by passengers (including a plumber who pulled the controls), and landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Passengers were released. Aviation observers and Israeli officials have described the sequence as an act of God.
Why the Fighter-Jet Story Is Impossible
The Iran F-35 campaign sits at the center because ordinary engineering and logistics make the zero-loss outcome nearly impossible to explain in purely natural terms. Long-range sorties place extreme stress on airframes, engines, and systems. Standard maintenance ratios and readiness rates predict significant attrition.
The presentation notes that American counterparts could not account for the result in their reporting and that engineers labeled the outcome impossible. Similar zero-loss results across the Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran operations stand in sharp contrast to the casualty rates of earlier Israeli wars.
Gog and Magog and the Days Ahead
Rabbi Pilichowski places these events in the framework of Gog and Magog and the final redemption. The pattern he describes is one of divine protection that has repeatedly prevented the destruction of the Jewish people and the State of Israel against overwhelming numerical and technical odds.
The presentation closes by urging listeners to open their eyes, to say Hodu (give thanks), and to recognize that the miracles of the last three years exceed, in certain respects, the historical benchmarks of Chanukah or the Six-Day War. As the coalition of adversaries continues to move, the claim is that the visible hand of Providence will become still more evident.
These accounts are drawn from a public lecture that relies on reported operational results, statements attributed to American officials and engineers, and the speaker’s synthesis. They invite examination, gratitude, and further inquiry rather than passive acceptance. In the language of the presentation, we are living through events that future generations will ask about, and the proper response is to open our eyes and give thanks.
Footnotes
Video: “🚨SHOCKING: Israel’s WAR Miracles That Will Change Your Life,” Parsha Inspired channel (featuring Rabbi Uri Pilichowski, Aish HaTorah; original lecture “Modern Miracles of Chanukah”), published October 13, 2026.
Supporting operational details appear in contemporaneous reporting on the Hezbollah pager operation, Syrian strikes, Operation Rising Lion against Iran, the February 2025 bus plot, and Flydubai Flight 1073.
Claims of American reactions (inability to file reports, “act of God,” readiness reevaluation) are as stated in the lecture.
What is happening at this very moment is not random geopolitics. It is the detailed map that the prophets, the Zohar, and the classical rabbis drew centuries ago. Pins are moving. Iran (Persia/Elam), Russia, and their allies are positioning. Events on the ground—including the Dubai plane incident—are lighting up ancient words. The entire world, the sources say, will be reborn through this conflict.
The Prophet’s Name: The Players
Jeremiah 49:34–39 delivers a precise oracle against Elam, the ancient territory corresponding to southwestern Iran. Hashem says He will break the bow of Elam, scatter its people to the four winds, set His throne there, and destroy its king and princes. Then comes the decisive line: “But it shall come to pass in the latter days that I will bring back the captives of Elam, says the Lord” (Jeremiah 49:39). Judgment first, then restoration in the end of days.
Ezekiel 38-39
Ezekiel 38–39 places Persia (modern Iran) explicitly among the coalition that comes against the land of Israel in the latter years—after the people have been gathered back from the nations. Daniel’s vision of the four beasts identifies the second beast, the bear, with Media-Persia: slower, crushing, devouring much flesh (Daniel 7:5).
Commentators such as Radak connect the successive empires in these visions, seeing Babylon, Media, and Persia linked in the historical and prophetic sequence. Joel sees the nations gathered to the Valley of Jehoshaphat for judgment, with the Lord roaring from Zion and the heavens and earth shaking (Joel 3).
The Persian Horse Tied to the Graves
Nearly two millennia ago, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai taught in the midrash: “If you see a Persian horse tied to the graves of the Land of Israel, expect the footsteps of Mashiach.” (Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah / Eichah Rabbah). The image is not abstract. When Persian military power produces graves in the Land of Israel, the footsteps of redemption are near. Recent Iranian missiles and attacks have already produced casualties in Israel. The midrash reads the current reality with startling directness.
The Zohar and the Classical Rabbis
The Zohar states that history must come full circle. The oppressors of Israel return at the end of days for a final reckoning. One tradition linked to the Zohar describes the king of Persia rising to rule over many kingdoms, including the Holy Land, for a limited period (as referenced in discussions of the Zohar on Shelach), after which he falls, and the holy ones receive the kingdom.
The Gemara (Avodah Zarah 2b) notes that the kingdom of Persia continues until the time of Mashiach. Tosafot clarify that the West (Rome/Edom in classical terms) defeats Persia in close proximity to Mashiach’s arrival. The Maharal and others treat Paras (Persia/Iran) and the forces of Yishmael as the final powers before redemption. Radak, commenting on the prophetic visions of successive empires, places Media-Persia in the sequence leading toward the end.
These are not modern inventions. They are the same sources the podcast draws upon: the prophets naming Persia and Elam, the Zohar and midrashim describing the Persian horse and the final cycle of history, and the classical rabbis mapping the empires.
The Map of Pins Moving Now
On the map right now:
Iran (Persia/Elam) is the named power in Ezekiel 38, the bear of Daniel’s vision in its historic Persian dimension, and the subject of Jeremiah’s latter-days restoration after judgment. Iranian actions, missiles, and proxies are the “Persian horse” producing the conditions the midrash describes.
Russia appears in many readings of the northern coalition associated with Gog of Magog (Ezekiel 38). Whether as a primary leader or a major participant, the pin is moving in coordination with Iran.
Surrounding and proxy forces (aligned with the broader coalition in Ezekiel) continue to act.
The Dubai plane incident (the FlyDubai flight drama involving a cockpit attack and near-catastrophe en route toward Israel) has been read by some as another marker of Iranian-linked tension, with competing narratives circulating in the region. It fits the pattern of pressure points lighting up around Israel.
Joel’s gathering of the nations, Ezekiel’s coalition, Daniel’s sequential empires, and Jeremiah’s word on Elam form one picture: these pins are not drifting. They are moving according to the map that the Jewish books already provided.
The World Reborn Through This War
The sources do not describe mere destruction. Jeremiah promises the restoration of Elam’s captives in the latter days. Ezekiel 39 ends with Hashem’s name sanctified among the nations and Israel restored. The Zohar and midrashim place the Persian confrontation as the final cycle before Mashiach.
The Gemara and classical commentators see Persia’s fall in proximity to redemption. Through the shaking Joel describes, the world is reborn—not by the victory of any human empire, but by Hashem’s intervention, the restoration of Israel, and the establishment of His kingdom.
Rabbi Sokol’s Response
At the close of the discussion, Rabbi Aron Sokol emphasized the practical response. The events are not a cause for panic or speculative charts. They are a call to emunah, to Torah, and to recognizing that the process of geulah has already begun.
The darkness and the pressure are the birth pangs. The Jewish people are not spectators; they are the witnesses and the light the prophets described. Strength comes from staying anchored in Hashem’s word rather than in headlines alone.
The response is clarity, faith, and readiness for what the sources say follows the war: restoration, the kingdom of the Lord, and the rebirth of the world.
The map is clear.
The Jewish books did not leave the end of days as a riddle. They named the powers, described the conditions, and promised the outcome. The pins are moving. The Persian horse is tied. Elam is under the word of the latter days. The world is being reborn.
Footnotes
Jeremiah 49:34–39. Oracle against Elam (southwestern Iran region): judgment, scattering, destruction of king and princes, followed by restoration of captives “in the latter days.”
Ezekiel 38–39. Persia was explicitly listed among the coalition that came against restored Israel in the latter years. Ends with Hashem sanctified, and Israel restored.
Daniel 7:5. The second beast, like a bear, is identified by traditional and many classical commentators with Media-Persia. Radak and others place this empire in the prophetic sequence of kingdoms.
Joel 3. Nations gathered for judgment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat; the Lord roars from Zion; heavens and earth shake. Context of the restoration of Judah and Jerusalem.
Midrash: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, “If you see a Persian horse tied to the graves of the Land of Israel, expect the footsteps of Mashiach” (Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah / Eichah Rabbah).
