Why the Bible Is the World’s Greatest Self-Help Book — and Why Resistance, Not Comfort, Makes a Person Whole

A teaching for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the year 5787

The Highways Are Already in the Heart

“Happy is the person whose strength is in You; the highways are in their heart.”

Ashrei adam oz-lo bach; mesillot bilevavam. The pathway to You is always on his heart.

So opens the psalm that names the blessed life not as a life without struggle, but as a life whose inner roads already run toward Zion. The mesillot — raised highways, built-up roads — are not out there waiting to be discovered. They have already been laid down inside the heart. The question of this season is never whether the path exists. The question is whether we will walk it when the road begins to resist us.

Self Help

The self-help shelves of the world are the most purchased books on earth, and almost no one who buys them becomes whole. That is not an accident. Most of those books sell a life without friction: optimize the self, protect the self, curate the self, soothe the self.

The Bible does the opposite. It is not a manual for the self. The Torah is the operating system and source code of the human mind and body. It tells you what you are made of, what broke, what the repair costs are, and who holds the compiler. You cannot debug a life with a book that refuses to name the Architect.

The World Began in Stumbling: Tohu, Resistance, and Two Trees

Start at the beginning. That is where the stumbling starts.

“The earth was tohu vavohu — formless and void — and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of Hashem was hovering over the face of the waters.” The world does not open in comfort. It opens in chaos.

The first movement of holiness is not the removal of resistance. It is the Spirit of Hashem moving over the dark waters — what the mystics called the pool of souls, the raw material of every life that would ever be asked to become righteous.

We are all already righteous in potential. Almost no one tells his own soul that it is good. The greater soul Hashem wants us to build in this world is not assembled by affirmations. It is assembled by His commandments and by the daily coronation of Him as King.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: The Soul

That is what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come to teach: not that we are already finished, but that hope is still possible inside unfinished chaos.

In the garden stand two trees. The Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A world with only the Tree of Life would be a world without resistance — no choice, no friction, no becoming. How can a person live in a world with no resistance?

He cannot. He can only float. Chava did not invent the fall out of malice. She named the structure of this world. Life in a body, in history, in marriage, in a nation, is the decision to eat from knowledge — to enter the field where good and evil actually press against each other — rather than remain in an untested immortality.

That is reality. Not the English paraphrase. Reality.

Ezer K’negdo: The English Lie and the Hebrew Truth

The first resistance Hashem built into the human being is not an enemy. It is a spouse.

“It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make for him an ezer k’negdo.” English Bibles say “helpmeet,” “helpmate,” “a helper suitable for him.” That translation is a softening. It is almost a lie. The Hebrew does not say assistant. Ezer is the word used, over and over, for Hashem Himself when He comes to Israel’s rescue — a warrior-helper, not a secretary. K’negdo means opposite him, facing him, against him.

Rashi, quoting the Talmud, refuses to let us sentimentalize it: if he is worthy, she is a help to him; if he is not worthy, she is against him, to oppose him. Chava was created to resist Adam — to place friction in the path of the isolated “I.” She was not made to complete his brand. She was made so that he would have to become someone large enough to love another soul as his own.

Love Your Neighbor- As Yourself

The first commandment of resistance is therefore this: love your wife as you love yourself. It is so hard because we are trained, by every self-help gospel of the age, to focus on the I, the Me, the private soul.

The one who is righteous understands that the whole world is his soul. The neighbor is not an accessory to the project of the self. The wife is not a member of the support staff for the husband’s dream. She is the first Sinai he will ever stand in front of.

I watched a film from Iran about the African communities there. It opens with a woman telling her husband that his idea of becoming a musician has no place in her world. She will not help him. The scene is not cruel. It is Genesis 2 speaking in a kitchen. A soulmate is not sent to remove the stones from your road. A soulmate is sent to be the stone you must learn to bless. She resists you so that you will become better than the man who only ever consulted himself.

Parshat Ha’azinu: Heaven and Earth Are Called to Witness

This Shabbat, 8 Tishrei 5787 — September 19, 2026 — is Shabbat Shuva, the Sabbath of Return that sits between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The reading everywhere is Parshat Ha’azinu, Devarim 32, the song Moshe places in the mouth of Israel as a witness against them and for them.

“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth.” Heaven and earth are summoned because, from Genesis 2 onward, they are our first parents. “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth.” Man is dust of the adamah and breath of the heavens.

What Hashem does to the earth, He also does to the human being, because we come from the stars and from the soil. When the land is judged, the body is judged. When the land is atoned for, the people are atoned for. That is why the song can end: “and He will atone for His land, His people.”

The Tzur – Our Rock

The Name that dominates Ha’azinu is not a feeling. It is Tzur — the Rock. “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, righteous and upright is He.” A rock does not remove resistance. A rock is what you strike against, what you hide inside, and what does not move when you do.

Hashem found Israel “in a desert land, in the howling waste of tohu.” The same word as the opening of Creation. We do not graduate out of chaos. We are found inside it. He circled him, instructed him, guarded him as the pupil of His eye, like an eagle stirring the nest — which is to say, like a parent who will not let the young remain untested.

Then comes the stumbling that repeats in every generation: “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked… You neglected the Rock that begot you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth.” Prosperity is not the opposite of resistance. Prosperity is often the place where we refuse it. We want the Tree of Life as a lifestyle and the Tree of Knowledge as a hobby. Ha’azinu will not permit that split.

The Song Of Operation

The center of the song, and the center of these Days of Awe, is the verse that should be written on the doorpost of 5787:

See now that I, I am He, and there is no god with Me. I put to death, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; and there is none who can deliver from My hand.

— Devarim 32:39

That is the most important reality. Not the reality we prefer. The reality that judges us and heals us from the same hand. Rosh Hashanah asks: Who is the King? Yom Kippur asks who will let that King wound and heal him. Shabbat Shuva stands between them and says, “Return.”

Mikveh Yisrael: Hope Is a Baptism, Not a Mood

What Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come to teach is the hope we have in Hashem. Not optimism. Hope.

The Hebrew word for hope is tikvah. The Hebrew word for the gathering of living waters — the pool in which the impure immerse and rise permitted — is mikveh. They are the same root, k-v-h: to wait, to gather, to hope.

Jeremiah names it without apology: “Mikveh Yisrael Hashem” — Hashem is the Hope of Israel, and Hashem is the mikveh of Israel. Rabbi Akiva heard the verse on Yom Kippur and said: just as a mikveh purifies the defiled, so the Holy One purifies Israel.

Hope is not a feeling you manufacture. Hope is an immersion. You go down into the chaos — tohu, the dark waters, the year that will not be easy — and you rise because the waters themselves belong to Him.

That is why the word can be translated, in the old Christian tongue, as the user of this teaching remembered it, as a kind of baptizing. Not as a borrowed sacrament. As the original Jewish act: the whole body, not one finger left dry, lowered into the gathered waters of the One who is both Judge and Fountain.

“Hope in Hashem; strengthen yourself and He will give your heart courage; and hope in Hashem.” The verse says Kaveh twice. You hope, you are strengthened, and then you hope again. Resistance is not a sign that hope has failed. Resistance is the medium in which hope is baptized.

5787: Friction Is Coming to Israel — Who Is Your Hope?

The work of the righteous will always be resistance in this world. That is not a prediction about geopolitics. It is the architecture of Creation, of marriage, of teshuva, and of Jewish history.

Friction is coming to Israel. It has never stopped coming. Ha’azinu already sang it: the nation will grow fat, forget the Rock, be handed over, and then — when power is gone, and no one is left, bound or free — “Hashem will judge His people and relent toward His servants.” The question of 5787 is not whether there will be resistance. The question is: Who is your Hope?

The Mikvah Of Israel

If your hope is a headline, it will drown. Hope is not a coalition; it will fracture. If your hope is the isolated I — my soul, my peace, my optimized year — it will discover that the self cannot be its own mikveh. If your hope is Hashem, then even the wound is inside the healing, and even the opposition of the one you love is inside the making of a greater soul.

The righteous person does not get a year without friction. He gets a year in which friction is interpreted. Adam hears in a spouse’s resistance the original ezer k’negdo. He hears, in the resistance of the nations, the song that already told him the Rock would both wound and heal. He hears, in his own stubborn “I,” Hillel’s second question: “And if I am only for myself, what am I?”

The Ethics of the Fathers: Work, Strength, and the Unfinished Task

Pirkei Avot does not flatter us. It trains us for resistance.

The world stands on three things: Torah, avodah (service), and acts of loving-kindness.

— Pirkei Avot 1:2, Shimon HaTzaddik

Not on comfort. Not on self-esteem. On Torah, service, and chesed — three forms of work that meet a resistant world and refuse to leave it as they found it.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

— Pirkei Avot 1:14, Hillel

The first clause saves you from self-erasure. The second saves you from the religion of the I. The third refuses to delay. That is the whole psychology of teshuva in one Mishnah.

The day is short, the work is great, the workers are lazy, the reward is abundant, and the Master of the house is insistent. It is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

— Pirkei Avot 2:15–16, Rabbi Tarfon

This is the opposite of the self-help promise. You will not finish. You are not permitted to stop. The Master is insistent. That insistence is not cruelty. It is the dignity of being needed by the house’s Owner.

Who is mighty? One who conquers his inclination.

— Pirkei Avot 4:1, Ben Zoma

Might is not the absence of an opponent. Might is the inner victory that only an opponent makes possible. Chava is opposite Adam. The nations opposite Israel. The yetzer opposite the soul. Hashem is opposite the isolated self, asking it to become a highway.

Choose Life Inside the Resistance

Moshe had already said it, one parsha earlier: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.” The two trees are still standing. The English world will keep selling a garden with only one of them. The Torah will not. A human being becomes whole not by escaping friction but by letting friction become the place where the Spirit still hovers over the waters.

Adam/Humanity=Chava/Life + Resistance

Love the one who stands opposite you. That is the first resistance and the first repair. Tell your soul it is good — not because it is finished, but because the Spirit of Hashem has been moving over it since the first dark morning. Crown Him King on Rosh Hashanah. Go down into the mikveh of Yom Kippur, the Hope of Israel, and rise. Walk the highways that are already in the heart.

The work of the righteous will always be resistance in this world. That is not a sentence of despair. It is the description of a calling. The Rock wounds and heals. The spouse opposes and completes. The year 5787 will not be smooth. It does not have to be. It has to be true.

Mikveh Yisrael Hashem. Who is your Hope?

G’mar chatimah tovah. May you be sealed for a good year — not an easy one, a true one.

Inspired by Chief Rabbi Goldstein

Shabbat Shuva / Parshat Ha’azinu 5787

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Primary sources cited

Tanakh: Bereishit 1:1–2; 2:4, 2:9, 2:16–18, 2:23; 3:22–24. Vayikra 19:18. Devarim 30:19; 32:1–4, 10–11, 15, 18, 39, 43. Yeshayahu 40:31. Yirmiyahu 14:8; 17:13; 50:7. Hoshea 14:2–3. Tehillim 27:14; 33:20; 84:6; 121:1–2.

Chazal: Yevamot 63a; Rashi on Bereishit 2:18; Mishnah Yoma 8:9; Pirkei Avot 1:2, 1:14, 2:15–16, 4:1. Rambam, Hilchot Ishut 15:19; Hilchot Teshuvah 1:3.

Liturgical frame: Rosh Hashanah 1–2 Tishrei 5787 (sundown 11 September 2026 – nightfall 13 September 2026); Shabbat Shuva / Ha’azinu 8 Tishrei 5787 (19 September 2026); Yom Kippur 10 Tishrei 5787 (sundown 20 September – nightfall 21 September 2026).

A letter to Glen Beck, to the Christian world, and to anyone still willing to read the book we heard at the mountain 3339 Years Ago.

I am one of the Jews the prophets said would come back. Isaiah 56:6

Not a metaphor. Not a church. A man whose mom’s mom, my grandmother, closed the curtains on Friday night and told her never to tell anyone the secret. 911 changed that.

I was thirty-five years old on 911 when my mother told me I was Jewish. I was a devout Christian for all of those years, I know, according to one of 40,000 in the denomination. The one thing I knew was the Bible.

A grandson of Luz Ramirez Diaz from Mexico by way of Spain, whose two sons’ Y-chromosomes came back Cohen Model Haplo match. Who immediately became a Messianic Jew and gave up everything except Jesus. I thought to myself, now, I can make sense of the Christian Bible. How does the Christian Bible make me a complete Jew?

I became the Director of a Mayim Hayim Messianic Jewish Congregation in Amarillo, with about 100 congregants on both Friday and Saturday. In 2005, I was on God’s Learning Channel for about five years and introduced Bill Cloud, Brad Scott, and many other friends whose phones are now dead.

I watched Glen on Fox and learned from Bill Cloud and others from the Hebrew Roots Ministries from 2001 to 2015, and walked with them until I kept Sinai without their mashiach Yeshua, and then the phone died.

Isaiah 56:6 The Stranger That Keeps Shabbat

Isaiah said the lost would be found. Jeremiah said they would come from the north country and from all the lands. Ezekiel said the bones would stand. Ezra and Nehemiah wrote the paperwork for a return.

Amos said they would not be pulled up from the soil again. Obadiah said saviors would go up on Mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau. I am not inventing a role. I am standing in a line that the text already drew.

This is for Glen because he keeps asking the same thing I ask every day I listen to your show. The Torch. A play off the burning bush. My Rabbi David Fohrman shows how that burning bush is Israel, not the truth as from Christian forefathers. The Bible has given you the full blueprint, Glen.

The End From The Beginning: Six Alefs

Ask Bill if he is familiar with Isaiah 46:9: “I have told you the end from the beginning.” I learned it from Bill and Brad Scott. The verse says, “The end is in the beginning,” Glen, every detail. But for 3339 years, no one has been listening to the Jew.

Glen, putting a Christian perspective on Jewish history is like telling a Jew about his history and his Bible. Bill Cloud, in the prophecy chair, speaks as if he had 3339 years of Jewish learning. Bill does not read Hebrew, and Brad Scott was one of America’s greatest Hebrew teachers.

I learned Hebrew from Brad for over 10 years. Brad could not read Hebrew even though he could read the letters, and yet he taught it because he said it was not like any other language. By the way, chemistry is the only language equal to Hebrew. The Bible is the lecture notes. You had to be at the lecture to know what the notes mean.

This is also for the Christian world, because you have spent two thousand years reading our mail and returning it marked “fulfilled.”

But, yet you say in the same breath, “that will be fulfilled in his second coming”. Jesus will fulfill all that has been prophesied in his return.

It is for the truth-seeker who is tired of being told that the people grabbing a Jew’s garment in Zechariah 8:23 are a satanic one-world religion that will follow a false messiah after the Temple is built for Satan.

The end-time prophecy for Christians:

The Antichrist / The Man of Lawlessness

Daniel’s “little horn,” Paul’s “man of lawlessness” who sits in the temple claiming to be God (2 Thessalonians 2), and Revelation’s beast from the sea plus the false prophet. He makes a covenant, breaks it at the midpoint, demands worship, and is given authority for 42 months. The number 666 and the mark of the beast belong here. A rebuilt temple in Jerusalem is assumed by those who read this literally and in a futuristic sense.

The Backbone: Daniel’s Seventy Weeks

Daniel 9:24–27 is the chronological hinge. Seventy “weeks” (seventy sevens of years = 490 years) are decreed for Israel and Jerusalem. Most futurists treat the first 69 weeks as fulfilled up to the Messiah, then a gap (the church age), then a final seven-year “week.” In the middle of that week, a coming ruler stops the sacrifice and sets up the abomination of desolation. That seven-year period is identified with the tribulation of Revelation.

Israel is Not The False Religion. They are the nation the prophets said would come.

I. What The Prophets Actually Scheduled

Isaiah 11:11–12 — a second time, Hashem recovers the remnant of His people from Assyria, Egypt, Pathros, Cush, Elam, Shinar, Hamath, and the islands of the sea. He lifts a banner for the nations and gathers the dispersed of Israel.

Isaiah 43:5–6 — from the east, from the west, from the north, from the south. “Bring My sons from afar.”

Isaiah 49:6 — too small a thing to raise up the Son of Jacob. I will make you a light to the nations.

Jeremiah 16:14–15 — days are coming when they will no longer say, “As the Lord lives who brought us up from Egypt,” but “As Hashem lives who brought us up from the land of the north and from all the lands where He drove them.”

Jeremiah 23- “Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when they shall no longer say, ‘As Hashem lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As Hashem lives who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ Then they shall dwell in their own land.”

What Part of The New Covenant Did Jesus Initiate

Jeremiah 31 — a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Torah on the inside. And then the clause your pastors skip: if those ordinances depart from before Me, the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation. The sun is still up. We are still a nation. The covenant did not migrate to Rome.

Ezekiel 36 — I will take you from the nations, gather you, bring you to your soil. I will sprinkle clean water. I will put a new spirit in you. The land that was desolate will be tilled.

Ezekiel 37 — dry bones. Two sticks. Judah and Joseph. One nation, one king.

Amos 9:14–15 — I will plant them on their soil, and they shall no more be pulled up.

Obadiah 1:17–21 — on Mount Zion there shall be deliverance. The house of Jacob shall be a fire, the house of Joseph a flame, the house of Esau stubble. Saviors on Mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau, and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.

Ezra and Nehemiah are not children’s church. They are the first return’s minutes: lists, walls, mixed marriages sent home, Torah read in the square until the people wept. We are the second wave of the same file.

That is my credential. Not a vision. A passport stamp the prophets already printed.

II. What Bill Cloud Sold You, And Why It Is Not Hebrew

1 Thessalonians 2 13And we also thank God constantly^d for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men^e but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. 14For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews,^f 15who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind 16by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But wrath has come upon them at last!^g

The Jew

On your program, Bill took Hosea 6 and started a clock at the time of departure. “Two days” became two thousand years since “the Messiah left.” That is Paul wearing tzitzit. Hosea’s “us” is Israel, torn and promised healing. It is not a stopwatch begun at Golgotha.

He took the katechon from 2 Thessalonians — a verse that does not exist in our book — and used it to decode Dugin, then kept Paul’s furniture. A Jew reads Ezekiel 38 without a restrainer from Salonika. Persia is named. The Name is sanctified. There is no Church in the credits.

He mapped Gog as Russia plus Islam so that an invading force could be destroyed and Jesus could return. Partial map, wrong ending. The Rambam does not end Ezekiel with a second advent. He ends the Laws of Kings with a man of David’s house who keeps the Written and Oral Torah, fights the wars of Hashem, builds the House, and gathers the dispersed. If he is killed, he is not the one.

Uncensored Hilchot Melachim 11:4 puts Jesus in Daniel 11:14 — the lawless of your people exalt themselves to fulfill the vision, and they stumble. Then the inventory: Jews slain, remnant scattered and humiliated, Torah altered, most of the world taught to serve a god other than Hashem.

That Last Sentence Is The Sentence Shoreshim Cannot Afford.

Then both houses, named the Nazarene and the Ishmaelite, who arose after him, pave a road they do not own, so that the nations already know the words “messiah” and “torah” when the real King stands. Zephaniah 3:9.

If that verse is your religion, Glen, you have already had a king for two thousand years. You have already had a high priest “after the order of Melchizedek.” The body of Christ already had a temple of the body and a temple of the Church. You have already changed times and laws. You do not need a future Antichrist to sit in our House and finish a checklist you claim was finished in the first century.

There Can Never Be A Anti-Christ In The Tanach

The Antichrist doctrine is the delay button. The first coming did not gather us, nor did it seat the Torah. Rather than fail the Rambam’s test, the Church invented a sequel and a scapegoat. The sequel is the Second Coming. The scapegoat is a Jew-facing monster who will do in seven years what your king did not do in twenty centuries. Then we must bow.

There Is No Antichrist In The Jewish Bible.

Deuteronomy 13: A sign that leads you away from the commandments is the test you have already failed. There is a false mashiach: if he dies without the House and the ingathering, he is not the one.

There is Gog and M’Gog. Edom is Christianity. Ishmael is Islam. There is no cosmic anti-messiah Israel must coronate so history can proceed. When Mashiach is revealed, the nations know. There is no vacancy for a double.

Christianity and Islam are not Judaism’s other half. They are two sides of one coin minted from our pages — two later books, two final men, two endings in which Israel is baptized or made dhimmi. That is the series on beithashoavah.org. The coin Bill needs is Judeo-Christian. The problem is that there is no Judeo. The coin the Rambam minted is Edom and Ishmael paving the road.

III. The Stage That Has Already Stood Up

The people came home. 1948, the same year Abraham was born in the Jewish calendar,1948. 1967 The Six-Day War and the Temple Mount back in the hands of Israel. Half of world Jewry on the soil, Amos said, would not spit them out again.

The land woke. Ezekiel 36 is not poetry when the desert exports fruit.

Hebrew lives in the street.

Jerusalem is a burdensome stone. Zechariah 12:3.

Persia is on the page of Ezekiel 38.

October 7, 2023 — 22 Tishrei 5784, Simchat Torah — sits inside Zechariah 12 the way Singer reads it: a national piercing, a mourning like a firstborn, a turn toward the Name. Glazerson’s tables clustered the year. The Vilna Gaon’s school put the opening of Gog near Tishrei.

A star from Jacob. Numbers 24:17. Zohar III 212b: 25 Elul, a Friday, seventy days. Palvanov flagged 27 September 2024. The same window took Nasrallah.

Rabbi Kessin and Cyrus As Trump

A gentile tool like Cyrus. Isaiah 45. Trump is not the donkey rider. He is the door-opener category that the text has already invented. Kessin can call him Esau repaired. The Rambam would still ask whether the House is up.

Zechariah 9 begins at verse 1, not verse 9. Damascus, Hadrach, Hamath, Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Ashkelon. Palvanov’s Damascus class put that corridor on footage. Ishmael is the wild donkey of Genesis 16:12. The King of 9:9 rides a chamor.

Zechariah 9:1–8 is the north-to-south march: Hadrach, Damascus as His resting place, Hamath, Tyre, Sidon, then the Philistine line — Ashkelon, Gaza, Ekron. Only after that corridor is broken does verse 9 say: your King comes, righteous, saved, ani, riding a chamor — a donkey — and a colt, son of she-asses.

Verse 10 is the payoff the churches skip: chariots cut from Ephraim, the horse cut from Jerusalem, the bow cut, and he speaks shalom to the nations, sea to sea. If verse 9 was already closed in the first century, verse 10 is a lie. The horse and the bow are still on the table.
The Rambam in Iggeret Teiman already set the donkey and camel — Edom and Ishmael — before the messiah, who rides. The chapter starts in Damascus. The rider has not been revealed. Verse 10 — horse cut, bow cut, peace from sea to sea — is not paid.

Zechariah 14 Is Not Paid. Flesh Consuming While A Man Still Stands.

DNA did not baptize anyone. It did something colder. Jeanson’s Traced is the three-trunk tree I used in Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life — Shem, Ham, Japheth; three wives; seventy names in Genesis 10. Mainstream labs will not grant him a clock. They will grant this: living Jews and Levantine Arabs carry a majority Canaanite ancestry.