Zohar traditions (including discussions linked to Shelach and related passages) on Persia/Iran at the end of days: history comes full circle; the king of Persia rises and then falls in connection with the messianic process.
Avodah Zarah 2b and Tosafot: Persia’s kingdom continues until near the coming of Mashiach; the West defeats Persia in close proximity to that time. Maharal and classical sources on Paras as a final power.
Contemporary events (Iranian actions producing casualties in Israel; Dubai/FlyDubai plane incident) as markers read against the midrash and prophetic map.
Key Takeaways
Current geopolitical events align with ancient prophecies about Elam and Persia, suggesting a significant transformation is underway.
The Persian Horse tied to graves in Israel symbolizes impending redemption, as Iranian actions are causing casualties in the region.
The Zohar and classical rabbis affirm the return of oppressors before the ultimate restoration at the end of days.
The ‘Persian Horse Elam and the Rebirth of the World’ highlights a vision of global renewal through divine intervention after the conflict.
Rabbi Sokol emphasizes faith and preparedness, urging that the Jewish people be active participants in this prophetic process.
Hazan Gavriel ben David · Amarillo · 7 October 2026 · 16 Tishrei 5787
I made it through the day.
Three years ago, on the morning of Shemini Atzeret, the sword came into the gardens. More than 1,100 people were murdered in Israel. Two hundred and fifty-one were taken. I watched it the way a man watches a house burn that he cannot reach. I told my wife then what I still tell her: my life will not be the same.
Today, the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, marked the day by naming the murder and then moving the sentence. He called October 7 a horrific war crime.
Then he said the suffering “did not begin nor end that day,” and that it “continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza,” in which, he wrote, Israel “has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — including more than 21,000 children.” He called the land occupation and apartheid, and he said American tax dollars fund war crimes.
Read the number before you repeat it. Those figures come from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. They do not separate the armed men who crossed the fence from the people behind them. They have been challenged, line by line, by analysts who count the dead differently.
A legal charge of genocide is not a mayor’s adjective. It is a claim Israel rejects, and that many governments reject as well. On the day my people buried 1,200, the sentence that traveled farthest was not the sentence about the murdered. It was the sentence about the murderer being the one who was attacked.
That is not a new sentence. It is the oldest accusation in the book. Rashi heard it a thousand years ago. The Torah heard it before Rashi was born.
Why does the book open with the world
One of my rabbis, Rabbi Aron Sokol, opened the door I needed. The other, Rabbi Efraim Palvanov, stood in Jerusalem and showed me the stone under the door. I am not retelling their shiurim as if I were in the room with a transcript. I am telling you what a chazan in Amarillo carried home, and then what the Tanakh and the sages say when you open them beside the lecture.
Rabbi Yitzchak asked the question that Rashi puts on the first verse. If the Torah is a book of law, why does it not begin at Exodus 12:2, “This month shall be for you the first of the months,” the first commandment given to Israel? Why begin with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”?
Rashi’s answer is a deed.
“He declared to His people the power of His works, in order to give them the heritage of the nations.”
Psalm 111:6
If the nations say to Israel, “You are robbers; you took the land of the seven nations,” Israel answers: the earth belongs to the Holy One. He made it. He gave it to whom He willed. By His will, He gave it to them. By His will, He took it from them and gave it to us.
That is not a slogan. It is why the first sentence of the Torah is about ownership. A God who does not make the world cannot create a land. A God who makes the world can. And a God who deeds a land also draws borders, and He makes His people pay for what they hold.
Rabbi Sokol walks that sentence from Genesis to the threshing floor. The nations will say the place was stolen. The book answers with a receipt.
The place of infusion
Stand with Rabbi Palvanov for a moment in Jerusalem, because the lecture was given there, not in a studio. He asks the question the whole world is asking with its hands: what is it about this place? Why does everybody want a piece of it? Why has it been the heart and the capital for three thousand years?
The sages answered before the lectures.
In Yoma 54b, the stone in the Holy of Holies is called Even haShetiyah, the Foundation Stone, because the world was founded upon it. Rabbi Eliezer says the world was created from its center. The sages say it was created from Zion: “From Zion, perfect in beauty, God appeared” (Psalm 50:2). The Zohar calls Jerusalem the heart of the world. Peace in the world hangs on peace in this city, which is why a city of so many wars is still named for peace.
Palvanov puts the tradition in a modern mouth. Creation did not begin as a smear. It began at a point. The stone under the Dome of the Rock is, in the memory of Israel, that point: the place of infusion, the place from which the dust was drawn out, the place where Adam’s altar stood, the place Noah rebuilt, the place Abraham was told to go up to Moriah. The Dome does not own the stone. It sits on a receipt that is older than the Dome.
You do not have to swallow every cosmic metaphor to hold the teaching. The teaching is this. Jerusalem is not a hill we like. In the memory of the sages, it is the first hill, the navel, the place from which the world was stretched. That is why the deed matters. You do not abandon the foundation of the house because a later builder put a roof on your stone.
Shem, Abraham, and the first name of the city
Genesis 14 is the first time the city appears by name in the story. Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of the God Most High, brings out bread and wine and blesses Abraham after the war of the kings. The sages identify Melchizedek with Shem, the son of Noah. Shem goes to this hill after the scattering from the tower, Palvanov says, because he already knows what the hill is. He calls it Shalem: whole, paid, at peace.
Abraham does not rename the hill out of vanity. After the binding, he calls the place “Hashem will see.” The tradition joins the two names. Shalem, from Shem. Yireh, from Abraham. Yerushalayim. The city is the peace of Shem and the vision of Abraham in one word.
That is the family line the book is protecting. Shem keeps the priesthood on the hill. Abraham receives the blessing on the hill. Isaac is bound on the hill. Jacob dreams, and later the threshing floor of the hill becomes the house. David does not invent Jerusalem. David pays for what Shem already named and Abraham already saw.
The first war over Jerusalem was not the first destruction
People ask who first destroyed Jerusalem, and they point to Joshua 10. Read the chapter before you answer.
Joshua 10:1 is the first time the Tanakh uses the name Jerusalem. The king is Adoni-Zedek, “my lord is righteousness,” a title that echoes Melchizedek and empties it. The king hears that Jericho has fallen, that Ai has fallen, and that Gibeon has made peace with Israel. He is afraid. He sends to the kings of Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon: come up and help me strike Gibeon, because it has made peace with Joshua.
Five Amorite kings. One coalition. The cause of the war is a peace treaty with Israel.
Joshua marches all night from Gilgal. The battle is not won by the night march. “Hashem threw them into a panic before Israel.” Stones fall from heaven on the descent of Beth-horon. The five kings hide in a cave at Makkedah. They are brought out. Joshua tells his captains to put their feet on the necks of these kings, and then he says the sentence that is also a sentence for the end of days: “Do not be afraid. Be strong and courageous. Thus shall Hashem do to all your enemies.”
Joshua The Stone and Lion
Adoni-Zedek dies. Jerusalem does not fall. Joshua 15:63 says Judah could not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem. The city waits. David takes the fortress of Zion in 2 Samuel 5, yet even then the threshing floor to the north remains in Jebusite hands.
So the honest history lesson is this. The first war named over Jerusalem is a coalition of nations led by her king, aimed not first at Israel’s camp but at the neighbor who made peace with Israel. The city itself is not destroyed in that war.
The destructions come later, and the book names them before they happen: Babylon, who burns the First House in the days of Zedekiah; Rome, who burns the Second. The pattern is older than both. A king in Jerusalem who borrows the name of righteousness gathers other kings against the people who have made peace with the God of Israel.
A writer who wanted to flatter his own century would not have left the Jebusite in the city. He would have given Joshua the flag. The book refuses the flag. It records the coalition, the hail, the cave, the execution, and the unconquered hill. Then it waits for a king who will buy the hill rather than take it.
David will not offer what costs him nothing
This is the heart of Rabbi Sokol’s shiur, and it is the heart of the deed.