Only two of the seventy nations still stand up and say Abraham is our father. And only one of those two still carries, at Temple-period depth, the Cohen Modal Haplotype Hammer and Behar published in Human Genetics in 2009. My uncle’s kit made my grandfather a Cohen on paper. The tree is on the site.

IV. The Red Heifer, The Altar, and The Lamb We Still Owe

Christians treat the red heifer as a countdown clock for their Antichrist. That is theft of a commandment.

Number 19 is not a prophecy chart. It is law. A red cow without blemish, never yoked, burned outside the camp, ash mixed with living water, sprinkled on the one who touched death. Without that water, a Jew cannot enter the sacred.

Ezekiel 36 promised clean water when we came home. The generation that came home has raised heifers and measured them the way the Mishnah measures them. The Temple Institute did not do that so Bill Cloud could book another hour. They did it because the Torah did not expire.

The altar is the same file. Exodus 20 and 27. Ezekiel 43. You cannot bring what the Torah requires to a metaphor. Passover is not a communion wafer. Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 16: the lamb, the house, the night Hashem passed over.

Every Jew who can become tahor and stand in front of a consecrated altar is still commanded to make that offering. Exile postponed the act. Exile did not repeal it. The return the prophets described is the return of a people who still owe the lamb.

I will not lie to you and say the Chief Rabbinate has restored the korban. I will tell you the requirement never moved. A Jew who came home and pretends the lamb is optional is playing the same game as a church that pretends the lamb already walked in and closed the account. The heifer, the altar, and Pesach are not your apocalypse props. They are our unfinished obedience.

V. The Christian World is calling the Noahides the Antichrist

Zechariah 8:23 is not vague.

“In those days it shall come to pass that ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the garment of a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

Isaiah 2 and Micah 4: the nations stream to Zion. Torah from Jerusalem, not from Rome, not from Mecca, not from a studio in Dallas.

Isaiah 56: the foreigner who joins himself to Hashem, who keeps Shabbat from profaning it, who holds fast the covenant — I will bring them to My holy mountain.

The Rambam: a gentile who takes the seven laws of Noah because Hashem commanded them to the children of Noah through Moses, has a share in the world to come.

That is a Noahide. Not a convert. No new Israel. Not a beast system. A child of Noah who stopped worshiping a man and started taking the God of Israel at His word for the human race.

The Christian End Times

Christians have spent decades on prophecy channels calling that man the Antichrist. End Time Headlines heard “international congress in Jerusalem” and reached for Revelation 13. Letters to the editor heard “Noahide laws” and reached for FEMA camps. That is what happens when your eschatology requires Jews to crown a monster in a Temple so Jesus can arrive. Any gentile who walks toward Zion without kneeling to your king looks like the plot.

Look at the plot the prophets wrote. The Jews return. The nations grab the garment. The nations do not grab a pope. They do not grab a caliph. They grab a Jew and say God is with you. That sentence contains no Antichrist. It has a robe.

Thousands of them exist now. Former pastors. Former missionaries. Men who took the cross off the wall because they read Deuteronomy 13 and could not unread it. They are not recruiting you. Rabbi Oury Cherki said it in plain language: we are not engaged in persuasion. We open a gate for those already seeking it. The fear in your comment threads is not exegesis. It is the sound of a sequel losing its extras.

VI. What I Need From You, Glen

Glen, I hear you every day asking people not to believe what you are saying and to prove you wrong by asking questions. Why do 4.5 billion people who claim they believe the Bible try to replace the people, the Jews, and the Bible?

Hosea 3: The real meaning is Israel. We are still waiting for our King and High Priest. You have had a king and high priest for over 2000 years.

Ezekiel 38 is written about a time when Israel returns as Paras and the Name, not as a prequel to Revelation.

Daniel 11:14 is speaking of Christianity the way the Rambam read it, uncensored.

What is the Time Period Of Zechariah- Nuclear Weapons

Zechariah 9:9 from Damascus, not from Palm Sunday. The Donkey is Islam. Zechariah is speaking of our day. Today, 5787.

Read Zechariah 8:23 as a compliment to the nations, not as a warrant.

Read Zechariah 14 as unpaid.

And if you still need a Hebrew guest, put on the air a Jew who came home the way the prophets said, and a Noahide who grabbed the garment the way Zechariah said. That is the show the book already outlined. Everything else is Rome with a tallit.

I have written the long form in Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, and The Star of Jacob Prophecy. The family tree, the Cohen match, the Two Sides series, and the Zechariah 14 piece are at beithashoavah.org. I am not asking the Christian world to convert. I am asking it to stop calling the return Antichrist and the garment a mark.

The Jews came home. The heifer is being watched because the Torah still speaks. The altar is being measured because exile is not repeal. The lamb is still owed. Ten men from the nations are already reaching for the sleeve.

That is not the end of your religion’s movie. That is the middle of ours.

The Timeline In Front of You. The Bible and The Jew

Course	Text	What the teachers say has already happened
Long exile without a king or Temple	Hosea 3:4–5	From Rome to the twentieth century
Promise of return from the ends of the earth	Deut. 30; Jer. 30:3; Isa. 11:11	The second gathering began
Jacob’s trouble without parallel	Jer. 30:7	The Shoah — and from it, salvation
Gentile door opened; imperfect remnant comes home	Ezra 1–3	Balfour to 1948; secular pioneers first
Land answers; Jerusalem held; an army stands	Ezek. 36; Zech. 8, 12	Agriculture, 1967, the IDF
Star from Jacob, seventy days	Num. 24:17; Zohar III 212b	25 Elul 5784 comet; Nasrallah; Damascus
National mourning that makes one people	Zech. 12:10–14	Simchat Torah 5784 / October 7
War of the roofs against the clouds	Ezek. 38–39; Zech. 14; Megillah 31a	Sukkot’s war, Persia-named, unfolding now

Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah — House of the Water Pouring
Amarillo, Texas
beithashoavah.org

A Book Like No Other

Rabbi David Fohrman will not let Genesis put you to sleep. You’ll quickly realize we are not studying the same book as before.

In A Book Like No Other, Eden Part 1, he asks the questions a child would ask if the story had never been sung as a lullaby. Why is there a Tree of Life and a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Those two ideas have nothing obvious to do with trees, and nothing obvious to do with each other. What is each tree for?

The Tree of Life looks extra. If they may eat of every tree but one, they already have life. Why plant a second tree in the middle of the garden and then treat it, later, like an emergency? And why would God withhold the knowledge of good and evil? If Adam and Chavah already had to know that “do not eat” meant something, they already possessed what the tree was supposed to give them.[1]

Those are not advanced questions. They are the elephants in the first garden. If you cannot answer them, you do not understand the story you think you inherited.

Here is the harder sentence, for Jews and for everyone who claims “the Bible.”

We Are Not Studying The Same Book.

We use some of the same words. Night and day are still night and day. The problem does not start with the snake. It starts with the first letter of Genesis.

Kind of mark	Where the sofer writes it	What the page actually does	What a translation hides
Large letter (ot rabbati)	בּ of Bereshit (Gen 1:1)	Creation opens with an oversized bet—a house, not a private thought.	Looks like an ordinary “In the beginning.”
Large letters that spell a second word	ע of Shema and ד of Echad (Deut 6:4)	The two large letters form ed—“witness.” Israel and Hashem testify to each other.	Two ordinary letters in “Hear” and “One.”
Large letter as a midpoint	ו of gachon (Lev 11:42)	Tradition treats this vav as the middle letter of the Torah.	No sign that the scroll is counting itself.
Large yud	יִגְדַּל (Num 14:17)	Moshe asks that Hashem’s strength “be great.” The yud = 10, the ten tests / ten spies hanging in the air.	“Let the power be great” with no extra ink.
Large heh	הַ in Ha l’Hashem (Deut 32:6)	“Is this how you repay Hashem?” The interrogative heh is blown up, so the rebuke cannot be skipped.	A small grammar word.
Small letter (ot ze’ira)	א of Vayikra (Lev 1:1)	Hashem “calls” Moshe, and Moshe’s humility is written into the first letter of the book.	“And He called” in full size.
Small heh	בְּהִבָּרְאָם (Gen 2:4)	“When they were created”—a diminished heh. The sages read worlds made and unmade, or Abraham hidden in the letters.	“When they were created,” nothing missing.
Small kaf	וְלִבְכֹּתָהּ (Gen 23:2)	Abraham weeps for Sarah with a reduced kaf—grief held in, or a tear the page will not fully show.	“To weep for her.”
Broken letter	ו of shalom in brit shalom (Num 25:12)	Pinchas is given a covenant of peace, and the vav is split. Peace after zeal is written as a fractured letter.	“Peace” looks whole.
Inverted nuns	Before and after Num 10:35–36	Two verses about the Ark traveling are fenced off like their own little book. The Talmud says they are not in their place.	Two ordinary verses in the march narrative.
Dotted letters (nekudot)	Ten places in the Torah—e.g., dots over vayishakeihu (Gen 33:4); over et (Gen 37:12); over Aharon in the Levitical census (Num 3:39); over lanu ulevaneinu (Deut 29:28)	The dots are not vowels. They are a second text sitting on top of the first: sincerity in doubt, a word that may not fully belong, a secret that is “for us and our children.”	Clean letters. No dots.
Written one way, read another (ketiv / qere)	Throughout—e.g., a word written without a letter the reader must still pronounce, or na’arah written defective	The ear and the eye are given two slightly different Torahs on purpose.	One flattened English word.
No vowels, no punctuation—on purpose	The entire scroll	חלב can be fat or milk. ירא can be fear; he will see; he will be seen. The sofer is forbidden to add the vowels that would close the question.	Every translation has already been chosen for you.

The Highlights For The Exam Were Left For Every Student In The Family

The sofer is not allowed to “fix” any of this. If he writes a normal vav in shalom, or a regular-sized aleph in Vayikra, or forgets the dots over Esav’s kiss, the scroll is not kosher. That is the lecture leaking through the notes.

A Christian or secular “Bible” can print Genesis to Deuteronomy and never show a single one of these marks. The Jew who says “Torah” is holding a page that already argues with itself—large, small, broken, dotted, inverted, and still unfinished until a living mouth reads it.

The First Letter Already Refuses a Pew Bible

The Torah does not open with a sentence. It opens with a letter the size of a house.

A sofer writes the bet of Bereshit larger than every letter around it. An English Bible cannot show you this. “In the beginning” wears the same font as “God created.” In the scroll, creation begins with a letter closed on three sides and open only to the left. The midrash hears a world built like a bet: a house that does not open backward into what was before. The Aleph wanted to start the Torah. It was told to wait for Anochi at Sinai.[2]

Already, the first ink is an argument. Already, the page is not a standalone book.

If you cannot see the large bet, you are not reading the Torah. You are reading a translation of notes.

The Torah Is Oral

Rabbi Mordechai Becher said the quiet part first. When other people talk about “the Bible,” and Jews talk about “Torah,” we are not naming the same object.

The Bible, as they mean it, is the printed page: five books of Moshe, then the Prophets and Writings. Letters on parchment. A standalone text. Open it, translate it, preach it, dismiss it. That is the whole claim.

When a Jew says Torah, he means something larger. The written words are the tip of the iceberg. Under them is a living tradition that goes back to Sinai—the reading, the pauses, the definitions, the applications, the way a people actually kept the thing. Without that, you do not have Torah. You have an ancient document you cannot finish reading.

Six Alephs In The First Sentence

Count the first verse with Jewish eyes.

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

Seven words. Six days plus Shabbat. Twenty-eight letters—the stretch of a lunar month. Inside those seven words sit six alephs. Aleph is also eleph, a thousand. Da’at Zekenim hears what the Talmud already said: this world, as we know it, has run for six thousand years.[3] Six alephs in the first sentence. The seventh word, hashamayim, is the word without an aleph. Its root can be heard as desolation. Six thousand, then a seventh that is not like the six.

You have not left verse one. You have already been handed a calendar. None of that appears in “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Same words? No. Night and day.

You Cannot Even Sound The Page

Hebrew in the scroll has almost no vowels. The sofer is forbidden to add them. חלב is fat or milk. ירא is fear; he will see; he will be seen; he will show. There is no punctuation. “No swimming allowed” and “no swimming allowed” are the same marks until a mouth puts breath in the right place.

When we read Torah in shul, we do not recite it. We sing it. The melody is the Oral Torah. It is the punctuation that the page refused to print.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch said the Written Torah is shorthand for a lecture. NaCl means sodium chloride only if you have heard of chemistry. Hand the same scribble to a stranger, and he thinks you have been drinking the chemicals.[4] That is the Torah vs Bible problem in one picture. One person heard Sinai. The other person is holding the notes.

Fohrman’s Garden Will Not Flatten

Now go where Fohrman will not let you sleep.

Two trees in the middle. One is life. One is the knowing of good and evil. God says to eat of every tree, but not that one. Later, God says the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil—now, lest he take also from the Tree of Life and live forever. Then come the keruvim and the turning sword.

If they were allowed the Tree of Life before the sin, why is it a threat after? Adam’s death? If it was the penalty for the other tree, were they mortal already, or not? Adam and Eve were already mortal; what is a Tree of Life doing in a garden of the living? If they were not, why plant a tree whose only job is to keep them from dying?

And the knowledge tree. Why hide good and evil from the only creature told to rule?

Why Hide Good From Bad From Your Children?

The snake’s first words are not even a clean sentence in Hebrew. Af ki amar Elohim—“Even if God said…” Most translations tidy it into “Did God really say you may not eat from any tree?” That is not what the letters do. The snake begins mid-insinuation. Chavah then answers with words God did not say: “Neither shall you touch it.” The midrash hears the added fence as the crack.[5] The English reader never sees that she added a word, because the English already fenced the whole conversation into Sunday-school dialogue.

Fohrman asks what the two trees have to do with each other. A reader with only the notes says: one is immortality, one is morality. A reader in the lecture hears Devarim 30 at the other end of the same book: “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.”[6] The two trees are still speaking in Moshe’s mouth on the plains of Moav. You cannot see that if Genesis is a children’s origin myth and Deuteronomy is a later law code. That split is how people claim they are studying our book while studying another one.

The Scroll Argues With Itself

Jews, this next part is for us.

We say we study Torah. Too often, we study the same flattened object the nations study, only with better footnotes. We treat large letters as calligraphy. Our tradition treats dotted letters as trivia. We treat a broken vav as a sofer’s curiosity.

The Talmud does not.

In Kiddushin 66b, the vav of Pinchas’s shalom is severed so the word can also be read shalem—whole. A blemished Kohen’s service is invalid because a letter in Bamidbar is written wounded.[7] In Shabbat 115b–116a, the Holy One sets signs above and below “When the Ark traveled,” because those two verses are either not in their place or are a book inside the book.

Does Your Bible Contain These Notes

[8] In Menachot 29b, Moshe watches Hashem tying crowns on letters he cannot yet read, and is told: a man named Akiva will hang mountains of law on every thorn.[9] In Kiddushin 30a, the early sages are called soferim because they counted the letters. The vav of gachon is named as a midpoint.[10] In Nedarim 37b, words read but not written, and written but not read, are classified as halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai.[11] Avot de-Rabbi Natan lists ten dotted places in the Torah. Ezra leaves the dots for Eliyahu: if the prophet says I wrote them well, I will take the dots off.[12]

“And he kissed him” is not vayishakeihu with a dot on every letter, so Esav’s mouth is in dispute with itself.[13] “A sign on your arm and frontlets between your eyes” does not describe tefillin—until a people who heard the lecture pull two-thousand-year-old boxes out of Qumran and show you they already knew.[14]

If that is Torah, then a vowel-pointed, regular-sized, punctuated English Bible is not Torah. It is a useful crib sheet. It is not the book.

We Do Not Understand Our Book Either

How can anyone understand?

Not by claiming the words are the same. “In the beginning God created” is not Bereshit bara Elohim with a large bet and six alephs counting six thousand years. “Do not work” is not a physics definition. “Afflict your souls” does not say fast. “Covenant of peace” is not brit shalom with a vav; you must break on purpose.

Night and Day.

The nations hold a Bible: a closed text, vowels supplied, letters normalized, trees moralized, Sinai turned into a sermon. We, the nation of Israel, are commanded to hold a Torah: an open house built like a bet, a first sentence that is already a calendar, a garden whose two trees are still arguing in Devarim, a scroll that sings, a page that dots, breaks, inverts, and enlarges itself so that no one can pretend the lecture is over.

Israel uses some of the same words. We are not studying the same book.

The first honesty is to say so. The second is to go back to the large bet and stay there until the house opens. The third is to admit that even we—teachers, chazanim, people with twenty-five years in the room—are still standing where Moshe stood in Menachot: watching crowns being tied on letters we have not yet earned the right to expound.

That is not despair. That is the beginning of reading. A book like no other does not let you finish it on the first pass. It only lets you discover that you were never in the room you thought you were in. Then, if you are still willing, it hands you the notes and points you toward the voice that wrote them.

The Last book of the Christian Bible is Malachi, and its warning is: “Remember Moses, my servant.”

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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Courage to go against the whole world, that is what my grandfather Abraham taught us some 4000 years ago. Strength to keep Hashem’s statutes and commandments and His Torah. Genesis 26

The Easy Way Brings Atrophy and No Growth

Friction is the key to this world. You were tricked into coming — and you will need Heaven’s strength to stay faithful.

Keeping the Torah will take courage and strength. That sentence is not a slogan. It is the plain reading of Moshe Rabbeinu’s last charge to Israel and to Yehoshua, and it is the plain reading of life. The world was not built as a smooth path. Friction is the key to this world.

The soul is drawn down into concealment, and the same concealment that hides Hashem is the workshop in which a human being becomes strong. The strength does not originate in personality, willpower, or public approval. The strength comes from Hashem.

Be Strong and Courageous: The Torah’s Own Charge

At the threshold of the Land, Moshe does not tell Israel that observance will feel easy. He says: “Chizku ve’imtzu — be strong and courageous; do not fear and do not be terrified of them, for Hashem your God is the One who goes with you. He will not fail you, and He will not forsake you.”

The same words are repeated to Yehoshua by Moshe and then by Hashem Himself: “Be strong and very courageous to observe, to do, according to all the Torah that Moshe My servant commanded you.” Strength here is not only battlefield nerve. Rashi, following the Sifrei, reads the doubled language as two fronts: strength in Torah and courage against the yetzer and against those who mock the mitzvah.

Physical bravery without moral clarity is incomplete. Moral clarity without the strength to act is incomplete. Both are required, and both are gifts that Hashem places in the one who stands.

The same grammar appears when Israel goes to war. The Kohen addresses the people with four expressions — do not be faint-hearted, do not fear, do not panic, do not be broken before them — because the enemy’s first weapon is noise: shields clashing, horses screaming, trumpets, shouts.

Rashi, citing the Sifrei, maps each phrase onto one of those tactics. The answer is not a louder shout. The answer is: “Hashem, your God, is the One who goes with you to fight for you.” Courage is not the absence of noise. Courage is knowing who stands in the camp.

Bold as a Leopard: Public Faith Without Shame

King David wrote, “I will speak of Your testimonies before kings, and I will not be ashamed.” The Tur opens the entire code of daily Jewish life with that posture. Before a Jew puts on clothes, before he washes his hands, he is told to be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of his Father in Heaven. The source is the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot.

Boldness here is not aggression. It is the courage to be different: to keep Shabbat when the marketplace does not, to guard speech when mockery is cheap, to wrap tefillin and make a berachah when no one is watching and when everyone is watching. The foundation of a life of Torah is not private sentiment. It is public fidelity without embarrassment.

You Were Tricked into Coming to This World

Why does keeping Torah require that kind of nerve? Because this world is not the soul’s native climate. The Sages taught that a person must carry two notes: “I am dust and ashes,” and “For my sake the world was created.” Both are true. The descent is real.

Before birth, the Talmud says, the soul is made to take an oath: be a tzaddik and do not be a rasha — and even if the whole world tells you that you are righteous, be in your own eyes a rasha, meaning never stop the work. The soul does not volunteer for concealment. Chassidic teaching, drawing on the Zohar and Tanya, describes the descent as a kind of holy trick. Above, the soul basks in revealed Godliness.

It does not want the body, the hunger, the confusion, the friction. Hashem sends it down anyway, because only in a world of concealment can a created being choose. Only here can a spark be lifted by a human hand. You were tricked into coming to this world — not as a cruelty, but as a mission.

And you are tricked into leaving it: death comes when the work of this body is complete, not when the ego is finished shopping. The soul that screamed against descent will one day scream against departure, because by then it will have learned to love the work.

Tanya states the metaphysics without romance: the Jewish soul is “an actual portion of God above.” That is why the strength is available. Immutable permanence is a Divine quality — “I, Hashem, have not changed” — and a spark of that unchanging firmness was placed in mortal flesh. The courage to keep Torah is not self-invention. It is the soul remembering what it already is.

Friction Is the Key to This World

Kabbalah hears the word olam, “world,” from helem, concealment. What the eye sees — trees, oceans, markets, governments — is a veneer. Beneath the veneer is Godliness. The purpose of creation, the Midrash and Tanya insist, is not that heaven remain heaven. It is that this lowest world becomes a dwelling place for Hashem. Sparks fell. Every object, every hour, every difficult person holds a spark waiting to be elevated by a berachah, a mitzvah, a word of Torah, an act of chessed.

That elevation produces heat. Friction is not evidence that you chose the wrong path. Friction is evidence that you are moving something heavy. A soul that stays in the harbor of ease generates no traction. The Chassidic masters describe the soul as sandpaper, a plow, and a polishing cloth.

The resistance that wears a person down is the same resistance that makes the world shine. If spiritual life feels effortless, it may be because it is producing nothing of substance. If marriage, work, tefillah, and Torah study generate strain, that strain may be the price of traction. Statics has no friction. Dynamics always do.

This is why obedience does not cancel struggle. The yetzer does not retire when a person takes on more mitzvot. Often, it intensifies as more light enters the room. The Sages already knew this: a person does not stand on words of Torah unless he has stumbled over them. Standing is a dance, not a statue. The people at Sinai moved backward twelve miles at each commandment and were pushed forward again by angels. To stand before Hashem is to know the tremor and remain.

Three Pillars, Deep Roots, and Deeds Greater Than Talk

Shimon HaTzaddik taught that the world stands on three things: Torah, avodah, and gemilut chasadim. Ideas without deeds cannot hold. R. Elazar ben Azariah compared a person whose wisdom exceeds his deeds to a tree with many branches and shallow roots: any wind turns it over.

Judaism is not a theory of courage. It is the art of doing — wrapping, blessing, giving, stopping work before sunset, returning a lost object, honoring parents, guarding the tongue — whether feeling is absent or present.

Moshe comforts a generation that has just heard the curses of Ki Tavo: “Atem nitzavim hayom — you are standing today.” Rashi, citing the Tanchuma, hears consolation: you angered Hashem in the desert, you made a calf, you refused the Land — and nevertheless you are still standing. Nitzavim is not a casual pose. It is a pillar.

It is a nation set firmly in place, a leader showing humanity a way. The same parashah then insists that the Torah is not hidden in heaven or across the sea. “It is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.” Near does not mean easy. Near means possible. The Rambam rules that every person can be a tzaddik like Moshe in the sense that matters: each can choose, and each is helped along the path he chooses.

Where the Strength Comes From

If the work is this hard, where does the power come from? Not from optimism as a mood. From Hashem as a Presence.

“Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I strengthen you, and I help you.” “Those who hope in Hashem will renew their strength.” The priest’s speech before battle ends in the same place: Hashem walks with you. Yehoshua is told the same thing three times in one chapter because leadership, inheritance of the Land, and daily Torah all require a strength that is borrowed from the One who does not change.

Chassidut adds a practical mercy. Even when a Heavenly voice seems to close a door, teshuvah remains open to the one who overpowers his impulse and returns. The Alter Rebbe writes that if a person strives with great effort, his repentance is accepted. Strength is not the same as never falling. Strength is getting up with help that was waiting before the fall.

Moshe also binds the living to the dead and the unborn. The covenant is made with those who stand here today and with those who are not here today. Immortality, as later teachers read that verse, is not an escape from this world. It is writing the next chapter so that the dead live in our deeds and we live in our children. That too takes courage: to keep a covenant you did not invent, in a generation that did not ask for it, with a strength that is not your own.

What This Asks of Us

Keep the Torah anyway. Hold fast to it when the world is loud. Do it when the soul remembers that it was tricked into a body. Keep it when friction burns. The concealment is the point. The sparks are the work. The pillar is the stance.

Be bold as a leopard without becoming cruel. Be strong as a lion without confusing force with holiness. Speak of Hashem’s statutes before kings and do not be ashamed. When the shields clash and the horses scream, remember the four phrases of the Kohen and the one fact underneath them: Hashem, your God, walks with you.

You were sent here. You will be taken from here. Between those two tricks lies a short, severe, luminous assignment: reveal the Godliness that the word olam hides, lift what fell, stand today, and draw the strength from the only Place it has ever come from.

Chazak ve’ematz. Be strong and courageous. Hashem will not fail you, and He will not forsake you.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Nitzavim–Vayelech: Courage, Return, and the Door Noach Opened
• “You Shall Not Murder” – The Hair That Binds Isaac, Esau, and Samson
• Being Bold
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• Parashat Shemot

Nitzavim–Vayelech: Courage, Return, and the Door Noach Opened

Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein is the spine of both parshiyot. For Rosh Hashanah week 5786.

Nitzavim: The stance that is already strong

The last Shabbat of the year does not open with a soft word. It opens with a stance. Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei Hashem Elokeichem: You are standing today, all of you, before Hashem your God. Chief Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein hears the verb before he hears the date. The verse uses nitzavim, which implies standing with strength.

It is not omdim, mere presence. It is planted weight. According to Rashi, this is God’s promise that we will never be destroyed. We will endure throughout history; no matter the difficulties, challenges, and calamities we face, we will still be standing strong in the end. And we are still standing strong.

Rashi’s midrash is the first comfort after the curses of Ki Tavo. Their faces paled. Moshe answers with a fact, not a softer list: you are still here. Egypt did not finish you. The calf did not finish you. The desert did not finish you. Nitzavim is a consolation that has the shape of courage.

Goldstein wrote that sentence in the year after the October 7 massacre, when Jewish communities from Johannesburg to Jerusalem had to decide whether standing was still possible. His answer was the parsha’s answer. We are still standing strong.

Vayelech: The Second Parsha is a Marching Order

In 5786, the two portions are read as one. Standing is not the last word. The next word is motion. Moshe tells Israel and then tells Yehoshua: Chazak ve-ematz. Be strong and courageous. Hashem, your God, goes with you. He will not fail you nor forsake you. That is the second parsha’s charge to every man and every woman who must walk into a battle that is not only of armies.

Goldstein’s teaching on fear belongs here. On Vayishlach, he reads the verse without anesthesia: Yaakov was very afraid, and it distressed him. The danger was real. The fear was real. Our Sages teach that courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. Yaakov splits the camp, prepares a gift, and prays. Strategy is not unbelief. Prayer is the training ground for trust. Fear and laziness come from the body. Courage comes from the neshama.

Pirkei Avot gives the definition that has to be memorized before any later war of the spirit: Who is mighty? He who conquers his inclination. Yehudah ben Teima adds the emblems: Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven. The Shulchan Aruch opens the code of ordinary mornings with that lion. Rise like a lion to serve the Creator.

When Israel went out to battle, the kohen spoke four negations of fear. Israel, do not be faint. Men of battle do not fear. Do not panic. Do not be broken before them. Hashem, your God, goes with you to fight for you. Rashi says the four phrases answer four ancient tactics of intimidation: clashing shields, screaming horses, trumpets, and shouts.

Noise is the first weapon. Inner strength is the answer. Goldstein carried Yehoshua 1:6 into the years after October 7: Be strong and courageous. You do not become safe through weakness. You find peace and safety through strength. Weakness is not compassion. Silence before a lie is not piety. Vayelech is the order to move while still standing.

Hayom-Today Spent Forty Years in the Furnace

Nitzavim does not pretend the standing was cheap. Four verses earlier, Moshe said the quiet sentence: Hashem had not given you a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear until this day. Hayom is the name of a strength that had to be grown in heat.

Forty years of manna. Graves in the sand. A generation that could not enter. A new generation that watched and learned. Courage here is not a mood. It is what a person looks like when they have come through a furnace and can finally say the first line of the Ten Words from the inside.

Isaiah speaks to a later furnace with the same grammar of enough. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem. Her term of service is over. Her guilt is paid off. She has received from the hand of Hashem double for all her sins. Double. Not a mild sadness.

A ledger the prophet is willing to read aloud. The people who stand hayom in any century are a people who have already paid. The land and the city do not call them tourists. They call them children whose bill, Isaiah says, has been marked paid, and who are therefore free to come home.

Return in Any Way. Open The Heart Today

The same parsha that plants the monument also writes the return. When all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, you shall return to your heart, and you shall return to Hashem your God. Hashem will gather you from among all the people.

He will bring you into the land. He will circumcise your heart. Then Moshe lowers the ladder to the ground. This commandment is not too wondrous and not far off. It is not in heaven. It is not across the sea. The thing is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.

Jerusalem and the land are calling. Return in any way. Buy the ticket if you can. Learn one verse if you cannot. Light the candles a grandmother hid. Say the Shema with the word “hayom” inside it. Open the heart. That last act is not a consolation prize. It is the first act the Torah names.

You shall return to your heart. Today. A man or a woman in Amarillo, Johannesburg, or a prison classroom can do that before sundown. Goldstein’s nitzavim is the public name of that inner motion. We are still standing. Therefore, we can still turn.

HaMakom: The Place Where You Are Seen

There is a special time in the design of creation that lets a person occupy a day larger than a clock. The Torah calls one coordinate haMakom, the Place Hashem will choose. Hashem Himself is called HaMakom, the Place of the world, whom the world does not contain.

On the day the soul stands before Him — Rosh Hashanah as kingship and as universal judgment — a person is seen as he is. Not the headline of his failures. The ninety-nine percent that was sent into a world of choice. The hidden things belong to Hashem. The revealed things are for us and our children to do.

Moshe already said the covenant includes those who are not standing here today. Midrash Tanchuma reads the missing bodies as future souls. The Talmud records that Moshe sat in Rabbi Akiva’s later classroom. The Torah’s own hayom is an address, not only a date. To learn, to accept the yoke, to open the heart, is to travel — not by gadget but by the design of a day that was never locked. How could this be reality? Only if the blueprint of creation includes a Place where time is thinner, and a people commanded to stand in it.

Choose Today. Good from Bad. The Choice is in our Hands

Vayelech’s courage has content. Nitzavim names it. See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your seed may live. The choice is in our hands now. Not in heaven.

Not after a committee meets. Hayom. Goldstein heard the same chapter as a public ethic: choose life in hospitals, in the protection of the innocent, in the way a nation treats the stranger. The verse is not only private mussar. It is how a landlord-species runs a world that God has promised not to flood again.

Pirkei Avot will not let the choice stay abstract. It is not upon you to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it. Hillel: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? The now is hayom. The way this morning is rising like a lion.

The battle a man or a woman faces is often not a border. It is the inclination that wants the curse while blessing the self in the heart, the poisonous root of the parsha. Courage is saying no to that speech. Hope in Hashem. Be strong, and let your heart take courage.

God Closed the Ark. Noach Opened the Door to Tikkun

The courage of Vayelech predates Yehoshua. It is the courage of the first man to open a door onto a repaired world. Fohrman, reading Noach against Genesis 1, shows that the Flood is not only a punishment of persons. The earth itself was corrupt. The earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth, and behold, it was ruined.

Demolition of a house. Then recreation in the order of the days: wind over water, upper waters parted from lower, dry land, plants, birds, animals, and humans. All except the heavenly lights, which were never destroyed. God closed the door of the ark on His world. Noach opened the door to ours.

Meat is permitted. Man becomes landlord. God swears by the rainbow that He will not unmake this world again. The seventh day was already the first sign-covenant with Adam. Shabbat is an everlasting sign that the Creator finished a world and will not treat time as disposable. The new world is a world of tikkun.

Repair is the only option left on the table. That your days and the days of your children may be multiplied upon the land like the days of heaven upon the earth. Heaven on earth is not a slogan for people who wait for God to reopen the sky. It is the assignment given to those who hold the keys.

Hashem will not flood the world. We can still ruin the earth with violence. That is why standing strong is not nostalgia. It is the landlord’s duty. Bring heaven down. Choose good over bad. Open the heart. Open the door.

The Land is Calling. The Monument Is Still On Its Feet

For Zion’s sake I will not be still, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Comfort, comfort, My people. The double payment has been named. The gathering of chapter 30 is not a metaphor that expires in the classroom. Jews return in planes and in teshuvah and in the small bravery of a public life that refuses to hide. Goldstein’s sentence after the massacre was not complicated. We are still standing strong. Rashi promised it. Vayelech orders the next step. Chazak ve-ematz. Go in.

A Charge

Be strong and courageous. Not because fear is a sin. Yaakov was afraid. Because fear is not allowed to drive. Rise like a lion. Conquer the inclination. Do not be broken by the noise of shields. Stand as nitzavim: a monument people, witnesses that a covenant cut in Avraham’s flesh and restated on the plains of Moav still has living stones.

Forty years made hayom possible. Double payment has been recorded. The land calls. The heart can open today. God closed the ark. Noach had to open the door. The world is repaired. Like the days of heaven upon the earth. That sentence is a task. It takes strength from within. It takes the neshama Goldstein says is already light, already strong, already purposeful, if we will let it lead the body into the day.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah · Amarillo · Nitzavim–Vayelech 5786

• Milestone 7: Esther Delivered from Death on the Third Day
• A Dialogue on the Noahide Laws: Understanding the Seven Laws of Noah in Judaism
• The Eternal Struggle of Self: Reincarnation, the Expanding “I,” and the Soul’s Never-Ending Journey
• “Take Words: Reclaiming Loving Guidance Before It’s Too Late” Find A Friend
• The Torah’s Hidden Clock

The Tanakh and Chazal do not give us a Hollywood calendar. They give us structure.

Zechariah 13:8 is the cut:

“And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, says Hashem, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein.”

Two parts. One remains. That is not a slogan. It is the prophet’s measure of how severe the sifting will be. Zechariah 14 then gathers the nations against Jerusalem and describes the plague on those who came to fight her:

“Their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their sockets, and their tongue shall consume away in their mouth.” (Zechariah 14:12)

For two thousand years that verse sounded like exaggeration. After Hiroshima it sounded like a laboratory report. Flesh, eyes, and tongue going while a man is still standing is the language people used when they first saw what a nuclear flash does to a body.

Singer has warned, without flinching, that if a nuclear device ever gets through, “that’s it.” The verse does not require us to pretend we have already seen that plague. It requires us to admit that the prophet described a death the ancient world could not invent.

The duration traditions sit next to that verse. One line from the Vilna Gaon’s school says the war of Gog and Magog lasts nine seconds. Another transmission, cited in the name of the Gaon by later poskim, says twelve minutes. Rabbi Akiva in Mishnah Eduyot 2:10 said the judgment of Gog lasts twelve months.

These are not contradictions if you listen. Seconds or minutes is the strike. Twelve months is the accounting. In an age of buttons and missiles, a war that once sounded impossible because men fought with horses now sounds like the only kind of war that matches the text.

Gog and Magog Three Confrontations

Rabbi Mendel Kessin has taught for decades that Hashem split Gog and Magog across three confrontations so the world would not be erased in one blow: the first two world wars absorbed much of the decree; the last stage is a confrontation over Israel rather than a slaughter of the whole earth — unless we force the harder script. The UN as the seventy nations, Persia as the named enemy, and the rise of Israel among the nations are, in his reading, the last scene of the beriah.

Efraim Palvanov has walked the same three prophets — Ezekiel, Zechariah, and the Zohar’s reading of Balaam — and tied them to Sukkot, to the seventy nations, and to the Vilna Gaon’s short-war tradition. The war that begins in Tishrei is not a rumor. It is the calendar the sages already marked.

Rabbi Akiva Tatz does not date the hour. He dates the epoch. We are in year 5786 of a 6,000-year clock. Labor pains are not the birth. They are how you know the birth is no longer theoretical.

Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson’s codes are not a substitute for peshat. They are a second witness in the letters: ketz hayamim, Gog, Persia, the enemy of Israel, appearing in tables he has published alongside statistical work with Professor Haralick and the late Professor Rips. Codes do not start a war. They testify that the Author of the war already wrote His Name in the scroll.

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What has already come true — and what has not

Honesty is a mitzvah here.

These things the prophets required, and history has already delivered:

• The Jewish people returned to the Land after two millennia.
• Jerusalem is in Jewish hands.
• The city is a burdensome stone to the nations (Zechariah 12:3). Every coalition that tries to lift it cuts itself.
• Persia is named in Ezekiel 38:5. Modern Iran is not a stretch. It is the name on the page.
• Nations gather against that city, not against a metaphor.
• The purpose clause in Ezekiel 38–39 has begun: the world is being forced to decide whether the God of Israel is real.
• Mountains have now melted on camera. The vocabulary of Psalm 97 is no longer only liturgical.

These things have not yet been completed, and it is a lie to say they have:

• The full gathering of all nations against Jerusalem in the sense of Zechariah 14.
• The plague of 14:12 in its full measure.
• The two-thirds/one-third cut of 13:8 as a finished global accounting.
• The mountain of the House of Hashem established so that all nations stream to it to learn Torah.
• Mashiach revealed, the Temple standing, and Hashem’s knowledge covering the earth.

Kessin, Singer, Palvanov, Tatz, and the Gaon’s school all refuse the cheap version of “every prophecy is already done.” The cheap version makes teshuva optional. The real version makes teshuva urgent.

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How much more Is The Strength of Hashem

The glacier is ice. It has no covenant. It has no Name written on it. And still, when it fell, the USGS called it an earthquake, China and Nepal closed their border, bodies washed into India, and the whole earth looked up.

Hashem let the world see a mountain melt like wax so that no one can say, when He judges, “We did not know what melting looks like.”

If that is what He does with a glacier that has no soul, what will He do when He judges those who come against Zion — the mountain He chose, the people He swore to, the city He called a cup of trembling?

Zechariah 13:8 says two parts are cut off and a third remains. That third is not the spectator section. It is the remnant that calls on His Name. Zechariah 13:9 finishes the thought: “They shall call on My Name, and I will answer them; I will say, It is My people; and they shall say, Hashem is my God.”

The glacier was a warning shot from the roof of the world. The next melting will not be ice. It will be pride, empires, and the tongues that rehearsed war against Jerusalem.

The work now is not to date the nine seconds. The work is to be found in the third that remains — kosher, study, fidelity, love of neighbor, receipts instead of slogans — while the mountain of Hashem is being lifted above every other mountain the nations still trust.

Hashem has already shown the cameras what wax looks like.

How much more when He judges the universe.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah

Ken Ham’s Question, Asked of the Pastors

Ken Ham’s Question, Asked of the Pastors: I Ask Them Another Question

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Elul 5786 / August 2026

Ken Ham looks into a camera in Kentucky and asks a question he thinks will save his church. Eric Metaxas has put Hugh Ross on a stage. Ross will not give him six ordinary days. He will not give him a flood that covers the globe. He will allow death and disease in the rock for ages before Adam and still call the work very good. Ham’s voice rises.

What kind of a God creates over millions of years and death and disease and calls that all very good?

Then the sentence that is supposed to close the case.

When you have Christian leaders saying, “Oh, you can just not believe the Bible. You can change what the Bible says”—no wonder they walk away from the church.

I heard that sentence this week the way I hear most Christian sentences in this town: through a radio on the way to work, and then through a pastor’s mouth on a telephone. Pastor Glenn Stoker of Bible Believers Baptist Church on Rockwell Road holds that the King James Version is the Bible and that anything else is not translated correctly.

I asked how a translation could be perfect when no Hebrew scholar sat at that table in 1611, and none sat at Nicaea. He said I was ignorant. Had I not read the book about the compilers?

Ham is not wrong that people walk away when they watch the text being moved. He is wrong about who started moving it. The question is not whether Metaxas and Ross can be trusted. The question is why a Jew in Amarillo—or any reader who can still see the letters—should trust any of them.

Nation, Not Religion, and a Perfect English Book

Pastor Stoker called offering support to the Jewish community after hard years. Then he told me he supported the nation, not the religion. From the pew, that sounds like kindness: flags, not a conversion class. From the Jew, it is the same agenda I have met for twenty-five years.

Israel is not a church in one folder and a state in another. Israel is a people under a covenant—land, law, Name, and seed. If you bless the map and bury the Torah, you have not blessed Jacob. You have kept the stage for the last act.

His book tells him: to the Jew first. His book tells him he will not see the one he waits for until we say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. So the Jew is not a neighbor. The Jew is an unfinished verse. Friendship lasts as long as the verse is still open.

A man who will not let a Jewish scholar near the English page is not in a position to lecture Hugh Ross about changing Genesis. He has already decided that a committee in England is more final than Moses. That is the same motion Ken Ham condemns, only older and dressed in leather.

Ham’s Dilemma Is Not Ours

What kind of God creates with death in the world and calls it very good? That is a Christian problem. It exists because Paul taught that death entered through one man’s sin, and later teachers fused that doctrine to Bereshit until a falling leaf became a crisis of faith. The Torah never said that. The human being is dust and returns to dust. Tov meod means the created order is fit for its purpose. It does not mean a museum without decay.

Judaism can read the six days as six days. The sages argued about the length of those days. I myself laid out for Pastor Stoker a reading I have carried for years: Psalm 90, a day as a thousand years; light and choice; waters and the Flood; seed and Avraham; lights and the prophets; scattering; the beast and the image; then rest. He answered in three words: typology, not doctrine. Then he stopped writing.

I do not bind a Christian to a six-thousand-year clock. What I will not surrender is this: the week is not a children’s story, and Israel remains Israel when the seventh day is spoken of. If the rest belongs to the Church instead of to Zion, then the first six days were only a preface to our disappearance. I cannot read Bereshit that way. I cannot read Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Zechariah 14, or Ezekiel 40–48 that way.

The Rule He Offered, Applied to His Own Book

Grant Ham the rule. Leaders who change what the text says cannot be trusted. Apply it to the Church that wrote the rule.

For two thousand years the Christian Bible has not merely interpreted the Jewish Scriptures. It has rewritten them—pronouns, tenses, articles, and nouns—until a book about Israel reads like a biography of a man from Nazareth. Rabbi Tovia Singer spent two volumes naming the places. I have asked pastors in this city to stand still at those places. They do what Yehuda Yisrael says they do. They filibuster. The scholars move the goalposts. They answer a question that was not asked. They offer confidence instead of a verse.

Isaiah 7:14 does not say “a virgin shall conceive.” It says hinneh ha-almah harah—the young woman is pregnant. The word for virgin is betulah. Isaiah knew that word. He used it five times. Matthew dropped the article, changed the tense, and switched “she will call his name Immanuel” to “they shall call,” because no one ever called the child Immanuel. Then English Bibles printed Matthew’s sentence back into Isaiah so the two books would appear to agree. Pastor Stoker’s perfect translation carries that sentence. A Jew who opens Isaiah in Isaiah’s language does not.

Change Words

Psalm 22 does not say “they pierced my hands and my feet.” It says ka’ari yadai veraglai—like a lion at my hands and my feet. The same word is “like a lion” in Isaiah 38. In this one verse it became a nail. The lion already walks through the psalm. No apostle quotes that clause as a crucifixion text. The English does the work later.

Psalm 110 does not say God spoke to God. It says Ne’um YHWH l’adoni—Hashem spoke to my master. Adoni is a human lord. Print both words as “Lord,” and David seems to worship his descendant as deity. That is the verse put in Jesus’ mouth when the Pharisees are tested. I have watched men use it on me in coffee shops in this town as if the Hebrew were not sitting on the table.

There Is No Aramaic In Psalms

Psalm 2 does not command the nations to “kiss the Son.” Nashqu-bar is not Aramaic smuggled into a Hebrew psalm so that bar can mean the Second Person of a Trinity. The psalm already used ben when it meant son.

Isaiah 9 does not announce that a divine child “shall be born.” Yullad is perfect tense: a child has been born. The long name describes what God is for that child. Flip the verbs into the future, and you have a Christmas card. Leave them in Hebrew, and you have a king in Judah. The New Testament never quotes the verse. The tense will not allow it.

Hosea 11:1 is Israel coming out of Egypt. Matthew makes it a toddler’s travel itinerary.

Defend Your Faith But Do Not Harm Your Neighbor

Pastor Carr wanted to fight me over Luke chapter 4. In the synagogue at Nazareth, the reading is made to say that the anointed one is sent to proclaim liberty and the recovery of sight to the blind. Open the Hebrew of Isaiah 61. The recovering of sight is not there. It is in Isaiah 42, and it is in the Greek Luke is following. A pastor who will not let Isaiah speak in Isaiah’s language will not let Israel speak in Israel’s language either.

Hebrews quotes Psalm 40 and deletes “ears You have opened” so it can insert “a body You have prepared for Me.” David’s line about obedience is removed. Incarnation language is dropped in its place.

Isaiah 53 is the fourth Servant Song. The servant is named in the songs that precede it: Israel. Isolate the chapter, treat every “he” as a single executed man, and the nations’ confession about the people they abused becomes a passion narrative. I have been that “he” in other men’s sermons. So have these people.

Daniel’s mashiach is an anointed priest or prince. Capitalize it, and a timetable appears that the first Christians themselves never quoted.

What Part Of The New Covenant in Jeremiah 31 Did Jesus Initiate?

Jeremiah 31 is the chapter I sent Pastor Stoker in his English and in the Hebrew. The new covenant is with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Torah written on the heart. Same law, internalized. Then the chapter says what Christians skip when they use it: If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever.

The sun still stands. I asked him which clause Jesus initiated. He did not name a clause. He asked where my final authority was. I answered: 613, Hashem, Moses, Deuteronomy 4, Exodus 19 and 20, the God of Israel. He asked again. Then he required me to prove the Torah one hundred percent, with facts no man could have known when it was written.