David numbers the people. A plague follows. Seventy thousand fall. The destroying angel stands by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, Ornan in the Chronicler’s spelling. Gad the prophet says: go up, raise an altar. Araunah sees the king coming and bows. He offers the floor, the oxen, the threshing sleds, the wheat. Take it. It is yours.
David refuses.
“No. I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to Hashem my God that cost me nothing.”
2 Samuel 24:24
He pays fifty shekels of silver for the floor and the oxen. Chronicles records six hundred shekels of gold for the site, and Sokol’s reading is the reading that keeps both verses: the altar is one purchase, the place of the House for the whole nation is another. The site does not become David’s private estate. It becomes the nation’s, bought in the open, with a price a later accuser can look up.
Then David says, “This is the house of Hashem God, and this is the altar of burnt offering for Israel” (1 Chronicles 22:1). Solomon builds there. The Chronicler ties the knot the Torah already tied: the House stands on Mount Moriah, where Hashem appeared to David, on the floor Ornan sold (2 Chronicles 3:1).
Abraham did the same thing on a hill to the south. Ephron the Hittite offers the cave of Machpelah as a gift. Abraham refuses the gift. Four hundred shekels of silver, weighed in the hearing of the children of Heth (Genesis 23). The burial place of Sarah is a receipt. The place of the House is a receipt. The God of Israel does not like stolen altars.
Palvanov adds the mystical layer the sages already loved. Araunah stands in the line of the Jebusite who kept the hill; the midrashic memory sets him near Shem and near Ephron, the men who held holy ground and were paid for it. David insists on the sale so that no later nation can say the floor was taken. The book wrote the bill of sale because it knew the bill would be questioned.
Yosef and David, one number
The sages noticed what happened to Yosef happened to Zion.
Yosef is thrown into a pit by his brothers. David is the forgotten son in the field. Yosef is sold. David is hunted by the king of his own house. Yosef rises from the prison to the throne of Egypt at thirty and feeds the world in a famine. David rises from the cave to the throne and gathers a hungry nation.
Yosef’s brothers come to him not knowing him. Israel’s tribes come to David after years of refusing him. Both save the family that sold them. Both are shepherds before they are rulers. The Midrash Tanchuma, at the end of Vayigash, says in a line: “Whatever happened to Yosef happened to Zion.”
Yosef and Zion
The numbers say the same thing. Yosef, yod-vav-samekh-peh, is 10 + 6 + 60 + 80 = 156. Zion, tzadi-yod-vav-nun, is 90 + 10 + 6 + 50 = 156. Kol HaTor, the Vilna Gaon’s school of redemption, counts 156 aspects of Mashiach ben Yosef because Yosef and Zion share the number, and both sit in the sefirah of Yesod, the foundation.
Mashiach ben Yosef is the beginning of the redemption, the ingathering, the one who is pierced in the war and whose work is finished by Mashiach ben David. The lion is Judah’s. The foundation is Yosef’s. Jerusalem needs both.
Judah is the lion in Genesis 49:9. “He crouches, he lies down as a lion. Who will rouse him?” Balaam sees the same animal from the ridge: a people who rise like a lion (Numbers 23:24). Isaiah calls the city Ariel, the lion of God (Isaiah 29).
Palvanov lingers on that name because the altar itself was remembered as answering with a lion’s face when the offering was accepted. The rising lion is not a campaign slogan borrowed from a headline. It is Jacob’s last blessing on his fourth son, waiting on a hill the son had not yet taken.
David’s years, in the mystical arithmetic Palvanov repeats from the sages, gather the missing years of Adam, Abraham, Jacob, and Yosef into one life of seventy. You can hold that loosely. The plain teaching does not need it. The plain teaching is that the shepherd who bought the floor and the prisoner who fed the brothers are one pattern, and the city of 156 is the pattern in stone.
Borders are also a receipt
Hashem is a God of borders. Rabbi Sokol says it because the Torah says it, not because it flatters a flag.
When Israel comes up from Egypt, the command is not “take whatever your army can hold.”
“You are passing through the border of your brothers, the children of Esau, who live in Seir. They will be afraid of you. Be very careful. Do not provoke them. I will not give you any of their land, not so much as a foot’s breadth. I have given Mount Seir to Esau as a possession.”
Deuteronomy 2:4–5
The same sentence is spoken over Moab. The same sentence is spoken over Ammon. “Do not harass them. I have given Ar to the children of Lot.” The land of the brother is not available, even to a people who have just watched the sea open. Edom, Moab, and Ammon have deeds too. Israel’s deed is Canaan, sworn to the fathers, marked by the purchases at Hebron and at the threshing floor, and limited by the borders God drew for other families.
A God of borders is the opposite of the slogan that the land belongs to whoever planted the last flag. He gives, He withholds, and He writes both down. The accusation “you are robbers” dies on the receipt. The temptation “to take the brother’s field too” dies on the border.
Abraham, Sarah, and the far country
There is a family of nations, and there is a family inside the family.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has stood with Prime Minister Modi more than once and called India and Israel ancient peoples, brothers in a hard region, two civilizations that have outlived the empires that crossed them. In February 2026, Modi addressed the Knesset as one ancient civilization speaking to another. Netanyahu called him more than a friend. The political alliance is new. The memory the rabbis are pointing at is old.
Palvanov’s reading is a reading, and a listener should know that. In the Torah, Abraham sends the sons of the concubines east with gifts (Genesis 25:6). The commentaries ask what the gifts were. One answer in the tradition is names, shemot, names of God. Palvanov follows that line into India.
Abraham and Sarah
What is Brahman, he asks, and what is Saraswati, if not a far echo of Abraham and Sarah? What is the syllable Om, the hum the East meditates on, if not a name that also sits among the seventy-two three-letter names? He counts it as the thirtieth. The Hindu sign that looks like a 30 is, in his classroom, a memory of a gift sent east.
Hold it as he holds it: not as a university paper, but as a mystical history. Sparks went east. Names went east. The family of nations is not a United Nations brochure. It is Abraham’s house, with Isaac, Ishmael, and the sons of Keturah, and a covenant line that runs through Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob into a land with borders. India and Israel can be ancient friends without pretending the covenant deed was mailed to every altar on earth. Netanyahu’s sentence and Palvanov’s sentence can sit at the same table. One is statecraft. One is the trail of a name.
The book keeps surviving the test you can actually run
I will not tell you that every line of the Tanakh has been photographed by a laboratory. That sentence is bigger than the evidence, and a book this honest does not need it.
I will tell you what the diggers keep finding.
The Tel Dan inscription, a ninth-century Aramaic stone cut by an Aramaic king, boasts of defeating the king of Israel and the king of the House of David. David is not a late legend in that sentence. He is a dynasty an enemy could name. The Merneptah Stele in Egypt, late thirteenth century before the common era, names Israel as a people in Canaan.
Hebron
Hebron has the cave. The City of David has the ridge, the spring, and the fortification. Lachish has the burn layer and the Assyrian relief that matches the prophet’s century. The Cyrus Cylinder and the decree in Ezra sit in the same generation. The Dead Sea Scroll 4Q51, which Sokol points to, preserves fragments of this Samuel story in a Hebrew hand older than Christianity and Islam.
Places named in the book are where the book said they were. Kings named in the book were named by their enemies. The bill of sale is in the record because the writer anticipated cross-examination. A forger who wanted a clean myth would have erased the Jebusite, the unpaid years, the census, the plague, the refusal of a free floor. The writer left the receipts.
Who writes a book like that? Israel has answered for three thousand years. Not three billion of us. A small people, scattered and returned, a few million in the land and a few million outside it. The answer has not changed. The unseen God. The God who begins the book with the making of the world so that no later mayor can call the children of that making robbers on the day of their death.
Seventy nations, and the day they gather
Genesis 10 counts the families of the earth as seventy. The sages kept the number. Seventy nations, seventy languages, seventy faces on the human house. The United Nations is not seventy. It seats 193. The arithmetic some of us reach for, seventy times seventy, is not the tradition. The tradition is simpler and heavier. All the nations.
Zechariah saw them.