Ask for the verse. Receive the weather.

The Rooms in This Town

I do not write that every Christian on earth is this way. I write what I can swear to.

Trinity Fellowship Church

Pastor Bo at Trinity Fellowship asked me to leave a men’s Bible study because the questions I asked did not align with the history he was presenting. People come to listen to him, he said, and not to me.

Grace Church- Calvary Chapel

Pastor Bill Glimm of Grace Community called security after I asked whether Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints were his brothers. Leave now, he said.

Hillside

Pastor Polis of Hillside sat with me at Chick-fil-A. I asked why he keeps Shabbat on Sunday. Because Jesus was resurrected on Sunday, he said. I said the Greek of the accounts does not give the Church the sentence it thinks it has. Mia ton sabbaton sits in the counting of the Omer, not in a transfer of the seventh day.

He is college-educated in Greek. He said he would go home and study it. The next time he was with his son, he said, “You are not to say anything in front of my son.” The time after that, he walked past me as if I were furniture.

Vicory Church

Pastor Brown of Victory Church went on the radio and said he could eat bread on Passover. He did not need some little man with a beanie and strings hanging down to tell him that Easter Sunday would not have ham and rolls.

The Pastors That Spoke with Kindness But Refused The Truth

Pastor Lee Simpson told me I had answered questions he carried. Then he said he could not teach that to his people. They were not ready.

The Church of Christ is the clearest doctrine on Israel. “No such thing as Israel”. There is no such thing as Israel, they say. We are the Church. Replacement is not a theory to them. It is the air they breathe.

My niece’s husband, Bishop Ludwig Onoko, said the last act without ornament. We are just waiting, he told me, for the Third Temple to be built so you Jews can accept the antichrist and go through the tribulation and see Jesus returning with wounds in his hands, so you Jews can fall on your faces and say we were wrong and bow down and worship Jesus. Then you will see.

That is not support of Israel. That is a scheduled humiliation. Stoker said the polite part: nation, not religion. The bishop said the last act. Ken Ham says do not change the Bible. All three are reading a book that already changed ours.

Letters the English Cannot Carry

A translation can carry a sentence. It cannot carry a Sefer Torah.

The Torah is written without vowels. The missing vowels are not a defect. They are how a living people keeps a living reading. Large letters, small letters, a broken vav in shalom, inverted nuns that mark a book inside a book, words written one way and read another—these are not later edits. They are the text. Gematria lives in the count of the letters. Midrash lives in the grammar that looks wrong on purpose.

Christianity and Islam inherit content. They do not inherit the object. The King James cannot show a broken letter. A Greek church Bible cannot carry ketiv and qere at once. When Ham says “the Bible,” he means an English paragraph. When I say Torah, I mean a scroll whose irregularities are themselves revelation.

Devarim 28:64 says we would serve wood and stone in exile—gods neither we nor our fathers knew. Wood and stone are not a metaphor I invented this week. They are the objects the nations put at the center of public worship while we paid the tax. The verse does not require every Jew to bow. It requires that we live under systems whose worship is not Sinai. That is historically exact. It is also why a Jew is not required to treat their later books as the same species as the one we never stopped reading in the original consonants.

How Do We Trust You?

Ken Ham is angry that some Christians treat Genesis the way Christianity has always treated Torah.

If a leader may decide that “six days” are not days, that “the whole earth” is not the whole earth, and that “very good” can include ages of death before Adam—on what basis may he not decide that “rose on the third day” is a figure, that “born of a virgin” is a mistranslation of almah, or that “no one comes to the Father except through me” is first-century rhetoric?

You already did that to our book. Almah became virgin. A servant song about Israel became a man on wood. I will raise up a prophet like you became a second god. Adoni became my Lord. Ka’ari became pierced. She will call became they shall call. Ears you opened became a body prepared. Sight to the blind was inserted where Isaiah had not written it.

Then you asked why the people of that book would not kneel.

Ross uses science to loosen Genesis. Matthew and Hebrews use theology to tighten the connections to Isaiah and the Psalms. Stoker uses a seventeenth-century English page to rule both. Ham uses a camera to scold the first two and never notices the third. All four operations treat the Jewish Bible as raw material.

You ask us to trust your leaders on the resurrection, the Trinity, the virgin, the cross, and the end of the Torah. The Christians ask us to trust that when we open “the Bible,” we are hearing Isaiah, not a committee. You ask us to trust sermons from men who cannot read the letters they are quoting, and who call a chazzan ignorant for noticing.

How do we trust you?

You changed the pronouns. Scholars removed the words. Church Fathers rewrote a book that was never yours to edit. You offered the flag and withheld the covenant. You said nation, not religion, and then waited for a Temple so we could be proven wrong on our faces.

If changing what the Bible says makes a leader untrustworthy, then the question is not whether Eric Metaxas can be trusted.

The question is how the Christian world ever expected the Jews to trust it at all.

As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. The Shabbat: As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. As long as the sun and the moon stand, the seed of Israel does not cease from being a nation before Him. I am waiting for the rest. I am not waiting to be proven wrong on my face.

B’H’

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo

The Ten Sayings, the Family Story, and Healing for the Nations

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Elul 5786 / August 2026

I have been sitting with Rabbi Menachem Leibtag’s last shiur on Ki Tavo and with Rabbi David Fohrman’s reading of the Ten Sayings through the house of Yitzchak. The two of them do not cancel each other. Leibtag shows how Devarim is built. Fohrman shows where the Sayings were already living before Sinai ever shook. Together they answer a question I have carried from church tables to a small esnoga in Amarillo: whose family story is this Book?

The Torah does not call them the Ten Commandments. It calls them Aseret HaDevarim — the Ten Sayings, the Ten Words. A commandment can hang on a courthouse wall and be ignored. A saying is speech. Speech is how the world was made. Speech is how a family is torn or put back together.

Until This Day

Leibtag closes his sixth class on a verse that should not be hard and is. “You have seen all that Hashem did before your eyes in Egypt… the great trials that your eyes saw, those great signs and wonders. But Hashem did not give you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day” (Devarim 29:1–3).

Israel had eyes. They had ears. They stood at the sea and at the mountain. What changed hayom?

Leibtag follows Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Sforno. Until now, the nation was not ready to take the covenant as its own. Rashi adds the story of that same day. Moshe gives the Sefer Torah to the sons of Levi. All Israel comes and says: We also stood at Sinai. Do not make it theirs alone. Moshe rejoices. Hayom hazeh nihyeita le’am — this day I understand that you want to cling to Him.

Seeing the event and knowing the event are not the same act.

What the Rambam Locates at Sinai

The Rambam in Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 8 will not let Israel’s faith rest on signs. Signs leave a suspicion: perhaps it was sorcery. The ground of belief is Ma’amad Har Sinai. Our eyes saw, and not a stranger’s. Our ears heard, and not another’s. Face-to-face, Hashem spoke with you. He did not cut this covenant with our fathers, but with us, we who are all here alive today.

Shemot 19:9 says they will hear Me speaking with you, and also in you they will believe forever. Before Sinai, the Rambam says, their trust in Moshe still had hirhur — afterthought, room for doubt. Sinai is the seeing that does not need a middleman.

So the Rambam places the decisive eyes and ears at the mountain, in the first year. Devarim 29:3 places the heart to know at the end of the fortieth year. I will not paper over that gap. Both verses are true.

What About the People Who Already Saw?

Three groups stand inside the verse.

The first are those who were under twenty at the time of the Exodus. They saw Egypt with a child’s eyes. They are still alive. Moshe can say “your eyes saw” and mean it. They saw. The Torah still says the gift of knowing did not arrive until now.

The second were born in the wilderness. They did not see the plagues. They ate manna they never asked for and wore clothes that did not wear out. For them, “you have seen” is already inherited sight. Devarim 29:14 will say the brit is also with those who are not standing here today. Their eyes are later eyes. The verse still includes them in hayom.

The third is us. We did not see the sea split. The Rambam’s rule is severe. Later generations do not believe because we saw what they saw. We believe because a nation saw, and the chain holds. If even eyewitnesses did not know until forty years had done their work, then our distance is not a lesser faith. It is the same faith — delayed knowing — stretched across more years.

The people who saw all those things before that day prove the point. Sight was not the missing organ. Readiness was.

Time Is Not the Clock. Time Is the Teacher.

Avodah Zarah 5b hears 29:3 and says a person does not stand on his teacher’s mind until forty years. Rashi sets that reading next to the Levi story. Both can be true. One is inner. It takes forty years to understand what you have been hearing. One is communal. Only today did they demand the Torah as theirs, not Levi’s.

Hayom in Devarim is not only a date. It is the day a people can stand. Forty years of manna, of cloth that did not rot, of Sichon and Og, of graves in the sand, were not waiting for a calendar page. They were wearing down the part of the soul that can see a miracle and still ask for a different menu.

Leibtag notes that verses 4 and 5 shift into first person. I led you forty years… that you might know that I am Hashem your God. Either Moshe is quoting God, or he is putting the first line of the Ten Words in quotation marks. The whole midbar was so you would take in Anochi Hashem Elokeichem. The eyes that matter are the ones that finally read the wilderness as that sentence.

The sages said there is no earlier and later in the Torah. The Name is was, is, and will be at once. “Until this day” is not an apology for slow students. It is the moment the same event becomes visible from the inside. Sinai happened. The sea happened. They happened again every day in smaller form until someone said, “I see what this has been.”

Groundhog Day

You do the same things. You wake to manna. You fold the same garment. You hear the same rebuke. You bury another name from the old generation. Then one morning the loop does not feel like a loop. It feels like a sentence that just closed.

That is not mockery of the forty years. It is what 29:3 describes. Egypt was spectacle. The midbar was repetition. Spectacle does not give a lev lada’at. Repetition, if you stay in it, can.

I live that pattern without leaving Egypt. The same parsha returns. The same berachah. The same failure. The same Shabbat. Then, without a new miracle, the old one opens. Wow. I see. The verse allows that ad hayom hazeh can mean both a generation that never saw the mountain and one that did.

The Rambam is not contradicted. Sinai remains the event no later sign can replace. Devarim 29:3 says something Sinai did not say. Even after you have seen, you may not yet have been given the heart that knows what you saw. The giving of that heart is also from Him. It arrived, the Torah says, today — for them on the plains of Moab, and for anyone who has walked around the same mountain long enough to want the book for himself, not only for Levi.

You Stand Today

Nitzavim 29:9–14 is the moment the Moab covenant stops being a speech about the people and becomes a speech with them. It answers Leibtag’s question about the seam at the end of the Tochacha. Why another brit after Sinai and after the curses?

Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem. Nitzavim is not casual standing. It is being posted for a legal act. The generation that has a heart to know is now the generation that can stand. Heads, tribes, elders, officers, every man of Israel. Then the ones who do not speak: children, wives, the stranger who chops wood and draws water. They do not recite the curses on Ebal. They are still named.

Le’ovrecha bivrit — that you may pass into the covenant. Same root as crossing the Jordan. The brit in Moab is the threshold. Ebal and Gerizim will be the land. One crossing is legal. The other is geographic. Both are hayom from the Torah’s side.

Not with you alone do I cut this covenant and this oath, but with those who are standing here with us today before Hashem our God, and with those who are not here with us today.

That is Devarim 29:13–14. All future souls. All future Israel. The people who will stand on the two mountains are already addressed. So are the people who will read this in Amarillo. You do not need a time machine. You need the Torah’s “you” to be larger than the camp in Moab.

Devarim Is Not a Second Law

Leibtag, following Rav David Tzvi Hoffmann, shows that the main speech of Sefer Devarim is built on the Ten Words. The first two dibrot are emunah: Who is speaking, and to whom you may not bow. The remaining eight are how a people lives in a land. From chapter 6 through 26, the mitzvot hang on that frame.

Greek ears heard Deuteronomion — second law. The book never says that. Mishneh Torah in 17:18 is a copy the king must write, not a replacement code. Ramban already listed what appears here for the first time in writing: divorce, slander of a bride, conspiring witnesses, the king, and more. Nearly a third of the 613, in the Rambam’s count, surface in this book. They are not Moshe’s inventions. They are words he received at Horev and at the Tent and held until a generation had a heart to know.

New laws. New mercies. The forgotten sheaf. The escaped slave you will not return. The worker paid that day. And an unbroken promise: the same Anochi, the same oath to the fathers, the same “not with you alone.”

A second law would mean the first had failed. Devarim means the first was always meant to be lived in a house, among brothers, with eyes that finally see what the wilderness had been saying for forty years. The Boss who pulled you out of the house of slaves is the same Boss still speaking on the plains of Moab.

Bitter Water, a Tree, Twelve Springs, Seventy Palms

Three days after the sea, there is no water. Then there is water they cannot drink. Ki marim hem — they are bitter. Hashem shows Moshe a tree. He casts it into the water, and it becomes sweet. Then they camp at Elim: twelve springs and seventy date palms (Shemot 15:22–27).

The Mekhilta reads the twelve springs as the twelve tribes and the seventy palms as the seventy elders. Rabbeinu Bachya and others push the image one step further. The seventy palms are the seventy nations. The twelve springs nourish the seventy trees. Israel is not an oasis for itself. The water that was bitter until a tree entered it is meant to run toward every household that came off the ark.

In Adam, the Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I have taught that the Tree of Life is the original operating system of the human family. Yechezkel sees a river from the House, trees on both banks: fruit for food, leaf for healing (Yechezkel 47:12). The pattern is already in Beshalach. Bitter water is the world after brothers stop seeing one another. The tree in the water is Torah entering the wound. Elim is what the camp looks like when the twelve remember they were sent for the seventy.

One Family from Adam through Noah

Genesis 10 is the Table of Nations. From three sons the earth is filled. Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced argues, based on Y-chromosome lineages, that living male trunks cluster in a way consistent with Shem, Ham, and Yefet. Mainstream genetics does not grant his dates or his rooting. What the Torah requires does not wait on the lab. Me’eleh nifretzah kol ha’aretz — from these the whole earth was populated (Bereshit 9:19). Every national hatred is a family quarrel wearing flags.

Adam is the blueprint, not a tribal mascot. Vayikra 18:5 says asher ya’aseh otam ha’adam vachai bahem — the human being who does them shall live by them. Adam. Not only Yisrael. Sinai did not invent the code. Sinai published it for a kingdom of priests whose job is to keep the water sweet for the seventy palms.

Chosenness is not a racial boast. It is an assignment. When Israel fails the assignment, the Name is desecrated. When Israel lives the Sayings, the nations have a well they can drink from without turning the well into a different god.

The Tanakh does not flatter the nations, and it does not flatter us. The families of the earth will be blessed through Avraham, and they will also press against Tzion. Christianity and Islam built cathedrals of meaning on Jewish text and then told the family that wrote the text that the Author had moved. The signature the Torah keeps offering is simpler than their metaphysics. Anochi Hashem Elokecha asher hotzeiticha me’eretz Mitzrayim. The God who took you out of Egypt. Not a man. Not a later recitation. The One whose first public word to a nation was an act of extraction from slavery.

The Family Story the Church Did Not Keep

I sat in church rooms for twenty-five years. I heard the Ten Commandments treated as a monument, or as a foil for grace, or as something Jesus either intensified or replaced. What I did not hear is that the Sayings are a family document. Rabbi Fohrman’s Season 4 of A Book Like No Other is not a sermon that uses Yaakov as an illustration.

It is a claim about how the Torah is written. He tracks words in the same order from the deception-and-reunion saga — Bereshit 27 through 33, with Lavan in between — into Shemot 19 and 20. Genesis is the hidden commentary. The Ten Sayings are the public repair.

The First Tablet Is Already in the Tent

Anochi. Who is the Doer. At Sinai, God says, “I am Hashem, your God, who took you out.” I am the One who acted. In the tent, Yaakov says to the blind father: I am Esav, your firstborn.

He names himself as the doer of the hunt. The first Saying is an identification. The family story is a mis-identification. Sinai tells the nation: do not become someone else in order to be loved. Let the Parent name you.

No image. No other gods. Fohrman hears the shofar at Sinai as a cry before it becomes words, and he sets that cry next to Esav’s “tze’akah gedolah u’marah ad me’od” — the great and bitter cry when the blessing is gone. God, who needs nothing, opens Himself to being refused.

Idolatry is not only bowing to stone. It is forcing the Parent into a form you can manage with your hands and eyes, the way a son tries to manage a blind father’s love with goatskins.

Do not carry the Name in vain. This is Fohrman’s cleanest hit. The phrase Hashem Elokecha appears for the first time in the Torah when Yaakov, already in costume, answers Yitzchak: ki hikrah Hashem Elokecha lefanai — because Hashem your God made it happen for me (Bereshit 27:20). The Name is used to make a lie hold. The next time the phrase is loaded this way is the third Saying. The Torah is pointing. You remember that scene. Do not do that again.

Shabbat, Both Parents, and the Second Tablet

Rivkah says stay with Lavan yamim achadim, a few days, until your brother’s heat turns. The few days become twenty years. Yaakov works without rest in a house where wages change ten times. Fohrman reads Shabbat against that grind. Rest is not a nap. Rest breaks the hierarchy in which a human being is only labor.

Honor father and mother — not father alone. After the stolen blessing, Yitzchak and Rivkah together send Yaakov to Padan Aram. The text says he listened to his father and his mother. Esav watches. Then Esav, who has already married women who embitter Rivkah, takes a daughter of Ishmael because he has seen what honors his father.

The fifth Saying is not only Yaakov’s obedience. It is also Esav’s late attempt to hold both parents in view. Honor is what stops the family from splitting into Dad’s son and Mom’s son.

Fohrman’s sharpest structural claim is this. Every horizontal crime in Yaakov’s life is bleed-through from a vertical wound — a fracture with Yitzchak, or later with Lavan standing in as father. Murder, the neighbor’s wife, theft, false witness, coveting: they are what happens when a child cannot trust that there is blessing enough.

Esav says in his heart he will kill his brother when mourning comes. He has motive and later four hundred men. He does not do it. That restraint is the fifth Saying holding the sixth. Lavan puts Leah in the dark where Rachel was expected. The house that stole a firstborn blessing is trapped inside a firstborn marriage. Goatskins. I am Esav. Identity theft is the prototype of false witness.

Do not covet. The word is already in the closet. Bigdei Esav hachamudot — Esav’s coveted garments, the ones Rivkah puts on Yaakov. Coveting is not first about a house or an ox. It is about believing your own face is not enough, so you put on your brother’s skin to be lovable. Lo tachmod is the Torah forbidding that costume.

You Cannot See God. Then You See a Face.

The first tablet says no form. You saw no image at Horev. The saga ends: ra’iti panecha kir’ot penei Elokim vattirzeini — I have seen your face as one sees the face of God, and you accepted me (Bereshit 33:10). Yaakov has learned the only permitted image: the brother who was the rival. God remains unseen. The neighbor becomes visible as someone whose existence is not the theft of yours. That is the last Saying enacted. They weep. The zero-sum game of the one blessing in the dark tent is, for a moment, not running.

Fohrman asks the ugly question. If Genesis 27 is a catastrophe of favoritism, why does Sinai look like God picking Yaakov’s children over the Esavs of the world? His move is integration. In the tent, Yitzchak speaks to Esav and Rivkah speaks to Yaakov. At Sinai God takes up both voices.

Nominally He addresses the children of Yaakov. Really the speech is aimed at the whole human house — including the older brother who cried. Chosenness is not Dad loved me more. It is: the family that lived the wound is commanded to publish the repair.

Leibtag takes those same Ten Words and shows they are the spine of Devarim. Fohrman shows they were already the spine of the family. Together they are one claim. The Author who spoke at Sinai had already been speaking in Beersheba.

What I Carry Now

The tree goes into bitter water. The springs number twelve. The palms number seventy. The Ten Sayings repair the house of Yitzchak so the house of Noah can drink. Whether a man accepts Jeanson’s clock or only the Torah’s table, we are not separate species of human. Prophecy says the quarrel with Israel will not be the last word. The Boss who took a slave nation out of Egypt has not changed His Name.

I do not need a pastor to certify that these Words belong to Israel before they belong to the nations. I needed my mother’s kitchen, a beit din, a prison classroom, and the Book. Live the Sayings when you sit in the house and when you walk on the way.

Teach the children the family history, not a slogan. When a brother can look at another brother and see a face like the face of God, the nations are already being healed — one household at a time. That is the only scale on which a tree ever sweetens water.

As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. I am waiting for the rest. I am not waiting to be proven wrong on my face.

B’H’

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo

• The Raising Lion
• “Take Words: Reclaiming Loving Guidance Before It’s Too Late” Find A Friend
• The Ten Sayings: Healing the Nations as One Family
• Toldot | תולדות | “Consequences”
• What the World Missed: The Star of Yaakov and the Quiet Dawn of Redemption

Rico Cortes (Wisdom in Torah) is a Hebrew Roots teacher.

Rico Cortes (Wisdom in Torah) is a Hebrew Roots teacher. In the video “Part 1 companion,” he argues a technically correct point from Leviticus: the Pesach lamb is a shelamim (peace/fellowship offering), not a chatat (sin offering).

He then still applies John 1:29 (“the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”) to Yeshua by blending other images—Isaiah 53, Yom Kippur, ransom language, and Hebrews. That combination is exactly where the Levitical system is left behind.

Here is the list of Leviticus prohibitions and structural rules that teaching runs against. These are the ones most directly in play when a man is presented as the lamb that removes the world’s sin and when that lamb is treated as a picture to look at.

Unauthorized slaughter and blood outside the designated place

• Leviticus 17:3–4, 8–9: Anyone who slaughters an ox, lamb, or goat and does not bring it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting to present it as an offering to Hashem—bloodguilt is on that person. The blood must be brought to the altar.
• Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement…” Atonement by blood is tied to the altar, the priesthood, and the specific animal brought by the offerer or the community. A death that occurs outside that system does not fulfill the verse.

No human being may be offered

• Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2–5: Do not give any of your offspring to Molech. Human sacrifice is an abomination. The Torah never authorizes a man—even a righteous man—to function as the korban. The animals in Leviticus 1–7 and 16 are animals. Substituting a human for them inverts the entire category.

Each person bears his own sin; no transfer of guilt onto another human

• The Levitical system has the sinner (or the community via the high priest) bring the prescribed animal. The two goats of Leviticus 16 work inside that framework; they do not license a later human to “take away the sin of the world.” Ezekiel 18 (which restates the same principle) is consistent with Leviticus: the soul that sins shall die.

Images and likenesses

• Leviticus 19:4: “Do not turn to idols or make for yourselves molten gods.”
• Leviticus 26:1: “You shall not make idols for yourselves, or set up a carved image or a standing stone… to bow down to it.”
• The Second Saying (Exodus 20:4 / Deuteronomy 5:8) is the same commandment restated: no likeness of anything in the heavens, on the earth, or in the waters. A lamb presented as “the picture of Messiah” or “the man coming like a lamb to die for our sins” is precisely a likeness made to be looked at and meditated upon. That is the thing the commandment forbids.

Priestly and ritual boundaries

• Only descendants of Aaron may handle the blood and the offerings (Leviticus 6–7, 16). A teacher who assigns the high-priestly or atoning function to a first-century Galilean man is assigning a role Leviticus reserves for the kohanim operating at the altar.
• Different offerings have different blood applications (thrown, placed on horns, sprinkled toward the parochet). Mixing Pesach (shelamim), daily tamid lambs, and Yom Kippur goats into a single composite “Lamb of God” erases the distinctions that Leviticus spends chapters establishing.

Rico can quote Leviticus accurately on the classification of the Pesach lamb and still violate the book’s actual operating rules the moment he maps that lamb (or any other korban) onto a man whose death is said to remove sin for the world. That mapping is the violation.

On the second part of your question: the Torah does not give us a lamb as a picture of a coming man. Exodus 12 and Leviticus 23 give Israel a meal of protection and covenant identity, eaten in haste, with blood on the doorposts so the Destroyer would pass over.

It is not a visual aid for later theology. When later writers turn the lamb into an image of a dying Messiah, they are doing the thing the Ten Sayings and Leviticus 19:4 / 26:1 prohibit—making a likeness and attaching redemptive meaning to it. The commandment is “no images except the ones that help us understand Messiah.” It is no likeness of anything.

On Rico Cortes, Leviticus, and the Lamb of God

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah  ·  August 29, 2026

Rico Cortes presents himself as a Torah teacher and holds the title of Kohen. That title is not a decoration. It is a lineage, a charge, a burden. The kohanim were set apart to guard the altar, to handle the blood, to teach the people the difference between what is holy and what is profane. When a Kohen teaches the nations to violate the Torah, the violation is not his alone. It is his by inheritance.

In his lecture “The Passover Lamb Was Never a Sin Offering — So What Did John 1:29 Mean?,” Cortes does exactly that. He makes the most guarded category in the Levitical system — the sin-bearing offering — and he hands it to a man. He creates the image the Second Saying forbids, and he makes it the centerpiece of devotion. He does this not as a pagan, but as a man who claims to stand inside the covenant.

The violations are not subtle. They are structural.

In Egypt, the lamb was not a dinner animal. It was a god. The ram was the face of Khnum, the potter who formed men from Nile clay, and of Amun, king of the gods. That is why Moses refuses Pharaoh’s offer to sacrifice in the land. Exodus 8:22 in the Hebrew — English 8:26 — is blunt: ki toevat Mitzrayim nizbach l’Hashem Eloheinu… hen nizbach et toevat Mitzrayim l’eineihem v’lo yiskelunu. “We would be slaughtering the toevah of Egypt to Hashem our God. If we slaughter the toevah of Egypt before their eyes, will they not stone us?”

Rashi on Genesis 46:34 says the same thing about shepherds: every shepherd is toevat Mitzrayim “because the flock is a deity to them.” The construct is toevat Mitzrayim — Egypt’s toevah — not “Israel is an abomination.” A grammar teacher would mark the English. You do not call a people’s god an “abomination” in their own mouth and then expect them to stone you for killing it. You stone a man for killing what you hold sacred.

Shadal and A. S. Yahuda both note that Hebrew toevah sits next to Egyptian wab / uab — “pure, set apart, holy.” What Egypt called holy, Israel called toevah, and the Torah uses Egypt’s own category against Egypt: the ram they set apart is the animal Israel must slaughter. Pesach in Egypt is not a picture of a later Messiah. It is Israel killing Egypt’s false god in public, under a sentence of stoning, and walking out alive. That is why the lamb is taken on the tenth and held four days. The whole street can see what is about to die.

Leviticus 17 is unambiguous. The blood that makes atonement must be brought to the altar, to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting. Blood outside that place is bloodguilt. A death that occurs on a Roman cross, outside the Temple, outside the priesthood, outside the prescribed animal — that death cannot fulfill the verse. It stands outside the system entirely. Cortes knows this. He teaches it. And then he steps over it.

Leviticus 18 and 20 are equally clear. Human sacrifice is an abomination. The Torah never authorizes a man to function as the korban. The animals in Leviticus 1 through 7 and in chapter 16 are animals. Substituting a human for them inverts the entire category. It is not a fulfillment. It is a desecration.

And then there is the image. Exodus 20, Leviticus 19, Leviticus 26 — the same prohibition, repeated, reinforced, never softened.

No likeness of anything in the heavens, on the earth, or in the waters. You shall have no molten gods. No carved images. No standing stones. A lamb presented as the picture of Messiah, a man coming like a lamb to die for the sins of the world — this is a likeness made to be looked at, meditated upon, adored. It is the thing the commandment forbids, dressed in the language of redemption.

The Christian will reach for Abraham and Isaac. That reach fails.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, showed that the Akedah is the Torah’s loudest no to human sacrifice. In a world where children were property, and the gods demanded them as payment, God stops the knife. He does not require what the nations require. He abhors it. The story is a polemic against patria potestas — the idea that a father owns his child and may dispose of him however he pleases.

Rabbi David Fohrman, in his lecture on Re’eh, draws the same line from Deuteronomy 12:31 — do not do this to Hashem your God; every abomination He hates they do for their gods, even burning their sons and daughters in fire. He is pointing back to the Akedah and saying: “That is what the nations do, and I will not have it.”

The Akedah is not a precedent for a man dying as a sin-offering. It is the Torah’s declaration that no man, no son, no human life, may be placed on the altar. The story ends with a ram caught in the thicket. The ram is the substitute. The son walks away. That is the point.

Cortes, as a Kohen, should know this. The kohanim were the ones who stood between the people and the altar. They were the ones who taught the difference between the clean and the unclean, the holy and the common. When a Kohen takes the altar’s most sacred function and assigns it to a man, when he takes the Second Saying’s most guarded prohibition and turns it into an object of devotion, he is not teaching Torah. He is teaching its inversion.

The prophet Ezekiel saw this coming. In chapter 44, God says to the kohanim who turned from Him: you have not kept charge of My holy things, you have set up your idols in My sanctuary. The charge is not new. It is ancient. And it falls on every Kohen who trades the altar for an image, the blood for a man, the covenant for a cross.

Cortes is not the first to do this. He will not be the last. But he does it with the title of Kohen on his lips, and that makes the violation heavier, not lighter. The kohanim were given the Torah to guard it. When they teach others to break it, the guard has become the thief.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo, Texas

Nation, Not Religion: What Pastors in This City Taught Me About Friendship with the Jew

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Elul 5786 / August 2026

I have been the chazzan for the Jewish community in Amarillo for twenty-five years. What I am trying to show is simple. Over those years, every pastor I have dealt with in this city has carried the same agenda. Their book tells them: to the Jew first.

Their book tells them they will not see the one they wait for until we say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. So the Jew is not a neighbor. The Jew is an unfinished verse. Friendship lasts as long as the verse is still open.

The polite form of that agenda is a sentence I heard again this week. Pastor Glenn Stoker of Bible Believers Baptist Church on Rockwell Road called offering support to the Jewish community after hard years. Then he told me he supported the nation, not the religion.

From the pew, that sounds like kindness: flags, not a conversion class. From the Jew, it is the same agenda. Israel is not a church in one folder and a state in another. Israel is a people under a covenant — land, law, Name, and seed. If you bless the map and bury the Torah, you have not blessed Jacob. You have kept the stage for the last act.

The Call and the Texts

I listen to Pastor Stoker’s radio program some Sundays on the way to work. He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He holds that the King James Version is the Bible, and that anything else is not translated correctly. I asked how the King James could be the perfect translation when no Hebrew scholars sat at that table, and none sat at Nicaea either.

He said I was ignorant. Had I not read the book about the compilers? I asked whether he had ever spoken with an Orthodox Jew. Assuredly yes, he said, several. Then I asked why Christians claim that our Bible contains Jesus everywhere. In that moment, the call left the Jewish community and landed on the nation. He believed the Jews would be in the tribulation and would suffer because we would not believe in Jesus.

What followed was texting. The wording below is from the phone, not from memory.

I wrote first with courtesy.

Thank you very much. I have not been able to speak to any pastor in my 25 years as a Jew. Thank you again. Gavriel Ben David

I sent the site.

beithashoavah.org Here are my credentials as a Hazan.

His answer to the work was not a verse.

Pastor Stoker text:

I don’t care what your credentials are or from where; if you can’t tell the difference between a non-practicing Jew and a Jew who converted to Christianity on his own, ie Mordachi Ham, etc I’ll stroke your oversized ego though and check it out.

I asked him the question I have asked for years, the question a teacher named Yehuda Yisrael puts to missionaries in the same words.

Deuteronomy 4, the whole chapter. That is our covenant with Hashem, just like Jeremiah 31. What part of the New Covenant did Jesus initiate?

Then I sent Jeremiah 31:35–36 in both English and Hebrew. The Lord of hosts is His name. If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever. That is the answer found in the same chapter that Christians use for a new covenant. The sun still stands. Israel is still a nation before Him.

I answered his question about authority. He asked it more than once.

We have 613 commandments, and my boss is Hashem. What other authority do I need as a Jew other than Moses and the GOD who took us…

The Tree of Life. The Ten Sayings, Exodus 20. That is where every human being should get his authority. From the God of Israel.

I do not understand your question because I have stated this at least 4 times. The Torah is from Hashem…

He did not then open Jeremiah 31. He answered the writer.

Pastor Stoker text:

Write all you want. You still have no absolute authority

Where is your absolute authority?

Answer the question: what is your final authority?

Ok, prove the Torah is 100% accurate without any mistakes, then show some facts that no man could have known when it was written

Hazan Gavriel text:

I asked where the Tree of Life is. He answered with a label.

Pastor Stoker text:

Yep, read about the “Tree of Life,” kind of getting into the kabala

Hazan Gavriel text:

I laid out the six days of creation and the seventh as the history of man— Psalm 90, a day as a thousand years.

Day one: light from darkness, Adam given the knowledge of good and evil and the power to choose.

Day two: waters from waters — the Flood, the ark on Ararat, dry land again.

Day three: seed after its kind — Avraham in 1948 of the Jewish calendar, then Yitzchak, Yaakov, Israel.

Day four: lights for signs and seasons — the prophets.

Day five: swarming things and birds — Israel scattered.

Day six: beast and man, and the choice of the sixth millennium.

Day seven: Shabbat. The thousand-year rest is coming. Baruch Hashem.

He answered the map in three words.

Pastor Stoker text:

typology not doctrine

Gavriel text:

I answered the label from the peshat. Genesis 8 is a world begun again. The wind of Hashem moved over the waters the way the Spirit moved in the beginning. Waters separated. Dry land. The ark rested. He never wrote back after that second creation and Noah as a beginning. Silence is also an answer.

How I Came to Sit at Those Tables

I was raised in church — Baptist and Catholic rooms, Black father, Spanish-speaking mother whose people came up through Jalisco, Guanajuato, Durango, Chihuahua, and New Mexico.

911 – On the eleventh of September, 2001, when I was about thirty-five, my mother told me what the house had been hiding: secret candles, Ladino in the kitchen, spring cleaning that was more than spring cleaning. She said we were from Spain, like every family member said.

Her grandfather was a Cohen, but we did not know until I did both of my uncles’ DNA. My two tios both tested positive for the COHEN MODAL haplogroup through the Jewish DNA testing site, FamilyTree DNA. My family is related to the owner of FamilyTree DNA.

I went to Israel in 2002. I met Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute. Rabbi Richman asked me if I was coming to return since my mother was Jewish. I was still a Jewish Christian then. I studied for years in Messianic and Hebrew Roots circles — Brad Scott, Bill Cloud, and others. We founded a ministry. Mayim Hayim Ministries mayim-hayim.org

That website is still there, but the content is not Christian.

I wore tzitzit and talked about Yeshua and the Torah in the same breath. In 2012, I completed a Conservative conversion in El Paso under Rabbi Stephen Leon. I now serve as chazzan of a very small Sephardic minyan in Amarillo, Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, and I teach Torah within the walls of a prison.

Twenty-five years of standing for this community is long enough to know which invitations were friendship and which were recruitment. I am not writing as a man who never loved the church. I am writing as a man who sat in its Bible studies, Seders, and Chick-fil-A booths, and then stayed Jewish when the friendship ran out.

The First Four Shepherds

The first was Pastor Bo at Trinity Fellowship Church. I was in a men’s Bible study on a book called Following in the Master’s Footsteps. The questions I asked did not line up with the history he was giving — not Jewishly. He called me and asked me to leave. People come to his Bible study, he said, to listen to him and not to me.

The second was Pastor Bill Glimm of Grace Community Church. I had invited him to a Passover Seder, and then to another gathering. In the conversation, I mentioned Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints.

He said those people are not his brothers. If I said they were, he would call the police or have security walk me out of the building. I asked him plainly: Are you saying Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not your brothers? I told you, he said. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult. Mormons believe the devil is Jesus’ brother. Leave now, he said, and he called security. I left.

Grace Church My First Visit

I remember the first time I visited Grace Church; the sermon was on Matthew 23, which is not a good chapter for the only Jew in the house. I was called a Judizer by Bill. He once told me that I do not need legalistic rituals; I keep Passover every day.

Later, one of Bill’s largest donors found out he was an Iranian Jew and started coming to our Center. He never stopped being a Christian Jew from Iran. I will always love him; he gave over $200,000 to Mayim Hayim Ministries, which Mayim Hayim gave away until our best friends stole everything we did not give away.

The third was Pastor Polis of Hillside Church, one of the largest congregations in Amarillo. We met at Chick-fil-A. The owner introduced us and told him I was a Jewish man in this town who did not believe in Jesus. We sat down over coffee. I asked why he kept Shabbat on Sunday.

Because Jesus was resurrected on Sunday, he said. I said the Greek of the resurrection accounts does not give the Church the sentence it thinks it has. Mia ton sabbaton — the first of the Sabbaths — sits in the counting of the Omer, not in a transfer of the seventh day. Pastor Polis is college-educated in Greek.

I said he knew what the phrase means. He said he would have to go home and study it. The next time I saw him, he was with his son. You are not to say anything in front of my son, he told me. I am the one who teaches my son doctrine. The third time I saw him at Chick-fil-A, he was with his wife. He walked past me as if I were furniture.

That is why, when Pastor Stoker called, I was skeptical and also glad. I know the radio voice. I also know what happens when a Jew asks the text to remain the text.

Other Rooms in This Town

Pastor Maurice Burks, who one day accused me of hitting him in the Sam’s Club. I asked him a question about Christianity, and he said he was not going there. I said to Maurice, ” You, as a pastor, should be able to defend your faith in and out of season and he called me a liar and said the Christian Bible does not say that. Then he called me the “devil”.

2 Timothy 4:2 New International Version: The Proof That Is Why I Ask

² Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.

1 Peter 3:15: Advises believers to always be ready to give an answer or defense for the hope they have, doing so with gentleness and respect.

I did get upset because he, as a pastor, just called me a liar and took off. I pulled up the verse on my phone in seconds and followed him to show him the verse; that is when he said I assaulted him in Sam’s Club. He started yelling as loud as he could and said, ” Stop, Archie, this man is assaulting me, and I knew his many years in theft management had kicked in. Sam’s has cameras, so I was not worried, but I was shocked that all of it, in front of our wives, was more embarrassing.

Pastor Herman was an ex-railroad engineer turned pastor.

Pastor Graves was the Black pastor I sat with in good faith. The heads of the Black Israelite Congregation who looked at my Yemenite rabbi and at me and told us we were not Jews. Blood, they said. Geography, they said. We did not fit the story they needed.

A gentleman I remember as Pastor Graves looked at the weapon I carry — a Jew in Texas, a chaplain, a man who has buried family in a violent year — and said I looked as if I thought I was bad because I carried a gun. He said he was going home to get his and we could have a shoot-out. We left.

Pastor Dr. Carr wanted to fight me over Luke chapter 4. In the synagogue at Nazareth, the reading is made to say that the anointed one is sent to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.

Open the Hebrew of Isaiah 61. The recovering of sight to the blind is not there. It is in Isaiah 42, and it is in the Greek of the Septuagint that Luke is following. A pastor who will not let Isaiah speak in Isaiah’s language will not let Israel speak in Israel’s language either.

Pastor Lee Simpson told me I had answered many of the questions he carried. Then he said he could not teach that to his people. They were not ready. The text is allowed to move a man in private. The congregation must not be disturbed.

Pastor Brown of Victory Church went on the radio and said he could eat bread on Passover. He did not need some little man with a beanie and strings hanging down to tell him that Easter Sunday would not have ham and rolls. Tzitzit and a kippah became a punch line so that ham could stay on the table.

The Church of Christ congregations I have met in this town have been the hardest. They denounce Israel. There is no such thing as Israel, they say. We are the Church. Replacement is not a theory to them. It is the air they breathe.

Pastor Larry, who pastors a church in Fritch, let me know that the Christian Bible and the New Covenant were, in effect, not the Old Testament.

Even a man from a Reform temple told me he did not lose anything in Israel. That, he said, is why they are called Temples: there is no need for another one. I pray they turn to Hashem and to His Torah as Jews.

The Sentence I Cannot Forget

My niece’s husband, Bishop Ludwig Onoko, said it without ornament. We are just waiting, he told me, for the Third Temple to be built so you Jews can accept the antichrist and go through the tribulation and see Jesus returning with wounds in his hands, so you Jews can fall on your faces and say we were wrong and bow down and worship Jesus. Then you will see.

That is not support of Israel. That is a scheduled humiliation. The Temple, in that sentence, is not the house of prayer for all nations. It is a trap laid for the Jews so that the nations can be proven right. Stoker said the polite part: nation, not religion. The bishop said the last act. Same script.

The Questions That Were Not Answered

Which clause of Jeremiah 31 did Jesus initiate, and where does that chapter name the blood of a crucified messiah as the start of the new covenant?

The reply is stages, patterns, and the Greek book proving itself.

Bible Believers Baptist Church Glen Stoker

Here is the scorecard of the Stoker thread as the phone recorded it.

I asked how the King James could be perfect with no Jewish scholar at 1611 or at Nicaea. On the phone, I wrote that about forty-seven scholars translated it, and there was not one Jewish scholar among them, nor at Nicaea. He had already called me ignorant and told me to read the book about the compilers. A bibliography is not a name.

I asked why Pharaoh would stone Israel in Exodus 8:26, and I sent the King James and the Hebrew, the ram-god of Egypt in our tradition, and the fact that the Passover sacrifice is a peace offering, not a sin offering. He did not answer 8:26.

I asked what part of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 Jesus initiated, and I sent 31:35–36. He did not name a clause.

I asked how the Christian replaces me if only Jews and the sons of Abraham still claim that father, and if Jeremiah says the seed does not cease while the sun stands. He did not open the verse.

I asked where the Tree of Life is. He said kabbalah.

I laid out the six days and Genesis 8. He said typology, not doctrine. Then he stopped writing.

He asked where my final authority is. I answered: 613, Hashem, Moses, Deuteronomy 4, Exodus 19, Exodus 20, the God of Israel. He asked again. Then he raised a new exam: prove the Torah one hundred percent, with facts no man could have known when it was written.

One question he answered outright on the call: had he spoken with an Orthodox Jew? One textual note he offered later: “Isaiah is not the end of our Bible; Chronicles is. That is true of the Tanakh’s order”.

It does not answer Jeremiah 31. The rest were redirected, labeled, or turned into a remark about my ego.

What Nation-Not-Religion Means for a Jew

I do not write that every Christian on earth is this way. I write what I can swear to. Pastor Bo, Pastor Bill Glimm, Pastor Polis, Pastor Brown, Pastor Carr, Pastor Simpson, the Church of Christ rooms, the bishop, and Pastor Stoker. The faces change. The terms of friendship do not.

The flag is allowed. The beanie and the strings are a problem. The Jew who keeps Shabbat is religion. The Jew who is only a prophecy token is nation. The moment you read Jeremiah 31 as still naming Israel and Judah, the support cools. That is what happened on the phone: first the offer, then not the religion, then authority, then typology, then silence.

Their book tells them to go to the Jew first. Their book tells them the story is unfinished until we say the verse they require. As long as there is a chance to convert us, they are friendly. When there is not, we are a nation they can pray over and a religion they can wait to watch fail.

Typology and Doctrine

A pattern that helps a man see is not the same as a commandment. I do not bind anyone to a six-thousand-year clock. The sages themselves argued about the length of the days. What I will not surrender is this: the Torah’s week is not a children’s story.

Creation, Flood, Avraham, prophets, exile, the beast and the image, and then rest — that is the shape of the world I was given. The rainbow after the Flood and the Shabbat after the six days are both signs that judgment is not the last word. Covenant is.

The difference between us is not whether a day can be a thousand years. The difference is whether Israel remains Israel when the thousand years are spoken of. If the seventh day belongs to the Church instead of to Zion, then the first six days were only a preface to our disappearance.

I cannot read Bereshit that way. I cannot read Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Zechariah 14, or Ezekiel 40–48 that way. The mountain is still the mountain. The House is still ahead of us.

What I Carry Now

I carry a weapon because I live in this country and because this year has already taken family. I carry tzitzit because the Torah told me to. I carry a small congregation and a prison classroom because the hidden ones are still coming home — crypto-Jews, the wounded, the men who found a Chumash after they lost everything else. I do not need a pastor to certify that we are Jews. I needed my mother’s kitchen, a beit din, a priestly memory in the blood, and the Book.

To the pastors who were kind: thank you. To the pastors who wanted a shoot-out, a fist over Luke 4, a radio joke about a beanie, or a front-row seat at Jewish tribulation: I am still here. The Third Temple, when it stands, will not be built so that we can accept an antichrist. It will be built because Hashem spoke of a house for His Name. If you love that House, love the people without a conversion clause.

As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. As long as the sun and the moon stand, the seed of Israel does not cease from being a nation before Him. I am waiting for the rest. I am not waiting to be proven wrong on my face.

B’H’

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo

Parashat Ki Teitzei: The 74 Commandments, Family Fractures, and the Tree of Life for the Nations

Parashat Ki Teitzei 5786 | Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19 | 9 Elul 5786 / August 22, 2026

• Ki Teitzei contains more mitzvot than any other parsha (74).
• These laws are the practical, civil branching of the Ten Sayings.
• They arise from real family problems recorded in Genesis.
• The ultimate goal is restoration: the Tree of Life healing humanity’s divided family.
• Brief note on Jeanson’s peer-reviewed Y-chromosome and mitochondrial work pointing to three ancestral fathers and three ancestral mothers.

I. The Tree of Life and Its Healing Leaves: The Torah

Ki Teitzei (Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19) is the densest parsha for mitzvot (classically 74), and many of them function as legal tikkun or retrospective commentary on earlier narratives rather than free-standing rules.

II. The Trunk: The Ten Sayings as the Source

Brief overview of the Ten as the root system. Each of the following sections takes one Saying (or a related cluster) and shows how specific mitzvot of Ki Teitzei grow from it and repair a Genesis family wound.

III. Branch 1 – Shabbat / Sabbatical Rest (1st–4th Sayings cluster)

• Mitzvot of rest, release, and non-exploitation (workers’ wages, forgotten sheaf, sabbatical-related kindness, etc.).
• Genesis root: Cain and Abel — conflict over land, offering, and the first bloodshed that broke rest and brotherhood.
• Application: Rest is the foundation of a civil society that does not devour its own family.
• Noah Commanded to Keep Shabbat: The “OT” Rainbow as a sign of Shabbat and Creation.