“I will make Jerusalem a cup of rejoicing to all the peoples around. Judah will be besieged, and Jerusalem. On that day, I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will be lacerated. All the nations of the earth will gather against it.”
Zechariah 12:2–3
Ezekiel saw the farther ring. Gog of the land of Magog, a chief prince, coming with Persia, Cush, and Put, Gomer and Beth-togarmah, “a great assembly and a mighty army,” in the latter years, against a people brought back from the nations, living at the center of the earth without walls (Ezekiel 38). Hashem says He will bring him. Not because Israel is clean in every ledger. Because the nations will know to whom the Land belongs when the hook in the jaw is pulled.
Ezekiel 38 and 39
Read 38 and 39 slowly on a day like this. The war is not a surprise to the prophet. The gathering is not a surprise. The rage at the returned people, sitting on the hills they bought and were exiled from and bought again in blood and in law, is not a surprise. “Have you come to seize spoil?” God asks the invader, and the invader’s answer is the answer of every age that calls a deed a theft. I will fall on the unwalled villages. I will come against the quiet people.
Then the mountains of Israel are told to speak. Birds are called. The weapons become fuel. The nations see. “I will no longer hide My face from them.” The Foundation Stone does not move during the speech. The lion crouches. The receipt stays in the book.
Polls will go against these people. They have before. Crusade, inquisition, expulsion, the century of the ovens, the morning of October 7, the statement from the city with the largest Jewish community outside Israel. The book already counted the nations. It already wrote the sentence they would say. You are robbers. Rashi already wrote the reply, from a France that was burning its Jews: the earth belongs to the Maker. He gave it. He can give it again.
What the reader is supposed to leave holding
Jerusalem was named by Shem and seen by Abraham before David was born. The first coalition against her peace was led by a king who wore righteousness in his name and died in a cave, while the Jebusite kept the hill. David took the fortress and still would not take the floor. He paid Ornan. Abraham had paid Ephron. Israel was forbidden to take the field of Esau, Moab, or Ammon. The God of the book is a God of borders and receipts.
Yosef and Zion share 156. The lion of Judah is the one Jacob said would never lie down. The Foundation Stone is the sages’ name for the place the world was drawn from, still under the later dome, still the address of the House. The Far East still carries names Palvanov hears as Abraham’s gifts. The family of nations is real. The deed inside the family is specific.
Must the Guilt
And the day you hear a mayor, on the anniversary of 1,200 murdered, move the guilt onto the people who buried them, you are hearing the question Rashi put on the first verse. You are robbers. The answer is neither a slogan nor a poll. The answer is the first sentence of the book, the cave that was paid for, the floor that was paid for, the borders that were not crossed, and the lion that the nations keep trying to call a thief.
The writer of the book knew the cross-examination was coming. He put the deed on page one.
חזק חזק ונתחזק
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Key Takeaways
The article reflects on the tragic events of October 7, marking three years since the attack that claimed over 1,100 lives in Israel.
It discusses the complex history and significance of Jerusalem, particularly focusing on the concept of the Foundation Stone as the center of creation and religious significance.
The writer emphasizes the importance of legal ownership and historical receipts in land claims, particularly in the context of Jerusalem.
The article draws connections between biblical figures such as Abraham, David, and Yosef, highlighting their roles in the history of the land.
The overarching message addresses accusations against Israel, countering them with theological and historical arguments about rightful ownership and divine promise.
Two verses, spoken at the two ends of the same week, hold the partnership James Long and Rabbi Chaim Richman were tracing.
And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)
So the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to work the soil from which he was taken. (Genesis 3:23)
The first sounds like an invitation. The second sounds like a sentence. The sages refuse to leave them apart. The invitation is the sentence, and the sentence is the invitation. Man is not set down in a finished world and then punished into labor. He is consulted before he is formed, and then handed the very dust he was formed from, and told to work it.
The plural and the answer written beside it
Other systems have long taken “Let us make” as a crack in the Oneness. The Torah does not leave the crack open. The next verse shuts it: “And God created the man in His image” — singular, vayivra, not vayivra’u (Genesis 1:27). The Talmud states the rule without raising its voice. Wherever the heretics misread, the refutation is written beside the verse (Sanhedrin 38b).
Rashi learns the same lesson from Bereshit Rabbah: Moses himself hesitated at this line and said, in effect, Master of the universe, why hand them an opening? The answer he was given was not a doctrine of many makers. It was a lesson in conduct. Write it. The greater will one day need to learn from his Creator that even the One who made the upper worlds and the lower worlds took counsel before He made the human (Bereshit Rabbah 8:8; Rashi on Genesis 1:26).
So the classical reading stands, and it should be said first. The Maker remains one. The plural is consultation, not company.
With whom?
The midrash does not choose a single answer, and that is its honesty. Rabbi Yehoshua, in the name of Rabbi Levi, says He consulted the works of heaven and earth. Rabbi Ami says He consulted His own heart. Rabbi Hanina says He consulted the ministering angels, who asked what this creature’s nature would be and were shown only the righteous who would come from him (Bereshit Rabbah 8:3–5).
Rashi takes that last path and draws the moral of meekness: man would be in the likeness of the angels, and they might envy him, so the greater asked the lesser’s permission. The Ramban, in the name of Rabbi Yosef Kimchi, hears the verb addressed to the earth already on stage. The waters had been told to swarm. The earth had been told to bring forth. Now the body would rise from adamah, and the breath would come down from Him. Both of you, He says to the soil. I will give the soul.
The Great Noahide Teacher
And then, in the same chapter, one voice says what James Long is convinced of.
Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin said in the name of Rabbi Shmuel: He consulted the souls of the righteous. The proof-text is a quiet line in Chronicles: “They are the potters, and the dwellers of Netaim and Gedera; with the king in his work they sat there” (I Chronicles 4:23).
The midrash reads the potters as the forming of man from dust, the planters as the garden in Eden, the fence as the bound set for the sea — and “with the king in his work” as the souls of the righteous, with whom the King of kings took counsel when He created the world (Bereshit Rabbah 8:7).
The Sages on “Let Us Make”
That is not a later invention laid over the verse. It is a saying of the sages. The “us” is not a second deity. It is, among the voices the midrash preserves, the souls themselves, already seated with the King in His work, who told what the partnership would be before a body had been formed to carry it. The physical realm is not a fall from that consultation. It is what the consultation was for. A soul that never meets soil never meets the work it was asked to share.
The sages say the same thing from the other direction, at every birth. There are three partners in a person: the father, the mother, and the Holy One. The parents give the white and the red, the bones and the flesh; the Holy One gives the spirit and the soul, the light of the face, the sight of the eye, the hearing of the ear (Niddah 31a; Kiddushin 30b). “In our image” is not exhausted on the sixth day. It is repeated every time a child is born. The plural keeps returning because the partnership was never closed.
He stopped so that the work could be shared
Creation does not end with a finished object. It ends with an infinitive. “And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it He ceased from all His work which God had created to make” — la’asot (Genesis 2:3). “And He made” is not what is written. “To make” is what is written.
The midrash hears the open end: the Sabbath arrived before the work was finished, and what remained was handed on (Tanchuma Buber, Bereshit 17). Ibn Ezra reads the verb as the power given to creatures to continue—to reproduce, to bring forth, to do. The world is not a closed artifact. It is a work left in the infinitive.
The Earth Needed Our Prayers
The rain teaches the same partnership in plainer speech. Before Adam, “no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to work the soil” (Genesis 2:5). Rashi, from the midrash, asks why the verse joins the two clauses.
Hashem Needs You
Because there was no man to recognize the benefit of rain. When Adam understood that the world depended on it, he prayed, and the rain fell, and the trees came up. The seeds were already in the ground. What was missing was a partner who would ask. Hashem withheld the last act so that the first man would have something to do that was not mimicry of a finished world, but a real share in bringing it up.
That is the force of James Long’s line. He stopped so that we could be co-creators — not makers of something from nothing, which remains His alone, but workers of what He had already spoken into the soil, and askers for what He had already prepared to give. The image is not a statue of God set in a garden. It is a capacity to act in the world in a way that answers Him.