IV. Branch 2 – Honoring Parents & Family Continuity (5th Saying)

• Laws of firstborn inheritance, two wives (beloved and hated), rebellious son, levirate marriage (yibbum), and protecting the next generation.
• Genesis roots: – Isaac & Rebecca / Ishmael & Isaac – Esau & Jacob – Rachel & Leah and the transfer of the birthright to Joseph – Judah & Tamar
• Key insight: Preference and favoritism fracture the family; the law restores fairness and continuity.

V. Branch 3 – Do Not Murder / Protect Life (6th Saying)

• Laws against kidnapping, false testimony that endangers life, the rebellious son procedure, burial of the executed, roof parapet (preventing accidental death), and the fighting men/pregnant woman case (Exodus 21 echoed and extended).
• Genesis roots: Cain & Abel; the near-destruction of Joseph; Yaakov–Lavan conflict that led to Rachel’s death in childbirth (yatz’a cycle); the threat to Binyamin.
• Theme: Family conflict produces collateral damage to the next generation. The law holds both fighters responsible and protects the vulnerable.

VI. Branch 4 – Do Not Commit Adultery / Sexual Integrity (7th Saying)

• Laws of the captive woman, defamation of a wife, adultery, rape, seduction, prohibited marriages, and purity in the camp.
• Genesis roots: The sexual and relational fractures around Judah & Tamar, the captive-woman pattern, and the consequences of disordered desire in the patriarchal families.
• Civil society requires protected boundaries so the family line is not further broken.

VII. Branch 5 – Do Not Steal / Property & Honest Dealing (8th Saying)

• Returning lost objects (including the ox), honest weights and measures, not muzzling the ox, timely payment of wages, collateral rules, and interest prohibitions.
• Genesis roots: Joseph as the “ox”; the brothers’ sale of Joseph; Laban’s repeated theft of wages and flock; the cycle of taking what belongs to another.
• Repair: Returning what was lost restores trust within the extended family.

VIII. Branch 6 – Do Not Bear False Witness (9th Saying)

• Laws against false accusations of a bride, honest testimony, and related judicial integrity.
• Genesis roots: The brothers’ deception of Jacob with Joseph’s coat; false reports that destroyed trust.
• Truth-telling is required to stop the cycle of family destruction.

IX. Branch 7 – Do Not Covet / Guarding Desire (10th Saying)

• Laws limiting desire for the captive woman, mixed species, and the broader restraint of appetite appear throughout the parsha.
• Genesis roots: The original coveting that led to the sale of Joseph and earlier sibling rivalries.
• Desire must be trained so it does not consume the family.

X. Branch 8 – The Nations & Amalek (Extension of the above into the wider family)

• Laws concerning Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Egyptians, and the final command to remember and blot out Amalek.
• Genesis roots: The 70 nations; the lines of Esau (35) and Ishmael (35); the ongoing hostility that began in the family.
• Zechariah 13:8 (two-thirds) as a prophetic echo of the firstborn/double-portion theme.
• The Jewish people stand as witnesses who must both remember the wounds and offer the cure.

XI. The Tree of Life as Healing for the Nations

• Summary: Every civil law in Ki Teitzei is a branch that grows from the Ten Sayings and is rooted in a Genesis family fracture.
• DNA evidence (Jeanson, Traced) confirms we are one family descending from a small number of ancestral parents. The fractures are therefore family fractures.
• The Tree of Life (Torah, the restored way of living) is the medicine.
• Israel’s unique role: to guard and give that Tree to the nations so the divided family can be healed.
• Closing invitation: Living these mitzvot is not only personal piety; it is the practical work of repairing the human family and offering the nations the leaves of the Tree for healing (cf. Ezekiel 47 / Revelation imagery of the leaves).

XII. Conclusion

• Ki Teitzei is the Torah’s detailed blueprint for turning the Ten Sayings into a functioning, compassionate civil society.
• That society is the repaired family of Adam.
• The descendants of Jacob carry the responsibility to model and share the Tree of Life so that the nations — our larger family — may live.

This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei (“When you go out”), contains more mitzvot than any other parsha—seventy-four commandments. These are not a random collection of rules. Instead, they form the practical, civil branching of the Ten Sayings (the Aseret HaDibrot).

Each law addresses a wound that first appeared in the family stories of Genesis. Together they reveal how Hashem governs the world through measure for measure (middah k’neged middah). They also show how He honors human free will and offers the Tree of Life as a source of healing for the entire human family.

Middah k’neged Middah

• Two wives and the firstborn (Deut. 21:15–17). The language of the “beloved” and “hated/senuah” wife, plus “first of his strength,” deliberately echoes Jacob, Leah, and Rachel (Gen. 29–30, 49:3). Jacob favored Rachel and effectively shifted the double portion toward Joseph (son of the beloved) over Reuben (son of the less-loved Leah). The law insists the actual firstborn’s rights cannot be overridden by preference. Commentators such as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks treat this as the Torah correcting the family dynamics that produced so much strife in Genesis.
• Returning the lost ox/animal (Deut. 22:1–3), with the parallel in Exodus 23:4 about your enemy’s ox. Joseph is repeatedly associated with the ox (shor): Jacob’s blessing calls him the firstling of his ox (Deut. 33:17), and the imagery of a wandering/lost animal resonates with Joseph “wandering in the field” seeking his brothers (Gen. 37:15). The command to return even an enemy’s animal, and not to ignore it, can be read against the brothers’ treatment of Joseph and the eventual reconciliation with Jacob. The Exodus formulation already frames the duty toward “your enemy,” so the Deuteronomy restatement intensifies the ethical demand.

Other clear narrative roots include:

• Amalek (Deut. 25:17–19) — direct recall of the attack in Exodus 17.
• Remember what happened to Miriam (Deut. 24:8–9) — explicit pointer to Numbers 12 and the laws of tzara’at.
• Ammonites and Moabites barred from the congregation (Deut. 23:4–7) — grounded in the story of Lot’s daughters (Gen. 19), Balaam, and the refusal to offer bread and water during the wilderness journey.
• Levirate marriage / yibbum and chalitzah (Deut. 25:5–10) — the legal institution already enacted in the Judah–Tamar narrative (Gen. 38) and later in the Book of Ruth.
• Multiple social-justice laws (treatment of the stranger, orphan, widow; timely wages; pledges; forgotten sheaves, etc.) that repeatedly invoke the Egypt experience as the formative “story” that generates the commandment.
• The rebellious son (Deut. 21:18–21) and the beautiful captive (21:10–14) are linked in midrashic tradition to the chain of consequences that begins with taking a captive and ends in a dysfunctional household (and, in some readings, to figures such as Absalom).

Additional possible links appear with the mother-bird law (compassion/parental imagery that some teachers, including Rabbi David Fohrman, connect back to patriarchal family dynamics), the prohibition on kidnapping/selling into slavery (echoes of Joseph), and the ox that must not be muzzled while working (again resonating with Joseph-as-ox imagery).

The Trunk: The Ten Sayings Branch into Civil Society

The Ten Sayings are the root system. The dense civil laws of Ki Teitzei—laws of inheritance, lost property, workers’ wages, safety, sexual integrity, judicial fairness, treatment of the stranger, and the final command concerning Amalek—grow from those roots. In addition, they show how the great principles of Shabbat rest, honor of parents, the sanctity of life, fidelity, honesty, and restraint of desire operate in daily life and in a functioning society.

These laws did not appear in a vacuum. They answer real fractures already recorded in Genesis.

Measure for Measure: The Way Hashem Runs the World

Hashem’s justice is reciprocal. What a person sows returns in kind, often through the next generation. This principle runs through every major family conflict in Genesis and is answered by the mitzvot of Ki Teitzei.

• Cain’s violence against his brother returns as exile and restless wandering.
• Yaakov’s angry curse in the fight with Lavan (“Whoever has your gods shall not live”) returns years later when Rachel dies in childbirth.
• The brothers’ sale of Joseph returns when they stand trembling before the unrecognized viceroy, fearing for their own lives and for Binyamin.

The civil laws of this parsha take that same reciprocal logic and turn it toward repair. For example, returning a lost ox, protecting a pregnant woman caught in a fight, ensuring fair inheritance, and refusing to exploit the weak all reverse the earlier pattern of taking, favoring, and endangering the vulnerable.

Free Will: The Dignity and the Danger

Measure for measure is never mechanical fatalism. Every fracture begins with a free choice, and every opportunity for repair remains open through free will.

God’s words to Cain in Genesis 4:7 capture this perfectly. The Hebrew does not use the ordinary word for a hinged door (delet). It uses petach—an opening, an entrance. “Sin is crouching at the petach.” Some traditional readers hear in that word the opening of the grave or the mouth of destruction. Yet the verse continues: its desire is for you, but you can rule over it. Cain is given his whole life to improve.

Cain’s later cry, “My iniquity is too heavy for me to bear” (Genesis 4:13), has long been read by many as the beginning of recognition and the possibility of teshuvah. Hashem’s protective mark shows that the opening was not slammed shut. Free will remains. The same God who spoke to Cain still leaves the petach of return open before every member of the human family.

Family Stories That Shape the Laws

The laws of the two wives and the firstborn’s double portion answer the favoritism and rivalry between Rachel and Leah. They also address the earlier tensions between Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau.

The command to return a lost ox (and all lost property) answers the theft and betrayal surrounding Joseph, who is himself called an ox in Jacob’s blessing.

The case of two men fighting and striking a pregnant woman so that “her children come out” (veyatz’u yeladeha) echoes the Yaakov–Lavan confrontation. The same root yatz’a (“to go out”) appears when Yehudah later describes Joseph’s disappearance to the Egyptian viceroy: “One went out from me.” Consequently, the cycle of conflict that forces children out of the family and threatens the parent’s life is precisely what the law seeks to interrupt.

Even the final command to remember Amalek reaches back to the wider family of the seventy nations that branched from Noah’s sons. It also refers to the ongoing hostility that began in sibling rivalry.

One Family Confirmed by DNA

Modern genetic research, including Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s work in Traced, points to a remarkable convergence with the biblical account. Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA studies indicate that the great diversity of humanity traces back to a very small number of ancestral fathers and mothers—consistent with the three sons of Noah and their wives after the Flood. Therefore, we are not separate species or unrelated tribes. We are one extended family that has been fractured by repeated choices against the Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life as Healing for the Nations

Because we are one family, the fractures are family fractures. The 74 mitzvot of Ki Teitzei are Torah’s detailed blueprint for repairing them. Furthermore, they turn the Ten Sayings into a civil society that protects life, restores what was taken, honors proper order, and restrains destructive desire.

Israel’s unique role is not superiority but responsibility. As keepers of the Tree of Life, the Jewish people are commanded to live by these laws and to offer its fruit and leaves as healing to the nations (see Ezekiel 47 and the imagery of the leaves as healing for the nations). The same reciprocal principle that once multiplied fracture can now multiply repair. This happens when free will chooses the Tree’s path.

Living the Lesson in Elul

We stand in the month of Elul, the season of return. The petach remains open. Every civil commandment in this week’s portion is an invitation to choose the measure that heals rather than the measure that continues the wound.

May we, the descendants of Jacob, take up our responsibility with joy. May we live the mitzvot that repair the old family stories. And may the leaves of the Tree of Life bring healing to the entire human family—one free choice at a time.

Shabbat Shalom.

— Hazan Gavriel ben David Esnoga Beit HaShoavah

Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson continues to uncover the hidden precision of the Torah through equidistant letter sequences (ELS) and gematria. In this latest teaching, he presents a remarkable finding: using a letter skip equal to the gematria of the word Yisrael (ישראל = 541), the Torah itself encodes the identity of the Messiah as ben Yishai (son of Jesse) and ben David (son of David), tightly bound to the word teshuvah — repentance.

This is not random. The Torah is the blueprint of creation. Its letters form living codes that still speak with mathematical exactness in our generation.

The Precision of the Skip: Gematria of Israel = 541

The numerical value of the five letters of Yisrael is:

• י = 10
• ש = 300
• ר = 200
• א = 1
• ל = 30

Total = 541

Rabbi Glazerson searches the continuous stream of Hebrew letters in the Torah at a skip of 541 letters. Within this structured dilug (skip), the phrases and words for Mashiach ben Yishai and ben David appear in meaningful proximity to teshuvah.

This alignment is highly significant. According to the statistical standards used by researchers such as Professor Eliyahu Rips, such tight clustering of related terms at a meaningful skip is far beyond chance.

Why Repentance Appears with the Messiah

The Rambam (Maimonides) is clear in Hilchot Teshuvah: the coming of the Messiah and the final redemption are conditional upon the Jewish people returning to Hashem through genuine repentance. Without teshuvah, there is no complete geulah.

Rabbi Glazerson’s table shows this exact relationship encoded in the Torah itself. The codes do not merely name the Messiah; they place him next to the very condition required for his arrival. The Torah teaches, through its hidden layer, the same truth that the open text and the sages have always taught: return to Hashem, and the Redeemer will come.

The Larger Blueprint

These findings fit the consistent pattern Rabbi Glazerson has shown for years:

• The Torah encodes the stages of redemption.
• The physical preparation often comes through a “son of Joseph” figure who opens the way.
• The final spiritual redemption arrives with Mashiach ben David, the son of Jesse.
• The indispensable key is teshuvah.

When the gematria of the name of the people of Israel itself becomes the key that reveals both the Messiah and repentance, the message is unmistakable. The destiny of Israel and the coming of the son of Jesse are inseparable from the nation’s return to the Torah.

A Call for Our Generation

We stand in a time of great upheaval. The nations continue to gather pressure against Jerusalem. Yet the Torah’s codes keep surfacing the same ancient promise with fresh clarity. The blueprint has not changed. The path remains the same: teshuvah, return to the commandments, strengthening of Torah observance, and trust in the God of Israel.

Rabbi Glazerson’s latest table is another luminous confirmation that the Torah is unlike any other book. Its surface narrative, its literary structure, its numerical relationships, and its hidden letter sequences all testify with one voice. The Messiah, son of Jesse, is bound to the repentance of the people whose very name equals 541.

May we hear the call of the codes and of the open text. May we do teshuvah from the depths of the heart. And may we merit to see the complete redemption speedily in our days.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Chapter Nine: Codes That Don’t Lie – Glazerson’s Torah Oracle
• 606 + 7= Ruth, The Code
• The Torah’s Living Timeline: Verses That Speak Our Generation’s Story – From 1948 to October 7 and Beyond
• Bible Codes Israel and Ishmael: Professor Glazerson, DNA Evidence, and the 70 Nations
• Milestone 17: Hosea’s Plea that the Lord Would Grant Life to Repentant Israel on the Third Day
  
  

The Torah is the blueprint of creation. It is not merely a book of history, law, or inspiration. It is the precise, layered architectural plan by which Hashem formed the universe, encoded human destiny, and mapped the redemption of His Land and His people.

No other text in human history displays this combination of mathematical structure, linguistic precision, predictive power across millennia, and hidden codes that continue to surface in real time.

Hebrew is not a conventional language. Its roots function like chemical elements; the binyanim (verbal conjugations) act like bonds and reactions that transform meaning with absolute consistency. Chiastic structures bind entire books and narratives into interlocking symmetries.

Gematria reveals numerical identities that are not decorative but structural. Equidistant letter sequences (ELS)—the Torah codes studied by Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson and others—embed additional layers of information that surface only when the continuous letter stream of the Torah is examined at regular intervals.

These are not after-the-fact curiosities. They form part of the same system that already contains the open-text prophecies of the return to the Land, the gathering of the nations against Jerusalem, and the final confrontation that leads to the revelation of Hashem’s glory.

The Prophetic Framework of the End of Days

The Tanakh is unambiguous. The Jewish people must first return to the Land in significant numbers and regain sovereignty over Jerusalem. Only then do the nations rise against her. Zechariah 12:3 declares that Jerusalem will become a burdensome stone for all the peoples; all who lift it will be severely injured. In addition, all the nations of the earth will gather against it.

Ezekiel 38–39 describes the coalition headed by Persia (Iran) and its allies that comes against a people dwelling securely in the Land. The purpose of this confrontation is not Israel’s destruction but the opposite. Specifically, it is so that the nations will know that Hashem is God when He intervenes dramatically on behalf of His people.

After the war come the recognition, the purification, and the permanent dwelling of the Divine Presence. Ezekiel 40–48 details the future Temple and the restored order. The sequence is fixed: return → confrontation → redemption. This is the blueprint.

Trump, Cyrus, and the Directed Hatred

Isaiah 45 calls the Persian king Cyrus “His anointed” (משיחו)—a non-Jew raised up specifically to open the way for the Jewish return and the rebuilding of the Temple. The open text already establishes the pattern. For example, Hashem uses unexpected instruments, even pagan rulers, to advance Israel’s redemption.

Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson’s Torah-code tables repeatedly place the name of Donald Trump adjacent to the Hebrew for Cyrus (Koresh), to “president of the United States,” to “lover of Israel,” and in proximity to language of redemption and the anointed. One early table appears in Leviticus. It is near the discussion of the anointed kohen.

Other tables link Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (announced in the month of Iyar, associated with Joseph) to the larger theme of the “son of Joseph” who prepares the physical ground for the final redemption. These codes do not invent a new theology. Instead, they illuminate the same pattern already written in Isaiah.

Intense Hatred

The intensity of hatred directed at Trump is therefore not random political animosity. It is of a different order than ordinary partisan dislike. In living memory, no other figure has been targeted with such sustained, almost liturgical vitriol. Ronald Reagan was also shot and survived, yet the quality and universality of the hatred directed at Trump stand apart.

When a gentile leader is raised up to serve the interests of Israel’s restoration—moving the embassy, recognizing the Golan, facilitating the Abraham Accords, confronting the Iranian nuclear threat—the forces that stand against the redemption of Zion inevitably focus their rage upon him. The hatred itself becomes evidence that the ancient pattern is active. As a result, the nations are gathering, and the instrument that helps Israel becomes the lightning rod.

This is the hand of Hashem. The same God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that His power would be displayed, and who raised Cyrus so that the decree of return could go forth, is directing the opposition of our day. Consequently, the final confrontation will be unmistakable.

Why the Christian Bible Has No Place in This Conversation

The end-time conversation belongs exclusively to the Tanakh. Rabbi Tovia Singer has repeatedly demonstrated that the Hebrew prophets already supply the complete sequence: the return of the Jewish people, the war of Gog and Magog centered on Persia, the burdensome stone of Jerusalem, the destruction of the aggressor nations, the recognition of Hashem by the world, and the permanent restoration. Therefore, there is no gap that requires a later “New Testament” to fill.

The Christian scriptures introduce concepts foreign to the prophetic texts—the replacement of Israel, a suffering messiah whose work is already finished in a different age, and a timeline that consistently misaligns with the plain readings of Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Isaiah. When the prophets speak of the nations coming against Jerusalem, they do so in the context of a restored Jewish people already living in the Land under Jewish sovereignty. That is the reality of our generation. Attempts to read later Christian frameworks back into these chapters obscure rather than illuminate the blueprint. As a result, the Torah and the Prophets stand complete.

A Book Like No Other

The precision is multi-layered and self-reinforcing. The open narrative of history and law, the literary architecture, the numerical relationships, the prophetic forecasts that have already begun to materialize, and the hidden letter sequences that continue to surface relevant names and events—all of these operate together. No other ancient text or modern composition exhibits this combination of features. For example, DNA itself functions as a coded language of life. The Torah presents itself as the prior, higher code from which the patterns of creation and history are derived.

We are living inside the blueprint. The return has occurred. The nations are aligning against Jerusalem. An unexpected instrument has been raised and is being opposed with unusual ferocity. The codes continue to surface the ancient pattern in modern names. The required response is not speculation but recognition. Therefore, return to the Torah itself, strengthen the people of Israel, and prepare for the revelation the prophets described.

The Torah is not a book among books. It is the architectural plan of creation and the operating manual of redemption. Everything else is commentary.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Trump as Modern Cyrus: Rabbis Proclaim a Divine Mandate for a New Era of Governance and Redemption
• For your sake, Hashem was angry with me. — Devarim 1:37 (and 3:26)
• The Jewish Prophets Words
• Where’s Your Cyrus? – Trump as God’s Tool, Not the King
• Trump Is Rebuilding An American Heritage Returning To God, Family, Country.

New King James Version
And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty, and your faith is also empty.

This is what every Christian must ask themselves: now what do I do?

The evidence is clear.

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The Torah Blueprint Analysis

Milestone 21: The Journey from Sinai to Zion Undertaken When the Lord Leads to the Place of Rest on the Third Day: “So they departed from the mount of the Lord on a journey of three days; and the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them for the three days’ journey, to search out a resting place for them.

And the cloud of the Lord was above them by day when they set out from the camp. So it was, whenever the ark set out, that Moses said: “Arise, O Lord, and let your enemies be scattered!” (Num 10:33–35) The movement of Israel from the encampment of Mount Sinai was undertaken to seek a “place of rest.” That “rest” will afterward be identified as situated upon Mount Zion.

Solomon will dedicate the temple with the cry, “Arise, O Lord God, to your resting place, you and the Ark of your power; let your priests, O Lord God, be clothed with salvation and let your godly ones rejoice in what is good” (2 Chron 6:41). And the psalmist will likewise sing, “the Lord has chosen Zion; he has desired it for his dwelling place. ‘This is my resting place forever; here I will dwell, for I have desired it’ ” (Psa 132:4).

All true Israel will find her final resting place in Christ, the Root of Jesse and Israel’s true Temple, “and his resting place will be glorious” (Isa 11:10) when he builds the eternal Temple by arising on the third day, the day of his victory, when all his enemies are scattered (John 2:19). It is the third day when Jesus leads forth his people from the Jerusalem below, which is Sinai (Gal 4:25), to bring them to the Jerusalem above, which is his eternal rest.

Gage, W. A. (2011). Milestones to Emmaus: The Third Day Resurrection in the Old Testament (p. 54). Warren A. Gage.

The Torah Blueprint Addresses the Claim

Warren Gage anchors this claim in Numbers 10:33–35, where Israel departs from Sinai on a three-day journey with the ark going before them “to search out a resting place.” Gage then links that resting place to Zion, the Temple, Isaiah 11:10, and finally to Jesus rising on the third day as the true Temple and true rest for “all true Israel.”

This is a sweeping theological move. It takes a historical narrative about Israel’s physical journey and turns it into a prophecy of national replacement and individual resurrection. Using the method of careful historical and textual scrutiny (the approach popularized by scholars such as Jay Smith for testing later religious claims against earlier sources), we will examine whether the claim aligns with the facts on the ground in the Hebrew text.

The Plain Reading of Numbers 10:33–35

The text is straightforward:

“So they departed from the mount of the Lord on a journey of three days; and the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them for the three days’ journey, to search out a resting place for them… So it was, whenever the ark set out, that Moses said: ‘Arise, O Lord, and let Your enemies be scattered!’”