Sent out to work the soil from which he was taken
Then the partnership is tested, and the verse that follows the exile is the one Rabbi Richman set his hand on.
He is not merely driven out. He is sent — vayeshalchehu — “to work the soil from which he was taken.” The purpose clause is the whole teaching. The expulsion has a lamed: to work. And the soil is not anonymous ground. It is the soil of his own making.
Where Was The Soil From
Where was that soil taken from? Bereshit Rabbah says: from the place of his atonement. “An altar of earth you shall make for Me” (Exodus 20:21). The Holy One said, I will create him from the place of his atonement; perhaps then he will endure (Bereshit Rabbah 14:8; Rashi on Genesis 2:7).
Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer and Midrash Tehillim place him, after the exile, on Mount Moriah, because the gate of the garden is near that mountain, and from there he had been taken, and to there he was returned — “to work the soil from which he was taken” (Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 20; Midrash Tehillim 92).
The Kli Yakar draws the line tight. The verse mentions “from which he was taken” for a reason. The coarse stuff of the body is what made the fall possible. Therefore, the repair is assigned to the same staff. He is sent to the earth of the altar, to work it into an altar, because the damage is mended through the thing that occasioned it (Kli Yakar on Genesis 3:23).
This is Rabbi Richman’s sentence in the language of the sages. The objective now is to subjugate the physical soil from which I was taken to the spiritual essence.
The soil is not the enemy.
It is the assigned material. Illusions mislead precisely because the soil is real, and food is real, and desire is real, and a man can forget that the dust in his hands was taken from the place of atonement and breathed into by the One who consulted his soul. The work is not to escape the soil. The work is to work it until the altar shows through.
Adam’s first labor in the garden was already described with the same verb: “to work it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The sages hear avodah there as more than farming.
What is left after the exile is not a different task. It is the same task, now without the shelter of the garden, on the dust that can fail him and can also become his offering. Kayin and Hevel, in the next chapter, are already bringing from that soil and from the flock. The altar begins at once.
The wrestle is also from Him
James Long invoked the wrestle, and he was right to. Yaakov does not learn that the struggle interrupts providence. He learns that the struggle is providence. He crosses the Jabbok diminished, having already said katonti — I am too small for all the kindness and all the truth You have done with Your servant (Genesis 32:11) — and he rises with a new name:
“Your name shall no longer be called Yaakov, but Yisrael, for you have striven with God and with men, and you have prevailed” (Genesis 32:29). The prevailing is not a victory over Hashem. There is no such thing.
It is the moment a man stops treating the night as an accident and confesses that the adversary, the limp, the blessing, and the dawn were sent by the same hand. Hosea will say it in a line: he strove with God, he wept, and made supplication to Him (Hosea 12:5). The weeping and the supplication are the content of the victory.
The Soul and the Soil
That is the thread between the two verses and the river. The soul consulted in the beginning is the soul that must meet soil, and the man of soil must meet a night he did not choose, and both meetings are the partnership.
Everything is from Hashem does not mean that nothing is asked of us. It means that the asking is also His. The yetzer, the ground that resists, the angel that will not give its name until dawn — none of it arrives from outside His will. The image was given so that the creature’s will could answer, not so that the creature could pretend to be a second source.
What the partnership is, and what it is not
The sages are careful here, and an essay on these verses should be careful with them.
We do not create as He creates. Bara remains His. The heretics are answered in the next verse, and they are answered again every time a Jew says the Shema. The consultation of angels teaches humility, not shared divinity. The consultation of souls teaches that we were wanted in the work, not that we were necessary to it. He could have caused the rain without a prayer. He caused it to wait.
What he did not keep for himself was the finishing. La’asot. The prayer that brings the rain. The soil worked until it remembered it was altar. The night wrestled until it yielded a name. A life in which the physical is not obeyed as if it were the whole story, and not despised as if it were a mistake, but subordinated — Rabbi Richman’s word is exact — to the spiritual essence that was breathed in after the dust was gathered.
The Connection and the Clay
The connection is older than the body. The midrash seats the souls with the King in His work before the potters have formed the clay. The connection is also never elsewhere than the body. He sends the man back to the very soil from which he was taken, and He calls the sending a mission.
Between those two — the consultation before the forming, and the labor after the exile — is the whole of a Jewish life. Everything is from Him: the image, the dust, the expulsion, the altar hidden in the expulsion, the angel at the river, the dawn. And because everything is from Him, the work can be offered back to Him, and the partnership He opened with a plural verb can be answered, one life at a time, in the singular of a man who finally knows whose soil he is working.
A Texas Jew who saw the High Priest’s crown in Amarillo in 2005 answers Dr. Michael Brown and the Book of Hebrews from the Tanach, and sets that night beside the altar that is finished in Jerusalem.
Then and Now
In 2005, at the Mayim-Hayim Center in Amarillo, Texas, Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute brought the tzitz of the High Priest. It had just been completed in Israel. We were the first to see it on this side of the ocean. I have never forgotten the weight of that gold, or the words cut into it: Kodesh laHashem, Holy to the Lord (Exodus 28:36).
We have given thousands of dollars over the years to the Temple Institute and to others who do that work. It was never a hobby. It was dear to my soul, and it was an honor to be involved in it as a Jew.
On September 5, 2016, I learned something that made that night in Amarillo feel less like a visitor’s story and more like a family story. My family is descended from a Cohen line. The crown I had looked at in Texas was not a costume. It was the plate that Aaron’s sons were commanded to wear when they stood before Hashem.
Jesus The HighPriest
I am writing this for the reader who has been told, week after week, on podcasts and in books still sitting on shelves, that the Levitical priesthood was replaced by Jesus, by the Church, or by a later book. I used to be that reader. Michael Brown’s books were in my library when I was a Messianic Jew. I read them, felt confused, and blamed my own mind. He was the scholar. I was not.
Today I know why those books never settled. They were leading where they led. They were leading away from the Hebrew Bible. Daniel, the friend of Hashem, said a power would think to change the times and the law (Daniel 7:25). I am not asking you to take my wound as proof. I am asking you to open the Tanach and read the verses Brown has to step around.
What Dr. Brown actually claims
On August 10, 2026, Dr. Michael Brown took a caller’s question on The Line of Fire in an episode titled “Does Ezekiel’s Temple Create Problems for Christians?” The caller, Terry, asked the plain question. Ezekiel 40–48 describes a future Temple, a priesthood, festivals, and offerings, including a sin offering. What does a believer do with that if the cross has already ended sacrifice?
Brown’s answer, in the framing of that episode, is the standard Christian resolution. Ezekiel 40–48 is a problem text for traditional Jews and for Christians. Believers explain the offerings after the cross so that they do not undo the claim that Jesus offered one sacrifice for sins forever. The center of the system is not the altar Ezekiel measured.
The center is the literal return of Jesus and his eternal reign. The millennial kingdom, in Brown’s telling, is how a Christian can still honor the prophets’ earthly promises without letting those promises govern the doctrine. Detail fights about the end are secondary to holding that return and that reign.[1]
That is the claim. Restated without ornament: the Hebrew prophet’s future altar, future sons of Zadok, and future sin offering cannot mean what they say, because a later book says there is no more sin offering.
Rico Cortes, teaching from the Book of Hebrews, makes the same move from the other door. He ties the death of the High Priest in the cities of refuge (Numbers 35) to Yeshua as the High Priest of Hebrews, whose death releases the guilty.
In his framing, Hebrews contrasts the earthly priesthood with a heavenly ministry, and Yeshua enters a heavenly sanctuary with his own blood. The earthly service, on this reading, is the shadow. The latter book is the substance.[2]
Cortes and Brown, both men, are serious. Both are readable. Both require the reader to let a book outside the Tanach take precedence over the Tanach.
What the Hebrew Bible states
The Torah does not speak of the priesthood of Aaron as a lease.
“And you shall anoint them, as you anointed their father, that they may minister to Me as priests; and their anointing shall be for them an everlasting priesthood throughout their generations.” (Exodus 40:15)
Everlasting. Throughout their generations. Not until a man from Judah dies outside the camp.
After the sin of Baal Peor, Hashem gives Pinchas a covenant:
“And he shall have it, and his seed after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God.” (Numbers 25:13)
Jeremiah, writing when the First Temple was about to fall, does not cancel Levi. He binds Levi to the same oath that binds David.
“For thus says the Lord: David shall never lack a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; neither shall the priests, the Levites, lack a man before Me to offer burnt-offerings, and to burn meal-offerings, and to do sacrifice continually… If you can break My covenant with the day and My covenant with the night… then may also My covenant be broken with David My servant… and with the Levites the priests, My ministers.” (Jeremiah 33:17–21)
No Commentary
Read that without a commentary from another religion. The end of the Levitical altar is, in Jeremiah’s mouth, as impossible as the end of day and night. A doctrine that ends the altar has to call this verse a metaphor, or a phrase, or a promise already kept in a man who never offered a korban on that altar. That is not a reading of Jeremiah. That is a rescue of a later creed.
Ezekiel is not vague, and Brown admits the problem. The Book of Ezekiel 43:18–27 gives the offerings of the future altar, including the sin offering. Ezekiel 44:15–16 does not hand the inner service to a priest from Judah, or to every believer, or to a heavenly order that retires Aaron.
“But the priests, the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the charge of My sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from Me, they shall come near to Me to minister unto Me… they shall enter into My sanctuary, and they shall come near to My table, to minister unto Me, and they shall keep My charge.”
Malachi, last of the Twelve, does not see the sons of Levi dismissed. He sees them purified.
“And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, and they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness. Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the Lord, as in the days of old, and as in former years.” (Malachi 3:3–4)
The Days Of Old
“As in the days of old” is an animal offering in Jerusalem, not a memorial invented to protect Hebrews 10. Zechariah 14:16–21 has the nations going up to Jerusalem to keep Sukkot, and every pot in Jerusalem and Judah is holy to the Lord of hosts. Isaiah 2:2–3 has the nations streaming to the House of the God of Jacob so that Torah goes out from Zion.
Isaiah 56:6–7 has the foreigner who joins himself to Hashem, whose offerings and sacrifices are accepted on Hashem’s altar, “for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” That is the verse. The altar is still there. The people come to it. They do not replace it.
Psalm 110:4, “You are a priest forever after the manner of Melchizedek,” is the verse Hebrews uses to change the law. In the Tanach, Melchizedek is the king of Salem who blesses Avraham (Genesis 14). He is not a warrant to void Exodus 40, Numbers 25, or Jeremiah 33.
A king can be called a priest in the sense of drawing near. David’s sons are called priests in 2 Samuel 8:18 in that older sense. None of that moves the mizbeach out of Aaron’s sons’ hands. The Torah already fixed who stands at that altar. “The priesthood being changed, of necessity there is also a change of the law” is a sentence in Hebrews.
It is not a sentence in the Hebrew Bible. To accept it, the reader must agree that Hashem changed the thing He swore would stand as long as day and night.
What Daniel Says
Daniel 7:25 says the arrogant power “shall think to change the times and the law.” I am not asking a court to stamp that verse with a church’s name. I am describing what I witnessed in my own reading life. The Sabbath was moved. The festivals were renamed. The altar was declared finished.
The priest was relocated to a tribe Moses never named for that work. The book that did this was not the Tanach. When I stopped letting that book judge the Tanach, Brown’s conclusions no longer looked like scholarship I was too slow to follow. They looked like a system that cannot survive a straight reading of Ezekiel 44 and Jeremiah 33.
Judgment and reward are already in the Hebrew Bible. They do not need a returning Jesus to invent them. “The soul that sins, it shall die… the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him” (Ezekiel 18:20). Daniel 12:2 speaks of those who sleep in the dust awaking, some to everlasting life and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence.
Malachi 3:16–18 says that Hashem writes a book of remembrance for those who fear Him and again discerns between the righteous and the wicked. The day Hashem acts is His day. The anointed king of David’s house is part of that hope. He is not a license to retire the priests, Jeremiah said, would not lack a man.
Rabbi Tovia Singer has said for years what the Talmud already said about the Writings. In Megillah 3a, the tradition holds that Yonatan ben Uzziel sought to reveal the Targum of the Ketuvim, but a voice from heaven stopped him because the time of the end is sealed within them. Prophecy is not only in the headlines of the Later Prophets. It is in the writings. Ezra is one of those books. Christians treat it as an archive. It is a pattern.
The altar is what Ezra built first
Ezra 3 is the pattern, and it is not subtle.
The exiles came back to a burned house and a frightened city. They did not wait for marble. In the seventh month, they gathered as one man to Jerusalem (Ezra 3:1). Yeshua ben Yozadak the priest and Zerubbabel built the altar on its bases, “for fear was upon them because of the peoples of the lands,” and they offered burnt offerings morning and evening (Ezra 3:2–3).
They kept Sukkot “as it is written,” and offered the daily burnt offerings “by number, according to the ordinance” (Ezra 3:4). Then the verse that should end the argument that a building must come before an offering:
“From the first day of the seventh month began they to offer burnt-offerings unto the Lord; but the foundation of the temple of the Lord was not yet laid.” (Ezra 3:6)
The Altar
The altar was the beginning of the rebuilding. The House came after. Rabbi Tovia Singer has pressed this in public, including in his Sukkot 2026 conversation with Rabbi Aron Sokol. His words: “We have an altar that’s ready to go. The altar is built. It’s here.
It’s ready to go on the Temple Mount. You technically do not need a Temple in order for an altar to be placed there and sacrifices to be offered.”[3] He pointed at Ezra 3 and at the older halakhah. Mishnah Eduyot 8:6 records Rabbi Yehoshua: “I have heard that they offer sacrifices even though there is no House.”
Maimonides rules that the sanctity of the Temple Mount remains (Hilchot Beit HaBechirah 6:16). Three prophets, the Talmud says, returned with the exiles and confirmed the altar, its place, and the possibility of bringing offerings (Zevachim 62a).
The Temple Institute completed a kosher altar in late 2014 and inaugurated it on the seventh night of Hanukkah, December 22, 2014. It follows Maimonides on the smaller lawful size. The outer frame is brick, fired to take the fire. The fill is stone; no iron has touched it, because the Torah forbids a tool of iron on the altar (Deuteronomy 27:5; Exodus 20:22). It can be taken apart and carried. It has been ready for more than a decade.[4]
The Tzit and The High Priest
Set the two dates side by side. In 2005, in Amarillo, a rabbi from Jerusalem set the High Priest’s gold plate before Jews and friends who had paid for the work. In 2014, and still today, the altar the plate belongs to is finished in Jerusalem, awaiting the decision to carry it up.
The priestly garments have been prepared. The silver trumpets have been prepared. The building stone, Singer said, is not yet in hand. Ezra did not have the building stone either. He had the altar, the fear, and the seventh month.
The Christian View
Christians looking at that same altar often say the opposite of what Ezra says. A popular end-times reading, the kind gathered under titles about a third temple the antichrist will desecrate, treats the finished altar as a stage prop for a villain.[5] The Hebrew pattern is not that.
The Hebrew pattern is exiles, afraid, building the altar first, on the place, in the seventh month, before one foundation stone of the House is laid. The villain reading needs Daniel 9 and 2 Thessalonians to rename the altar. The Tanach already named it. It is the place where Adam’s earth was taken, where Avraham bound Yitzchak, and where David bought the threshing floor. Fear of the peoples of the lands is in Ezra 3:3. They built it anyway.
Ezekiel 34 to 37, from 1948 to this morning
I learned the modern map of these chapters from Rabbi Tovia Singer. He does not treat 1948 as a mood. He treats it as the condition the prophets set. None of the later sentences can happen if Israel is not in the land.