This is a travel notice. After receiving the Torah at Sinai, Israel begins the next stage of the wilderness journey. The ark goes ahead to find a suitable camping place. Moses’ prayer is a call for divine protection on the march. The “three days” is simply the length of this leg of the journey. Nothing in the passage speaks of resurrection, a dying Messiah, a new Temple made of a person, or the redefinition of Israel.

Later texts identify Zion as the place of God’s rest (Psalm 132; 2 Chronicles 6:41). Isaiah 11:10 speaks of the Root of Jesse standing as a banner for the peoples and of his glorious resting place. These are real verses. The question is whether they form a continuous prophetic chain that culminates in Jesus rising on the third day and becoming the final resting place for a redefined “true Israel.”

Applying a Jay Smith-Style Examination

Jay Smith’s method insists on four basic questions when a later tradition claims to fulfill or complete an earlier revelation:

• How did the claim arise? The claim arises by reading the New Testament (especially John 2:19 and Galatians 4:25) backward into the Torah. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” is treated as the interpretive key for Numbers 10, Isaiah 11, and the entire Sinai-to-Zion movement. The three-day journey becomes a type of the three days in the tomb. This is a classic case of later theology controlling earlier text rather than the earlier text generating the later claim.
• What does the full picture of the original sources actually show? Numbers 10 is about physical movement and divine guidance in the wilderness. Zion becomes the resting place of the ark and the Temple under David and Solomon. Isaiah 11 is a royal, messianic vision of a Davidic king who restores justice and gathers the nations. Nowhere does the Tanakh say that the resting place is a person who dies and rises, or that Sinai itself is a form of spiritual bondage (as Galatians 4:25 asserts). The Hebrew Bible consistently presents the Torah given at Sinai as life, light, and the path of blessing (Deuteronomy 30:15–20; Psalm 19; Proverbs 3:18).
• Was there enough time and continuity for this interpretation to be the original meaning? For more than a thousand years after the events of Numbers, Jewish readers understood the three-day journey as historical travel and Zion as the chosen place of God’s presence among Israel. The idea that the journey points to a third-day resurrection that redefines Israel as those who rest in Christ appears only after the rise of the Christian movement. There is no continuous chain of interpretation from the prophets through the Second Temple period that reads Numbers 10 this way.
• Does the reading match the original blueprint? The original blueprint given in Genesis and developed through the Torah presents Israel as Hashem’s firstborn son, servant, and light to the nations. The goal is not the replacement of Israel but the nations coming to the light of Israel and the Torah (Isaiah 2:2–4; 42:6; 49:6). Redemption is tied to covenant faithfulness, repentance (teshuvah), and the preservation of the original design. Gage’s claim requires that the original servant people find their true identity only by being absorbed into a later figure. That is not the trajectory of the Tanakh.

The Ten Sayings and the Path of Redemption

If we want to know how redemption comes to the world according to the Torah, we must look at the Ten Sayings given at Sinai—the very mountain from which the three-day journey begins.

The Ten Sayings are not temporary scaffolding. They are the practical expression of the blueprint for human society and relationship with Hashem:

• The First and Second Sayings establish exclusive loyalty to the one God and forbid the creation of substitutes. Creating a new mediator or a new “true Israel” that replaces the original covenant people violates the prohibition against other gods and graven images of divine reality.
• The Third Saying forbids taking God’s name in vain. Using the name of the God of Israel to authorize a narrative that erases or redefines Israel is a form of taking the Name lightly.
• The Fourth Saying (Shabbat) points to the true rest: a weekly reminder that creation is complete and that human beings find rest in the rhythm established by the Creator, not in a later historical event such as the resurrection.
• The Fifth Saying commands honor for father and mother. In the larger family of humanity, this includes honoring the original firstborn son—Israel—rather than declaring him replaced.
• The remaining Sayings (murder, adultery, theft, false witness, coveting) protect the integrity of human relationships and property. A theology that reassigns Israel’s identity and inheritance without clear warrant from the original text raises serious questions under the Ninth Saying (false witness).

Redemption, according to the Torah, comes when the nations learn these ways of life from the people who received them. It does not come by declaring that the original recipients of the covenant must find their final resting place only by becoming something else.

Israel as Servant and the Resting Place

Isaiah repeatedly calls Israel “My servant” (Isaiah 41:8–9; 43:10; 44:1–2; 49:3). The servant is the nation through whom the light goes to the Gentiles. Isaiah 11:10 speaks of the Root of Jesse as a banner for the peoples; it does not say that the Root replaces the people or becomes their only possible resting place. The resting place of Hashem remains connected to Zion and to the covenant people who dwell there in faithfulness.

When Gage asserts that “all true Israel will find her final resting place in Christ,” he is not summarizing the Hebrew text. He is imposing a later theological conclusion upon it. The original design does not require Israel to die and rise in a single representative in order to reach rest. It requires Israel to walk in the ways given at Sinai and to be a light that draws the nations to the same path.

Verdict

The three-day journey in Numbers 10 is a historical travel notice. The resting place sought by the ark is the next campsite, later identified with Zion and the Temple. Isaiah 11 is a vision of Davidic restoration and universal recognition. None of these texts, read in their own context, teach that the final resting place of Israel is a third-day resurrection of a figure who redefines the identity of the people.

The claim that Jesus leads “true Israel” from the “Jerusalem below” (Sinai) to the “Jerusalem above” rests on Pauline allegory, not on the plain sense of the Torah and Prophets. When the original sources are allowed to speak for themselves, the evidence for Gage’s reading is absent.

The Tree of Life—the Torah—was never lost. The original blueprint remains. Redemption still comes through return to that blueprint and through Israel’s role as servant and light to the nations.

The silence of the Tanakh when asked for clear, plain-text receipts for this third-day replacement reading continues to speak.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• The Fourth Commandment in Toldot: “Stay With Laban a Few Days” – The First Shabbat in Exile
• Why Christianity Never Got Out of the Garden
• The Tree of Life Blueprint: What the Spies, Manna, and Our Family Struggles Reveal Today
• Matot-Masei: Why God Cares About Your Broken Windows – The 42 Journeys
• Becoming Aware of Your Soul: The Tree of Life Blueprint Christianity Never Answered

In Parshat Shoftim, the Torah commands:

The earthly court in the Torah is called “elohim,” God. The court represents Hashem, and they are held to a higher standard. Today, look at our courts and ask yourself, where is Mishpat Tzedek?

Come, Hashem, and restore our judges as at first.

“Judges and officers shall you appoint in all your gates… and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment… Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deuteronomy 16:18–20). The parsha continues with the higher court that sits in “the place which the LORD your God shall choose.” This is the Sanhedrin whose rulings bind the nation. Earthly justice is not optional.

It is the concrete expression of the covenant that began with Abraham. His descendants were to “keep the way of the LORD, to do righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19).

This week the same Torah that establishes human courts also reveals, through the equidistant letter sequences uncovered by Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, that the ultimate court already sits in session. The Day of Universal Judgment is not a later invention. In fact, it is written into the opening chapters of Genesis.

Rabbi Glazerson’s Discovery in Genesis 5

In the continuous letter stream of Genesis chapter 5—the “book of the generations of Adam”—Rabbi Glazerson has shown sequences in which the phrases connected to Rosh Hashanah appear. These sequences appear together with language of the universe standing in judgment.

The relevant stretch runs roughly from verses 13 through 33, covering the generations from Kenan through Noah. At minimal letter skips (including a documented 39-letter and related 76-letter intervals), the codes cluster around the head of the year. They also cluster around the world’s judgment.

The surface text is already a family register: Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah. The hidden text declares that the same family will one day stand before the Judge of all the earth. The book whose name means “In the Beginning” already encodes the day on which the entire created order is weighed. The rabbis did not invent the character of Rosh Hashanah; they recognized what the letters themselves contain.

The Human Family on Trial: Edom, Ishmael, and Israel

The judgment is familial. The seventy nations that descend from Noah are divided, in classical sources and in the sacrificial order of Sukkot, between the dominion associated with Ishmael and the dominion associated with Esau/Edom. Christianity grew within the civilizational orbit of Edom. Moreover, Islam arose from the line of Ishmael. Both claim Abraham. However, both contest the covenant’s unique status that runs from Isaac and Jacob to the House of David and the city of Jerusalem.

The codes do not invent this tension; they confirm that the Torah never hid it. The struggle that began with the twins in Rebecca’s womb and the expulsion of Hagar continues until the end of days. Reconciliation is promised—Esau falling on Jacob’s neck, Isaac and Ishmael together at Abraham’s burial—but it comes after a hard reckoning. In fact, the letters of Genesis already contain both the conflict and the healing.

Iran as a Key in the Code

Within these same tables, Iran appears as a contemporary key. Classical sources identify Persia with forces that rise again in the final period. The Talmud and later commentators speak of Persia (and by extension the Islamic world centered in modern Iran) extending its reach until the days of Mashiach. In addition, Rabbi Glazerson’s matrices place Iran inside the larger pattern of Ishmael’s role in the end of days—sometimes as the power that intensifies the pressure on Israel, sometimes as the force that forces the final clarification between the claims of Edom, Ishmael, and the covenant people.

The codes do not predict dates with mechanical precision. However, they do reveal that the ancient text already knew the actors who would stand on the stage when the universal judgment becomes visible in history.

From Shoftim to the Heavenly Court

Parshat Shoftim teaches us how to build earthly courts that pursue tzedek. The codes in Genesis 5 remind us that those courts are training for a higher one. On Rosh Hashanah, the Judge of all the earth opens the books. The standard is the same standard given to Abraham: righteousness and justice. The family that began with Adam is called to account according to the blueprint set forth in the first chapters of the Torah.

As Elul continues and we approach the Days of Awe, the message is practical. Appoint righteous judges in your gates. Pursue justice without partiality. And remember that the same letters that command earthly courts also declare that the entire universe stands in judgment on the day the Torah itself calls the head of the year.

The Book is still speaking. The codes are not curiosities. Instead, they are reminders that the Blueprint was complete from the beginning—and that the family of Adam is being summoned, once again, to return to it.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson has repeatedly shown that the Torah codes of Genesis are not random curiosities. In tables drawn from the continuous letter stream of Bereshit, the phrase “Rosh Hashanah” (or its clear equivalents for the head of the year) appears together with “universe in time of judgment.”

These sequences cluster with minimal skips inside the creation narrative itself. The very book whose name means “In the Beginning” already encodes the day on which the entire world stands in judgment. Someone had to know this for the Rabbis to assign the biblical Yom Teruah of the seventh month the name and character of universal judgment. Thus, the day is not an invention. It is a revelation already present in the blueprint.

The Whole Torah Contained in the First Word

The Vilna Gaon taught that the entire Torah is contained in its first book, the first book in its first portion, the first portion in its first verse, and the first verse in its first word—Bereshit. He demonstrated the principle on the spot when challenged about the mitzvah of pidyon haben. The letters of בראשית form the acronym: Ben Rishon Achar Sheloshim Yom Tifdeh—“a firstborn son after thirty days you shall redeem.”

The Gaon’s insight is not clever wordplay. It is the recognition that the Torah is a single, unified organism. Everything that will unfold in history, law, and redemption is already latent in the opening word. The codes that Glazerson uncovers are simply the same principle operating at the level of equidistant letter sequences. The minimal skip is the most concentrated expression of that latent design.

Sukkot, the Seventy Bulls, and the Two Houses of the Nations

The same design appears in the sacrificial order of Sukkot. Over seven days the Torah commands a descending number of bulls that total exactly seventy—corresponding to the seventy nations that descended from Noah. The Vilna Gaon noticed a further precision in the accompanying sin-offerings.

On some days the text says “a kid of goats”; on others simply “a kid.” The days whose offerings are linked to “kid of goats” total thirty-five bulls; the remaining days also total thirty-five. One set corresponds to the nations under Ishmael’s dominion. The other to the nations under the dominion of Esau (Edom).

The human family is already divided in the sacrificial map of the seventh month. The seventy bulls are Israel’s priestly intercession for the whole family of Adam. The thirty-five and thirty-five mark the two great branches that will contend with Jerusalem until the end.

Adam, the Blueprint, and the Tree of Life

This division is not abstract geopolitics. It is family history written into the structure of creation itself. In the teachings developed in Adam, the Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, Adam is not merely the first man. Instead, he is the living template. The Tree of Life is the architecture through which the divine letters organize reality—DNA as living Torah, roots as elemental forces, branches as the unfolding of history.

The human family is real. Every nation is a descendant. The judgment that falls on Rosh Hashanah is therefore a family judgment. The Ten Sayings (the Ten Commandments) are the moral code of that family. The original fracture is a family problem. It is the struggle between the house of Esau/Edom and the house of Jacob centered in Jerusalem, and the parallel struggle between Ishmael and the covenant line that runs through Isaac to the House of David.

Islam (Ishmael) and the Christian civilization that grew from Edom both claim a relationship to Abraham while contesting the unique status of Jerusalem and the Davidic promise. The Torah never hides the coming conflict. It narrates the twins’ birth, the theft of the blessing, the long separation, and the eventual embrace. The same story is written large across the nations.

The Reconciliation on the Neck

Rabbi David Fohrman, in his series A Book Like No Other on Shavuot, brings the brothers’ story into sharp focus. Around the moment corresponding to the nineteenth minute of the relevant discussion, he notes what happens when Jacob and Esau finally meet. Esau runs, falls on Jacob’s neck, and kisses him; they weep.

The earlier blessing had placed a yoke on Esau’s neck—“you shall serve your brother, yet you will break his yoke from your neck.” In the reconciliation, the yoke is gone. The zero-sum game is over. There is no longer “I rise only if you fall.” There is only one neck against another, two brothers crying together. The competitive blessing is transcended. The family can breathe again.

This is the trajectory the prophets describe. Hosea 1 speaks of children who will be called “sons of the living God.” Ezekiel 37 takes two sticks—one for Judah, one for Joseph/Ephraim—and joins them into one in the hand of the prophet. The two trees become one Tree. The divided family is restored.

The War That Still Comes

Yet the Torah and the prophets are honest. Before that full reconciliation there is a hard war. The codes that place “universe in time of judgment” inside Genesis do not cancel the coming conflict; they locate it inside the same creation narrative that already contains the possibility of healing. Rosh Hashanah is the annual rehearsal of that final accounting.

The nations under Ishmael and the nations under Edom, the forces that contend with Jerusalem and the House of David, stand before the Judge together with Israel. The human family is real. It will be judged by the Ten Sayings that were spoken into the same letter-stream that begins with Bereshit.

The Vilna Gaon showed that everything is already in the first word. Glazerson’s tables show that the Day of Universal Judgment is already named in the book of creation. The seventy bulls and the thirty-five and thirty-five map the divided family.

Fohrman’s reading of the brothers’ embrace shows the goal: the yoke removed, the zero-sum game ended, necks joined in tears rather than in domination. Between the present and that goal stands a hard war. Rosh Hashanah summons every member of the family—Jew, descendant of the Ten Tribes, Noahide, Ishmaelite, and Edomite—to turn while there is still time.

The end was declared from the beginning. The letters have not forgotten. The family is still called to come home.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• The Raising Lion
• Rosh Hashanah, Universal Judgment, and the Call to the Ten Tribes: The Torah’s Design from Beginning to End
• The True Story of King David: Unraveling Misconceptions in Jewish Tradition
• Rosh HaShana “Seder” and symbolic actions.
• Bible Codes Israel and Ishmael: Professor Glazerson, DNA Evidence, and the 70 Nations

As Elul opens and we stand thirty days from Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Universal Judgment, a familiar challenge rises from those who once stood near the Jewish people and then turned away. As a former Messianic Christian, I have heard it from hundreds: “Rosh Hashanah is made up by the Rabbis.

You Jews are always changing things in the Bible.” The claim is false. The day itself is written in the Torah. The deeper meaning of judgment, kingship, and return is the faithful transmission of what the Torah already contains.

Yom Teruah Is Not a Rabbinic Invention

Leviticus 23:23–25 commands: “In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation.” Numbers 29:1 repeats it as “a day of teruah.” The Torah itself establishes the day.

The name “Rosh Hashanah” and its identification as the Day of Judgment and the beginning of the year for counting years appear in the Oral Torah, yet they rest on the biblical foundation. The shofar, the call to remembrance, and the themes of kingship already echo through the Tanakh.

Psalms of divine kingship and the prophetic insistence that Hashem judges the world supply the substance. Jews did not invent a new holiday; they preserved and illuminated the one Hashem gave.

On this day we crown Hashem as King. The liturgy of Malchuyot is not an addition foreign to Scripture; it is the public acknowledgment that the God who created the world continues to rule it. Rosh Hashanah is the day the entire human family, not only Israel, stands before the Judge. That is why the urgency of these thirty days reaches far beyond the Jewish people.

Declaring the End from the Beginning

Isaiah 46:9–10 states: “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure.”

The Torah itself is the primary demonstration of this principle. Before Persia (Iran), before the modern nation of Israel, before Edom and the civilization that grew from it and called itself Christian, the letters of Genesis already contained the pattern.

Researchers of equidistant letter sequences (ELS), often called Torah codes, have shown that related words appear in Genesis at statistically significant proximity when measured by minimal skip distance. A minimal skip is the smallest equidistant interval at which a given word or phrase appears in the continuous letter stream of the text.

When that minimal-skip occurrence clusters with other relevant terms inside the same chapter or thematic section, the design becomes visible. The codes are not random noise; they sit within the narrative flow of the book, which begins with creation and already maps the later history of the nations.

The Alef-Bet is the operating system. Every letter is a building block. The fact that these sequences remain readable after more than three millennia of transmission is itself evidence that the text was guarded with extraordinary care throughout the long exile.

The Alef-Bet Confirms Transmission

Jewish children learn Hashem through the Alef-Bet because the letters are the blueprint of creation. The same twenty-two letters that form the words of Genesis are the letters that form every subsequent book of the Torah.

The precision required to keep the text letter-perfect across centuries of dispersion is the practical proof that the people who carried it never abandoned it. The claim that “the Jews changed the Bible” collapses under the weight of the manuscript evidence and the living tradition that still reads the same consonants today that were read in antiquity.

The Time of the Ten Tribes and the Noahides

This is the season when the Ten Tribes and the Noahides of the nations are called to do teshuvah and return to their father and mother, Abraham and Sarah. The Vilna Gaon’s circle understood that the beginning of the Redemption requires the awakening of the lost brothers.

The 1830 letter of Rabbi Yisrael of Shklov to the Ten Tribes was not a curiosity; it was a summons. The Gaon’s students called the scattered tribes to come and assist in the restoration. Today that call is louder. The Land is being rebuilt. The Hebrew language has returned. The fruit of the Land is appearing.

These are among the seven pillars taught in Kol HaTor: the gathering of the exiles (including the Ten Tribes), the building of Jerusalem, the cleansing of the Land through planting and the mitzvot dependent on it, the raising up of people of truth, the spread of Torah from Zion, the war against Amalek, and the healing of Zion.

Noahides, the righteous of the nations who accept the seven laws given to the children of Noah, are also summoned. Abraham and Sarah are the parents of the multitude of nations. The return is not conversion for its own sake; it is recognition of the God of Abraham and the moral order revealed at the beginning. Rosh Hashanah is the universal day of judgment precisely so that every human being may crown Hashem as King and turn.

Combining the Urgency

The two ideas belong together. The footsteps of Mashiach ben Yosef, the return of the Ten Tribes, and the call to the nations coincide with the annual Day of Judgment. Isaiah’s declaration that the end is told from the beginning is not abstract theology; it is written into the letter structure of Genesis itself. The same Torah that the Jewish people have kept through exile is the Torah that now calls the lost tribes and the righteous among the nations to return while there is still time.

Elul is the month of preparation. The shofar of Rosh Hashanah will soon sound. The Judge is also the King who desires the return of His children. Jews and their descendants remain bound to the Torah for life. The Ten Tribes are being stirred. Noahides are being invited. The design of the Torah, visible in its minimal skips and in the unbroken transmission of the Alef-Bet, confirms that nothing essential has been lost and that the counsel of Hashem still stands.

The day is approaching. Make Hashem King. Return to the Father and Mother of the multitude. The end was declared from the beginning. The time to act is now.

Selected Sources

• Leviticus 23:23–25; Numbers 29:1
• Isaiah 46:9–10
• Kol HaTor (Voice of the Turtle Dove)
• Letter of Rabbi Yisrael of Shklov to the Ten Tribes (1830)
• Studies on equidistant letter sequences in Genesis (Witztum–Rips–Rosenberg and subsequent research on minimal-skip significance)

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• The True Story of King David: Unraveling Misconceptions in Jewish Tradition
• A Dialogue on the Noahide Laws: Understanding the Seven Laws of Noah in Judaism
• Was the Great Assembly Invented? Testing the Claim
• Rosh HaShana “Seder” and symbolic actions.
• 606 + 7= Ruth, The Code

As the month of Elul begins and we stand thirty days from the universal judgment of Rosh Hashanah, the Torah portion of Shoftim and its Haftarah from Isaiah 51 call us with urgent clarity. “I, I am He who comforts you,” declares Hashem.¹ We have paid for our sins through centuries of exile, suffering, and faithfulness.

The arm of Hashem is visible in our days. Jews and their descendants—whether of known lineage or the hidden ones returning—carry a lifelong obligation to the Torah. This is not optional culture or ethnic identity. It is the covenant sealed at Sinai. It was witnessed by those who heard the Voice. In addition, it is preserved in the Hebrew letters that form the very blueprint of creation.

The Alef-Bet: How Jewish Children Know Hashem

One of the primary reasons Jewish children know Hashem is the Alef-Bet. The twenty-two letters are not mere symbols for communication. They are the instruments through which Hashem spoke the world into being. “By the word of Hashem the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6).

The Sages teach that the Torah preceded creation and served as its blueprint.² Every letter, every combination, every root carries creative force. When a child learns to form the letters, to sound the vowels, to read the words of the Living God, that child is being initiated into the architecture of reality itself.

This is why the Hebrew language remains holy even when spoken imperfectly. It is why the return of the language in the Land is itself a sign. Christianity and Islam, for all their claims, stand on the outside of this reality. Both systems treat the Jewish people as having been replaced—two sides of the same replacement coin. They assert that the covenant has been superseded. They claim that the “old” Israel has been set aside for a new spiritual body or a final prophet.

Yet the Jewish people still possess the Book handed down from those who saw and heard “the words of Hashem.” We remain His witnesses, as Isaiah declares: “You are My witnesses… and My servant whom I have chosen” (Isaiah 43:10).³ No later claim can erase the testimony of those who stood at Sinai.

This Shabbat: Shoftim and Isaiah 51

Parashat Shoftim opens with the command to appoint judges and officers who will pursue justice. It continues with the laws of kings, prophets, cities of refuge, and warfare. The portion insists on righteousness in the land and fidelity to the Torah.

The accompanying Haftarah (Isaiah 51:12–52:12), the fourth of the seven Haftarot of Consolation, answers the cry of exile with divine comfort. Jerusalem will rise, the cup of trembling will pass from her hand, and Hashem will bare His holy arm before the eyes of the nations.⁴

We have paid. The long exile, the pogroms, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the ongoing war against the Jewish people have exacted their price. The righteous among our ancestors prayed that their descendants would live to see Hashem’s arm revealed in these days. Some of us are the answer to those prayers. I am one such descendant. The obligation that rests upon us is therefore not abstract. It is personal, generational, and irrevocable.