Ezekiel 34 indicts the shepherds and promises that Hashem Himself will seek the flock. “I will bring them out from the peoples, and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land” (Ezekiel 34:13). Ezekiel 36 speaks to the mountains of Israel: you shall shoot forth branches and yield fruit to My people Israel, for they are at hand to come (Ezekiel 36:8).
The cities will be inhabited. The ruins will be rebuilt. Ezekiel 37 is the valley of dry bones, then the two sticks, Yehudah and Yosef, in one hand. Ezekiel 38 and 39 set a war in the latter years, when Israel has been brought back and is dwelling in the land.
The order is the order. The people return. The land responds. The army exists because a people brought back into a land of enemies does not survive without one. Then the altar. Then the House. A sermon that starts with a replaced priesthood has to skip the order.
1948
In 1948, the Jewish population of the new state was about 806,000.[6] On the eve of Independence Day 2025, the Central Bureau of Statistics put the population at nearly 10.1 million, about twelve times the 1948 figure, with roughly 45 percent of the world’s Jews living in Israel.[7] About 3.5 million people have immigrated since 1948. That is Ezekiel 34:13 in a census table.
The Land
The land was the subject of the skeptics’ argument for centuries. Mark Twain’s 1867 picture of a bare country is the “before.” KKL-JNF has planted on the order of 250 million trees; Israel is one of the few countries that ended the twentieth century with more trees than it had in 1900.[8] Ezekiel 36:8 did not say the mountains would host a conference.
It said they would branch and bear fruit for the people who were about to come. Wheat, barley, vines, figs, pomegranates, olive oil, and honey are the seven species of Deuteronomy 8:8. They are in the ground again. The last harvest of the year is still the olive.
The Date Palm
In January 2005, the same year the tzitz came to Amarillo, Dr. Elaine Solowey planted date seeds recovered from Masada. One germinated in March 2005. They named it Methuselah. Radiocarbon dating placed the seed at around two thousand years old. It is the oldest cultivated seed known to have grown, and it stands at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava.[9]
A date palm does not prove a doctrine. It does embarrass the claim that the land was finished. Ezekiel said the mountains would yield their fruit to My people Israel. A tree from Herod’s fortress put out a leaf in the year we first saw the crown.
Israel has had an army since the state was named. The prophets do not blush at that. Ezekiel 37’s living army and Zechariah’s Jerusalem are not a disarmed parable. A people gathered from the nations, in this land, with enemies on the ridges, is the setting Ezekiel 38 assumes. “After many days you shall be mustered… against the mountains of Israel” only works if there are mountains of Israel with Israel on them.
Singer’s point about the secular state is the same point. The prophets did not require the returnees to arrive already wearing tefillin. Ezra’s generation came back mixed, married out, and afraid. Nehemiah had to teach the day. The state was the vessel of the return. The altar is the next verse, not a contradiction of the verse.
Lev echad, and the boys who are hungry
Ezra 3:1 says they gathered “as one man.” Singer’s way of saying the end-condition is lev echad, one heart, the heart of that seventh month. The Targum tradition held the Writings back because the end is in them. Ezra is where you watch the end begin: one heart, the altar, then the House.
What is happening among Israeli youth is not a church growth seminar. It is Amos 8:11 in the streets. “Not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.”
After October 7, 2023, the shift was visible enough for secular papers to name it. On November 22, 2025, the Jerusalem Post described a “great Jewish awakening”: synagogues in Tel Aviv filling with young people, teenagers at Selichot, Shabbat attendance rising without social coercion. Reichman University research, cited there, found 37 percent of Israelis aged 15 to 18 turning to religion for healing, strength, and belonging.[10]
On November 13, 2025, Israel365 reported Thursday nights in Tel Aviv, once the night out before Shabbat, with teenagers in synagogue, phones down, some boys putting on tzitzit after Gaza, parents being led by children to a Friday table.[11]
The Teens
On September 21, 2025, more than 3,500 teens from 70 places filled Binyanei HaUma in Jerusalem for a Selichot night, featuring a concert and a midnight Selichot broadcast from the Kotel. The former Rishon LeZion led them in the Shema.[12] The 2025 Selichot season in Jerusalem put Adon Olam on the stage. Dudu Fisher’s symphonic Selichot program listed Adon Olam in the set, beside the older prayers.
[13] The line the boys sing is the line the siddur has always ended with: Adonai melech, Adonai malach, Adonai yimloch le’olam va’ed. The Lord is King, the Lord was King, the Lord shall be King forever and ever. That is not a youth-group chorus written last spring. It is the creed of the Tanach, in the mouths of teenagers.
Set the same ages beside American headlines, without gloating. The CDC’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that about one in three U.S. high school students have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
Among boys, 24 percent reported that sadness, 11 percent had seriously considered suicide, and 5 percent had attempted it.[14] KFF’s review of CDC data counted 1,478 suicide deaths among adolescents ages 12 to 17 in 2024, down from a 2018 peak and still higher than a decade earlier, with the deaths concentrated among boys and more than four in ten involving a firearm.[15]
These are not the same countries, and a statistic is not a soul. The contrast the prophets would notice is still there. One group of boys, 12 to 23, is running toward Shabbat, tefillin, and Adonai melech. The other is being tallied for despair. Amos did not say every nation would hunger the same way. He said the hunger for the word would come. In Israel, it is showing up as children pulling parents to the candles.
A word to the reader holding Brown or Hebrews
I am not writing to take books off your shelf. Brown’s books have been on my shelf for years. I am writing to tell you what the Hebrew text does when it is allowed to finish its own sentences.
Dr. Brown
Brown’s claim is that Ezekiel’s future sin offering and Zadokite priesthood create a problem that the return of Jesus and the Book of Hebrews must solve. The Tanach does not state that problem. It states an everlasting priesthood (Exodus 40:15), a covenant with Levi as firm as day and night (Jeremiah 33:20–21), a future altar with sin offerings and the sons of Zadok at the table (Ezekiel 43–44), and Levites refined until their offering is pleasant as in former years (Malachi 3:3–4).
Rico Cortes
Cortes’s claim is that Hebrews presents the earthly High Priest as a shadow of a heavenly one, whose death ends the system. The Torah already explained the death of the High Priest in Numbers 35. It frees the manslayer from the city of refuge. It does not free Israel from the altar, nor does it move the plate on the High Priest’s forehead onto another tribe.
The timeline in front of you is the timeline in the text. Israel is in the land. The people have multiplied. The mountains have put out branches. A date seed from the Roman siege has grown. The state that brought them home has an army. The crown has been made. I saw it in Amarillo in 2005. The altar has been made. It has been ready since Hanukkah 2014. The boys are singing the King’s line. Ezra gathered as one man in the seventh month and offered before the foundation was laid.
If the Book of Hebrews is right, Jeremiah 33 is wrong. Both cannot be the word of the God who does not break a covenant with the day. I lived the confusion long enough. The way out was not a smarter Christian scholar. The way out was the Hebrew Bible, read in its own order, with the altar still in the sentence.
Hazan Gavriel ben David Amarillo, Texas Beit HaShoavah
Footnotes
Dr. Michael Brown, “Does Ezekiel’s Temple Create Problems for Christians?,” The Line of Fire, YouTube, August 10, 2026, https://youtu.be/XGyMCrdDXf0. Episode description: Brown answers Terry on sin offerings in Ezekiel’s future temple, how believers explain sacrifices after the cross, and why he treats the literal return and reign of Jesus, and the millennial kingdom, as the way to hold the prophets’ earthly promises.
Rico Cortes, “Yeshua the High Priest: How the Cities of Refuge Reveal His Ransom,” YouTube, July 28, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/live/LuB0sBEmkrs. See also his related teachings contrasting earthly priestly service with the heavenly ministry argued in Hebrews: https://youtu.be/Gr5PiKduqQc and https://youtu.be/xnlOVvX6bxk.
Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz, “Rabbi Tovia Singer: ‘The Altar Is Ready’ for the Ezra 3 Prophecy,” Israel365 News, October 4, 2026, https://israel365news.com/421611/rabbi-tovia-singer-the-altar-is-ready-for-the-ezra-3-prophecy/. Interview with Rabbi Aron Sokol, Parsha Inspired, during Sukkot.