The Lifelong Obligation of Jews and Their Descendants

Every Jew and every descendant who discovers Jewish roots is bound to the Torah for life. The covenant is not a temporary contract that can be annulled by history or theology. Deuteronomy repeatedly warns that the commandments are neither too hard nor too far away. They are in our mouth and heart to do them (Deuteronomy 30:11–14).

The return of hidden Jews, crypto-Jews, and those whose DNA or family memory points back to Israel is part of the same process. Isaiah 56 speaks of the foreigners and the eunuchs who join themselves to Hashem, keep the Sabbath, and hold fast to the covenant. The obligation is lifelong because the relationship is lifelong.

Kol HaTor: The Voice of the Turtle Dove and the Seven Things That Must Happen

The Vilna Gaon and his disciples taught that the beginning of the Redemption unfolds through the “footsteps of the Mashiach,” guided by the principle of Mashiach ben Yosef. The book Kol HaTor (“The Voice of the Turtle Dove”), attributed to Rabbi Hillel of Shklov, a disciple of the Gaon, draws its title from Song of Songs 2:12: “The voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.”⁵ The Gaon saw in this verse the signal of the awakening from below. There are designated deeds, designated times, and designated emissaries working together.

According to the teachings preserved in Kol HaTor, the beginning of the Redemption rests upon seven major pillars or principles:⁶

Seven Pillars: Seven Days of Creation

1. Gathering in the exiles – the return of the Jewish people to the Land, including the awakening of the Ten Tribes.
2. Building Jerusalem – the physical and spiritual reconstruction of the holy city.
3. Eradicating the impure spirit from Eretz Israel by planting the Land and fulfilling the commandments dependent upon it. The Talmud already notes that the land bearing its fruit is one of the clearest signs of redemption (Sanhedrin 98a).
4. Setting up people of truth in order to redeem the truth and sanctify the Name of God.
5. Promoting the spread of Torah from Zion.
6. Waging war against Amalek – in the heart (the evil inclination), in the spiritual realm, and against the physical forces that seek Israel’s destruction.
7. Healing Zion – the restoration and consolation of the Land and people.

These are not abstract ideas. They are the practical work of the beginning of the Redemption, carried out modestly, step by step, through human effort that draws down heavenly assistance.

The Gaon insisted that the process begins from below, as it did in the days of Cyrus. In addition, Mashiach ben Yosef’s mission includes materially strengthening Israel so that Mashiach ben David can complete the spiritual redemption.

The Letters to the Ten Lost Tribes

The disciples of the Vilna Gaon did not merely study these ideas. They acted. In 1830, Rabbi Yisrael of Shklov, one of the Gaon’s close students and a leader of the Perushim community in Safed and Jerusalem, composed and sent a letter to the Ten Lost Tribes.⁷ The letter informed them of the state of the Jewish people, the development of halakhah, and the urgent need for their return.

A Cry For Help To The Ten Tribes

It called upon them to come and help—specifically to participate in the restoration of a proper Sanhedrin of ordained judges, which the Gaon’s circle believed was necessary for the beginning of the Redemption. The letter is filled with longing and fraternal appeal. Reading even a short portion of it moves the heart. The cry of a remnant calling to its brothers across centuries is unmistakable.

The Gaon and his students understood that the full ingathering includes both Judah and the House of Joseph. The awakening of the Ten Tribes is not a side note; it is one of the prerequisites. Today we see fragments of that awakening in the growing number of people discovering Jewish roots, returning to Torah, and identifying with Israel’s destiny. The process is unfolding exactly as the Sages and the Gaon described. The Land is being rebuilt and bearing fruit; Jerusalem is being restored; Torah is spreading from Zion. Moreover, the battle against the spiritual and physical heirs of Amalek continues.

The Call of This Hour

Elul is the month of return. Thirty days remain until we stand before the King. The Alef-Bet still teaches our children Who created the world. The Book is still in our hands. The witnesses have not been silenced. Replacement theologies have not nullified the covenant. The Voice of the Turtle Dove is being heard in the Land.

The Hidden Ones From Sinai – Nitzavim

Jews and their descendants—known and hidden—carry a lifelong obligation to the Torah. That obligation is not a burden to be escaped but the very reason our ancestors prayed we would be here: to see the arm of Hashem and to take our place in the work of redemption. The seven pillars stand before us. The letters to the lost brothers still echo. The time to act is now.

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Footnotes

1. Isaiah 51:12.
2. See Genesis Rabbah 1:1 and related midrashim on the Torah as blueprint.
3. Isaiah 43:10–12; see also Isaiah 44:8.
4. Isaiah 51:12–52:12; the fourth of the Sheva d’Nechemta.
5. Song of Songs 2:12. The title Kol HaTor is drawn from this verse.
6. Kol HaTor, Chapter 6 and related sections, listing the seven pillars of the beginning of the Redemption: gathering the exiles, building Jerusalem, eradicating impurity through planting and land mitzvot, establishing the people of truth, spreading Torah from Zion, waging war against Amalek, and healing Zion. English translations and discussions appear in various editions and studies of the text.
7. Letter to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel by Rabbi Yisrael ben Shmuel of Shklov, Safed/Jerusalem, 1830. Available on Sefaria and in collections of Eretz Israel letters (e.g., Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael).

Selected Books and Sources

• Kol HaTor (The Voice of the Turtle Dove), attributed to Rabbi Hillel of Shklov (various Hebrew editions and English translations).
• Letter to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Rabbi Yisrael of Shklov (Sefaria; also in Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael).
• Isaiah, Chapters 43, 51–52, and related prophetic texts.
• Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin 98a (on the land bearing fruit as a sign).
• Studies and discussions of the Vilna Gaon’s messianic teachings and the Aliyah of his disciples (historical works by Aryeh Morgenstern and others).
• Classical midrashic collections on the Torah as blueprint of creation (Genesis Rabbah and parallel sources).

May Hashem open our eyes to see His arm in these days, and may we fulfill our obligation with joy and faithfulness.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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Rabbi Chaim Richman became my first Rabbi in 2002 when he was talking about the Torah’s Most Deliberate Mystery. It was also my first time in Israel. The Temple Institute was where I met my family in Israel.

At that time, I had no idea my grandfather was a Cohen. I was a Christian (30 years). I had just discovered our family secret. Sephardic Jews from Spain on my mother’s side. I was Jerusalem-bound at 35 years old in 2002 to meet Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute.

What Other Book Makes It So Plain: Jerusalem

Mainstream scholars and casual readers often make a bold claim: the Torah never mentions Jerusalem. They are technically correct. The name “Jerusalem” does not appear even once in the Five Books of Moses.

Yet this absence is not an oversight. It is one of the most intentional literary decisions in the entire Torah. Instead of naming the city, Moshe Rabbeinu repeatedly points to a mysterious location with a single recurring phrase: ha-makom asher yivchar Hashem — “the place that Hashem will choose.”

According to careful counts across the commentaries, this phrase (and its close variants) appears approximately twenty to twenty-one times, almost all of them in Sefer Devarim, and the majority clustered in Parashat Re’eh and the chapters that follow. The Torah keeps pointing, again and again, without ever saying the name.

Why?

The Place Adam Already Knew

Traditional Jewish sources, including the Rambam in Hilchot Beit HaBechirah, teach that the site of the future altar on Mount Moriah is the same place where Adam himself brought an offering after he was created. It is the place where Cain and Abel offered, where Noah built an altar after the Flood, and where Abraham bound Isaac.

In other words, the “place that Hashem will choose” is not a new discovery. It is the original ground of human history — the place connected to the first human being who carried the Blueprint of Creation.

In my book Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I argue that Adam was never automatically immortal. The Tree of Life stood freely available in the Garden. Eternal life required relationship, trust, and the choice to eat from that Tree. The same principle reappears here. The permanent House of God would only be built when the nation was ready — when there was peace from surrounding enemies, when the people could truly “seek His dwelling” (leshichno tidreshu).

The Temple and the Tree of Life are parallel. Both are places of life. A required human partnership with Hashem. Both are given, yet both must be chosen and approached with intention.

Lebanon — The Temple That Whitens

When Moshe begged to enter the Land, he asked to see “this good mountain and the Lebanon” (Deuteronomy 3:25). Our Sages explain that “Lebanon” is a name for the Holy Temple. Why? Because the root lavan means “white.” The Temple malbin — it whitened — the sins of Israel.

Throughout the prophets and the writings of the Sages, the Temple is repeatedly called Lebanon. The same wood that built the House of God was the cedar of Lebanon. The same place that purified the nation is the place that first received the Blueprint through Adam.

The Shoulder of Judah and Benjamin

The eventual site sits on the border — the “shoulder” — between the territories of Judah and Benjamin. It is a shared inheritance, a place that belongs to the whole people even while it rests in a specific tribal allotment. This detail itself is part of the deliberate mystery: the place is chosen by Hashem, yet it emerges only through the history and seeking of the nation.

1. The Center

The Tree of Life stood in the midst of the Garden — the absolute center.

Jewish tradition places the Temple at the same cosmic center. Midrash after midrash describes the world as having a navel: the Land of Israel is the navel of the world, Jerusalem the navel of the Land, the Temple the navel of Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies the navel of the Temple, and the Even Shetiyah (Foundation Stone) the point from which the world itself was founded.

One center. One Tree. One Place.

2. Adam and the Original Ground

According to the Rambam and earlier midrashim, the site of the future altar on Mount Moriah is the very place where Adam brought an offering after his creation. It is also the place associated with the dust from which Adam was formed.

The first human being who carried the Blueprint of Creation stood on the ground that would later become the permanent House of God. The “place that Hashem will choose” is not a later invention. It is the original ground of human history.

3. Availability and Access

Eden (aligned with Rabbi Fohrman’s approach), the Tree of Life was freely present. Adam was not created immortal by default. Eternal life required a relationship of trust and the choice to eat from that Tree.

The same pattern appears with the Temple. The Torah never names Jerusalem. Instead it repeats, twenty-plus times, “the place that Hashem will choose.” The place is designated, yet it is only revealed and established through human seeking (leshichno tidreshu — “you shall seek His dwelling”).

Both the Tree and the Place are given by Hashem. Both require partnership and readiness on the human side.

4. Source of Life and Living Waters

Midrash teaches that all the waters of creation branch out from beneath the Tree of Life.

The Foundation Stone under the Temple is likewise associated with the source of the world’s waters and the point from which the earth was spread. The Temple becomes the place where spiritual life — atonement, the whitening of sins (“Lebanon”), the presence of the Shekhinah — flows out to the people and ultimately to the nations.

5. Cherubim and Guarding the Way

After the expulsion, cherubim with a flaming sword guard the way to the Tree of Life.

In the Mishkan and later in the Temple, cherubim stand over the Ark in the Holy of Holies. The same symbolic guardians appear at the threshold of the most intense divine presence. Access is protected, not forbidden forever.

6. Torah as the Continuing Tree of Life

Proverbs 3:18 calls wisdom (understood by the Sages as Torah) “a tree of life to those who grasp her.”

Once physical access to the Garden was closed, the Torah itself becomes the ongoing Tree of Life. The Temple is the place where that Tree is most fully lived, taught, and guarded (the Sanhedrin sat near the Temple; the Torah was read and taught there). The permanent House and the permanent Tree are meant to stand together.

7. One vs. Many

Eden had one Tree of Life in the center.

Deuteronomy insists on one Place among all the tribes. The centralizing formula is the Torah’s way of saying: just as there was one Tree of Life, there will be one House where Hashem places His Name. Multiplicity of altars is the path of the nations; the single Place is the path of the Blueprint. The Foundation Stone (Even ha-Shetiyah)

The Even ha-Shetiyah (אבן השתייה) is one of the most powerful and layered symbols in Jewish tradition. It sits at the intersection of creation, the Temple, Adam, and the cosmic center of the world.

What the Sources Say

In the Mishnah (Yoma 5:2), we read that after the Ark of the Covenant was no longer present, there remained a stone in the Holy of Holies “from the days of the early prophets.” It stood three fingerbreadths higher than the ground and was called Shetiyah. On Yom Kippur the High Priest placed the incense pan upon it.

Rabbi Yose explains the name: the world was founded (or “woven”) from it. The word shetiyah carries the sense of foundation and also of the warp threads of a loom—the starting point from which everything else is stretched out. Later midrashim expand this: the Holy One cast a precious stone into the deep, fixed it from above to below, and from that point the world expanded in every direction. It is the center point of the earth.

The Navel of the World

A classic midrashic sequence (found in Tanhuma and elsewhere) places the Stone at the absolute center:

• The Land of Israel is the navel of the world
• Jerusalem is the navel of the Land
• The Temple is the navel of Jerusalem
• The Sanctuary is the navel of the Temple
• The Holy of Holies is the navel of the Sanctuary
• The Foundation Stone stands before it, for from it the world was founded

This is the same language used of the Tree of Life standing “in the midst” of the Garden. Both are axis mundi—the vertical point where heaven, earth, and the deep meet.

Connection to Adam and the Patriarchs

Traditions link the site closely to the beginning of humanity. The earth from which Adam was formed was taken from this place (or near the future altar site). Adam offered sacrifices there. The same ground later became the site of the Binding of Isaac and the place where Jacob slept, set up a stone pillar, and declared, “This is none other than the House of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Some sources identify Jacob’s stone with the Even ha-Shetiyah itself.

In other words, the first human who carried the Blueprint of Creation stood on the same ground that would later hold the permanent House of Hashem.

Waters of the Deep

Later layers of the tradition associate the Stone with the sealing of the tehom—the subterranean waters of the abyss. When David dug the foundations for the Temple, he reached these waters and had to reseal them. The Stone is thus both the starting point of dry land and the lid that holds the chaotic deep in place. Parallel traditions speak of all the world’s waters originating from or flowing in connection with this point—echoing the midrash that all the waters of creation branch out from beneath the Tree of Life.

Parallel to the Tree of Life

The parallels are striking:

• Both stand at the absolute center.
• Both are the source-point of life and order.
• Both mark the place where the divine presence is most intensely accessible.
• Both require human approach and partnership—the Tree was available yet had to be chosen; the Place is designated yet must be sought.
• Both connect the first human (Adam) to the ultimate House of God.

The Foundation Stone is the physical, earthly counterpart to the Tree of Life’s role in Eden. Where the Tree offered the possibility of eternal life through relationship, the Stone marks the permanent ground from which that relationship can be restored and sustained for the whole world.

In the language of the Blueprint theme, the Stone is the original “place” already present at the beginning—long before the Torah ever names Jerusalem. The repeated, unnamed “place that Hashem will choose” in Deuteronomy points back to this same ground that Adam already knew.

8. Future Restoration

The prophets look forward to a time when the nations themselves will say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of Hashem, to the house of the God of Jacob” (Isaiah 2). The seeking that began with Israel becomes universal.

In that vision, the life that was once centered in the Tree of Eden flows again from the restored House in Jerusalem.

1. The Absolute Center

The Tree of Life stood in the midst of the Garden — the precise center.

The Foundation Stone is described as the navel of the world. The classic sequence in Midrash Tanhuma and parallel sources ends with the Stone itself: the world was founded from it. It is the earthly fixed point that corresponds to the Tree’s position in the center of Eden. Both function as axis mundi — the vertical axis where heaven, earth, and the deep meet.

2. Source of the Waters of Life

Midrashim on the Tree of Life state that all the waters of creation branch out from beneath it (Bereshit Rabbah and Zohar).

The Foundation Stone is linked to the same idea. It is the first solid point that rose from the waters of creation, and later traditions associate it with sealing (and therefore controlling) the waters of the tehom. The life-giving waters that flowed from under the Tree have their earthly counterpart in the Stone that both originates and restrains the deep.

3. Origin Point of Ordered Existence

The Tree of Life represents the possibility of sustained, eternal life in relationship with Hashem.

The Foundation Stone is the point from which the entire ordered world was “woven” or founded. It is the first act of structure against chaos. In both cases we meet the same pattern: divine initiative that establishes a center of life and order, which then becomes available to humanity.

4. Adam and the Beginning

Adam was formed from the dust of this site (or offered sacrifice there). He stood on the ground of the future Foundation Stone while the Tree of Life still stood accessible in the Garden.

The Stone therefore marks the physical place of the first human encounter with the Blueprint of Creation — the same Blueprint whose central living symbol was the Tree of Life.

5. The Temple as Restored Access

Once the way to the Tree was guarded by cherubim, the Temple (built over the Stone) becomes the place where the divine presence is again made accessible in a structured, covenantal way. The cherubim reappear over the Ark that rested on (or near) the Stone. The single Place that Hashem chooses in Deuteronomy continues the single Tree that stood in the midst of the Garden.

In short: the Foundation Stone is the earthly, permanent, and historical counterpart to the Tree of Life. The Tree offered life through relationship in the beginning. The Stone marks the ground from which that same possibility of life is to be restored and extended to the world through the House of Hashem.

A Developing Reality

The Torah does not present Jerusalem as a finished fact. It presents it as a developing reality. First the people must conquer and settle the Land. Then they must achieve rest from their enemies. Only then does the permanent House appear.

David yearned for that House. Psalm 132 records his oath and his searching: “I will not give sleep to my eyes… until I find a place for Hashem, a dwelling for the Mighty One of Jacob.” The contrast with Rome (or any other power that claims centrality) is sharp. One place is sought in humility and covenant; the other is imposed by force.

Isaiah later opens the vision that fulfills the Torah’s hint:

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of Hashem, to the house of the God of Jacob… for from Zion shall go forth Torah, and the word of Hashem from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3).

Notice the language. The nations themselves will say, “Let us go up.” The seeking that began with Israel becomes the invitation of the whole world.

Partnership with Hashem

The verse in Re’eh that introduces the mystery says: leshichno tidreshu — “you shall seek His dwelling.” The place is chosen by Hashem, yet it is revealed through human seeking. David and Samuel later identify it. Solomon builds it. But the Torah already planted the seed in the repeated, unnamed phrase.

This is the same pattern as the Tree of Life. The Tree is given. The relationship must be chosen. The House is designated. The people must seek it and partner in its building.

Why the Silence?

Rambam offers practical reasons: if the nations had known the exact location in advance, they would have fought over it or desecrated it before Israel was ready. More deeply, the silence forces every generation to seek. The mystery itself becomes a teacher.

In our day the same call remains. The place still waits. The Blueprint first given to Adam still stands. The Tree of Life is still offered. And the nation — and ultimately the world — is still invited to come up to the mountain of the House of the God of Jacob.

Re’eh — See. Seek His dwelling. The place has been waiting since the beginning.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

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“See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” Re’eh. Singular. You. See.

This is not a suggestion. It is the command that opens the portion we read this Shabbat, 25 Av 5786. Hashem places two paths in front of every person and every nation and demands that we open our eyes. In a world that insists there are many truths, many paths, and many gods, Parashat Re’eh insists there is only one Blueprint.

That Blueprint begins in the Garden.

The Tree of Life Was Always Available

In my book Adam: The Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I return again and again to a simple, devastating observation taught by Rabbi David Fohrman. In the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life stood in the middle of the Garden. It was not hidden. Two angels now invite you into the Covenant contained in the Tree of Life, with the same two Angels with no sword. It was freely available.

Adam was never going to live forever by default. Eternal life was not automatic. He had to eat from the Tree of Life. Hashem gave only one direct prohibition — do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — and remained silent about the Tree of Life. Why? Because trust and relationship are built through experience, not through constant commands. Adam was meant to live, to return to his Father, to share what he had learned, and then, having grown into that relationship, to take from the Tree of Life and live forever.

This is the opposite of the theology that later claimed man was created immortal and then “fell.” The Torah’s picture is different. Mortality was the starting condition. The Tree of Life was the offered solution. The Blueprint was already there.

How Do You Get Jesus From The Tree of Life

Christianity never left the Garden. It built an entire system around a different reading of those first chapters and then claimed the original Blueprint had been replaced. Islam took another path of replacement. Both claim to stand on Abraham while setting aside the very structure Hashem gave in the beginning. That is why I titled the series on my site “Two Sides of the Same Coin.” They look different, but both fail the same Torah tests: the falsifiable national witness of Israel, the unbroken covenantal line through Sarah, and the Tree of Life itself as the unchanging Blueprint for all humanity.

One Family, Written in DNA

Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s research in Traced confirms what Genesis already told us. All human Y-chromosome DNA traces back to three men — the sons of Noah — and mitochondrial DNA to three women. We are one family. The seventy nations of Genesis 10 are brothers and cousins. The divine image placed in Adam was never erased. It is carried in every human being.

This is why the Torah can say, without contradiction, that every human is created in the image of God and that Hashem chose one family to guard the Blueprint for the sake of every family. The choice of Abraham through Sarah was never about superiority. It was about responsibility. The Tree of Life was entrusted to a people so that it would not be lost.

Where the Distinction Begins: Genesis 25

The portion of Re’eh does not appear in a vacuum. The distinction between the children of Hashem and the nations is already visible in the story of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Esau. Two nations are in Rebecca’s womb. Two paths. One will carry the covenant; the other will walk a different road. The Ten Sayings later given at Sinai are the public, national expression of the same Blueprint that began with Adam and was protected through the line of Jacob.

When Parashat Re’eh says “You are children of the Lord your God; you shall not cut yourselves or make any baldness on your heads for the dead” (Deuteronomy 14:1), it is speaking from that same Blueprint. Because the soul is eternal, and because the Tree of Life remains available, we do not mutilate the body in despair. The body is the temporary vehicle. The soul is the passenger who will one day step out. Extreme self-harm is a denial of the Blueprint.

The Visible Distinction in Our Day

This past week, the world watched a man livestream himself cutting his own flesh while declaring he wanted to die. Commentators reached for the language of demons and the devil. The Torah does not. Isaiah 45:7 is clear: “I form light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil — I, the Lord, do all these things.” There is no independent rival power. Everything requires permission from the One.

The same portion that forbids self-mutilation because we are children of Hashem also places blessing and curse before us and demands that we see. The wars, the slaughter in places like Sudan and Nigeria, the hidden systems that treat human life as disposable, the rising claims of parallel revelations — all of it is the stage on which the distinction is being made visible again.

Ezekiel 38–39 tells us the nations will come against the mountains of Israel so that two things will become clear: the nations will know that Hashem is God, and the house of Israel will know that He is the Lord their God. There can only be one truth. Either the Torah’s Blueprint is correct, or it is not. Christianity and Islam cannot both be true while the Tree of Life still stands as the original offer of eternal life through relationship with the Creator who spoke at Sinai.

Choose the Tree of Life

Re’eh means see. See that Adam was offered the Tree of Life and had to choose it. Remember that the same offer remains. Behold that the children of Hashem are forbidden to destroy the vessel that carries the soul because the soul is immortal and the Blueprint is still given. See that the family of Abraham was chosen to protect that Blueprint for every family on earth. See that replacement theologies, however powerful they appear, fail the Torah’s own tests.

The blessing and the curse are still set before us. The Tree of Life is still available. The question is the same one that stood in the Garden: Will we eat from it?

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Shabbat Shalom.

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