Ahuva Balofsky, “Jewish Temple Altar Rebuilt, Ready for Use,” Israel365 News / Breaking Israel News, March 9, 2015, https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/32009/altar-jewish-holy-temple-rebuilt-jewish-world/. Completion late 2014; public inauguration at the menorah lighting, December 22, 2014. Measurements follow Maimonides; fill stones untouched by metal; frame can be disassembled.
For the Christian reading that places the finished altar inside an antichrist third-temple plot, see the line of commentary sampled at https://youtu.be/rWI9ibDZcfc and the republication “For The Third And Final Temple (Which Antichrist Will Desecrate), The Jewish Altar Has Been Rebuilt And Is Ready To Begin Service,” TheWatchTowers.org, drawing on the 2015 Matzav Haruach report.
“Israel turns 68 with 8.5 million people, 10 times more than in 1948,” Times of Israel, May 9, 2016, citing the Central Bureau of Statistics: population about 806,000 in 1948.
“Israel’s population tops 10 million for 1st time, on eve of 77th Independence Day,” Times of Israel, April 29, 2025. CBS: nearly 10.1 million, about twelve times the 1948 population; about 45 percent of world Jewry in Israel; about 3.5 million immigrants since 1948.
Jewish National Fund, “The Story of Israel’s Tree Planting,” JNF.org; KKL-JNF forestry figures, 2025 update. JNF reports more than 250 million trees planted since 1901. Israel is among the few countries with more trees at the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning.
Sarah Sallon and colleagues, Science (2008); “Palm tree grown from 2,000-year-old date stone,” The Guardian, June 12, 2008; “An update on Methuselah, Israel’s palm tree from a 2,000-year-old seed,” Jerusalem Post, November 28, 2021. Seeds from the Yadin-Netzer excavation at Masada; planted January 2005; germination March 2005; tree at Kibbutz Ketura.
Jamie Geller, “Welcoming Israelis are experiencing spiritual awakening,” Jerusalem Post, November 22, 2025, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-874631. Cites Reichman University: 37 percent of Israelis ages 15–18 turning to religion.
Elie Mischel, “‘A Generation of Thirsty Souls’: Inside Tel Aviv’s Unexpected Spiritual Awakening,” Israel365 News, November 13, 2025, https://israel365news.com/413959/a-generation-of-thirsty-souls-inside-tel-avivs-unexpected-spiritual-awakening/.
“3,500 CTeens Uplifted at Annual Selichos Event,” Anash.org, September 21, 2025, https://anash.org/3500-cteens-uplifted-at-annual-selichos-event/.
“Selichot 2025: Jerusalem’s Must-See Mega Concerts,” JFeed, September 9, 2025, https://www.jfeed.com/music/selichot-concerts-jerusalem-2025. Dudu Fisher’s “Shaking the Heavens,” Yavne, September 28, 2025, setlist including Adon Olam.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, “Mental Health and Suicide Risks,” 2025 findings, https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/youth-health-in-focus/mental-health.html. About one in three students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness; male students: 24 percent persistent sadness, 11 percent seriously considered suicide, 5 percent attempted.
Nirmita Panchal, “5 Key Facts on Adolescent Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders,” KFF, May 11, 2026, analysis of CDC WONDER 2014–2024, https://www.kff.org/mental-health/5-key-facts-on-adolescent-mental-health-and-substance-use-disorders/. Adolescents ages 12–17: 1,478 suicide deaths in 2024; more than 17,000 in the decade; more than four in ten involved a firearm; deaths higher among males.
Key Takeaways
The author shares a personal experience of seeing the High Priest’s tzitz in Amarillo, highlighting its significance in relation to Jewish heritage.
He critiques Dr. Michael Brown’s interpretation of the Levitical priesthood and the Book of Hebrews, arguing it contradicts the Tanach.
The article emphasizes that the Hebrew Bible presents an everlasting priesthood and future altar as essential elements of faith.
Ezra’s return, the rebuilding of the altar, and the revival of modern Israeli youth signify a spiritual awakening, in contrast to the challenges faced elsewhere.
The tzitz symbolizes continuity in Jewish tradition, reinforcing the enduring nature of the altar and priesthood in the faith.
Why is Genesis Chapter 1 written in a different order than Chapter 2?
Where was Adam created?
A book like no other is what I learned from Rabbi David Fohrman, and Chemistry from Rabbi Ephriam Palvanov. Both show how the Hebrew Bible is A book like other book made under the heavens.
No man could have pen it. It is beyond the understanding of the human mind. It contains everything known or that will be known in the past and the present and future.
Who can answer the questions the Torah ask?
It is a book that show how the universe was created and everything within it. It contains the souls of every human being and their names. Adam contained within him all the souls of every human soul today.
There is no longer any qustion if the Bible is true. That can be proven through science, math, DNA, Archeology and history. No one can make some believe these facts. That is why you were sent here to find the truth. That is why the Garden was given to you.
We came from heaven and had to pass over into this world to grow. Heaven is not a place you can grow. Heaven is perfect, there is no room to grow there . So what is Adam? Why are we here?
The answers are for you to seach out in the only thing that give enternal life. I set before you today both life and death good and evil.
What the two names are doing
Biblical criticism noticed something real. Genesis 1 speaks of God as אֱלֹהִים, Elohim. From 2:4 the Name is יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים, YHVH Elohim. The styles differ: cosmic and ordered, then earthly and particular. From that, source critics built two authors. The Hebrew suggests a different conclusion. One creating, two standpoints.
Elohim is the builder, and the sages tie that Name to מִדַּת הַדִּין, the measure of judgment. The method is separation: light from darkness, waters above from waters below, sea from dry land. Each day closes with an evaluation, וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב, “and God saw that it was good.” The human of that world matches it: זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה, male and female, told to subdue the earth and rule.
YHVH Elohim keeps the builder in the sentence and adds the Name the sages tie to מִדַּת הָרַחֲמִים, compassion. רַחֲמִים shares a root with רֶחֶם, womb.
A womb does not manufacture a child. It shelters a union and lets it unfold. That is the divine role in chapter 2: heaven and earth are too far apart to parent anything, so YHVH Elohim draws them together with mist, cloud, and rain. The human matches that standpoint too.
The words are no longer zakhar and nekevah. They are אִישׁ and אִשָּׁה, and the charge is לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ, to serve the garden and guard it.
Chapter 2 uses the compound Name on purpose. Both standpoints belong to one God. The Shema will not leave them as two: יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד.
The first movement of each account
The second account does not open at Genesis 2:1. Those verses still close the seventh day. The other standpoint opens at 2:4.
Every load-bearing word of 1:1 is still here. The grammar has reversed. אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת elsewhere names a parent: Noah, Terah, Isaac. Here there is no human parent. Heaven and earth have become the parents.
The objects of 1:1 are the subjects of 2:4. Ramban already reads their offspring as rain and growth. בְּהִבָּרְאָם, “in their being created,” means the organic story starts while the building is happening, not after it.
The small heh in that word is read by Rashi, from the midrash, as בְּהֵ׳ בְּרָאָם, “with the letter heh He created them,” the letter of this world and of mercy.
The problem, and its inverse
Genesis 1:2 gives the builder three obstacles: תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ, too much chaos; חֹשֶׁךְ, too much darkness; a תְהוֹם of water, no dry ground.
Genesis 2:5 inverts all three. Nothing has sprouted, so the land is static. No cloud has formed, so the sun is unrelieved. לֹא הִמְטִיר — no rain has fallen at all.
The remedy inverts as well. Elohim says יְהִי אוֹר and then divides light from darkness. The second account raises an אֵד from the earth, cloud mixing light and dark, water below rising to meet water above. Chapter 1 divides the waters. Chapter 2 joins them.
The hinge is the extra word at the end of the seventh day: אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים לַעֲשׂוֹת, “which God created to make.” The next verse spends it: בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים. The structure was built so an organic making could begin.
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