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The Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe Podcast Collection is the one-stop shop for the Torah inspiration shared by Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe in one simple feed. The Jewish Inspiration Podcast, Parsha Review Podcast, Thinking Talmudist Podcast, Living Jewishly Podcast and Unboxing Judaism Podcast all in one convenient place. Enjoy!
You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of Torch in Houston, Texas. This is the Parsha Review Podcast.
All right, welcome back everybody. Good morning. Welcome back to the Parsha Review Podcast. This week's Parsha is Parsha is Vayigash, Vayigash, a love Yehuda. This week's Parsha, we continue last week's story where the brothers, unbeknownst to them, they don't know, unknowingly, they come to the king or the viceroy of Egypt. He starts interrogating them. He starts asking them questions, and he is asking them, where's your other brother?
They bring the other brother. The brothers try to convince their father. If you remember last week's Parsha, Yaakov says to them, why did you have to tell him that you have another brother? He says, well, the interrogation was done well by Yosef. I mean, obviously Yosef knew already, but they revealed all the information that Yosef needed to hold them accountable. Then Yehuda, so Binyamin, Joseph sends them back with all this food and all of their bags,
and he slips into the bag of Binyamin, he slips in his goblet. That goblet is then recovered, and now he's caught red-handed, quote, stealing from the viceroy his goblet, and Joseph says, okay, throw him into prison. He wanted to see how the brothers were going to stand up for him. Did they learn from their mistakes, or did they not learn from their mistakes? What happens now? Yehuda, Judah was the leader. He was a leader personality.
In fact, the blessing of Jacob is that Judah will forever be the king. The tribe of Judah, the kings of Israel will always be from the tribe of Judah. By the way, we are all, except for you, you're a levy, because you're a Kohen. But everybody else who is a Yisrael is from the tribe of Yehuda today. Either way, so the Possack says, Vayikash, you love Yehuda, then approached him, did Yehuda, Vayomer, be Adoni, he says, please, my master, Yida b'na avdokha, davar b'ezni Adoni.
Let me speak a word or two into your ear, my master. Vayichar apcha b'avdokha kikachamokha kipparo, who is great like you. Don't get upset at me. We know that you're very high up there, but let me just have a word with you. And then he says, he goes through the whole narrative of what transpired. You asked us, do we have a father? Do we have a brother? Yes, we do. We have a father. Our father's old, he's frail. And our brother, he's a little boy.
And then, you know, he goes through the whole story. And the beginning of chapter 45, verse number one, the following verse. V'lo yachol Yosef lehisapik l'chol anitzavim. And Yosef was unable to restrain himself in the presence of all who stood there. Vayikra haytsiyu kol ishmi olay, v'lo oamad ishito b'hisfada Yosef alokhov. And they cleared out every man from the room. And no one was there when Yosef revealed himself to his brothers. Vayitin eskolo bevchi. He gave out his voice in weeping. Vayishmu mitzrayim, vayishma bes baro.
And his weeping was heard across Egypt. And his weeping was heard in the house of Pharaoh. Vayomer Yosef alokhov. And Yosef says to his brothers, ani Yosef, I am your brother Yosef. Haod avichai, is my father still alive? V'lo yokhlu echov lanos oso ki nivalu miponov. And his brothers could not answer him because they were terrified of what they just experienced. This is the greatest reveal of all time, where in total shock, the brothers had no idea that
the person they were negotiating with the entire time was their brother. One of the great commentators says, Abba Cohen bardolo omar, oy lanu miyoma din, oy lanu miyoma tachokha, woe to us for the day of judgment, woe to us for the day of retribution. Yosef kitanon shel shvotim, hoyo v'lo hoyu yukholum lanum betokhakhto. Yosef was one of the younger brothers of the tribes. He was one of the smaller of the tribes. And yet, when he held their feet to the fire, they couldn't stand in front of him.
When he revealed to them that everything that had gone on, they're going to be held accountable for, suddenly they couldn't stand. He says, l'kishi yov ha'kodesh boruchu v'yohiach kol echod v'echod lefim ha'shahu, when the Almighty will be the Yosef who reveals in front of us what we were capable of doing, al achas kama v'kama, how much more so will we tremble and not know what to say when God presents in front of us our potential, what we could have brought to this world.
Sages tell us, and the Chavetz Chaim brings this as well, when Yosef said, I am Yosef, God's master plan became clear to the brothers. They had no more questions. Everything that happened in the last 22 years fell into perspective. So too will it be in the time to come when God will reveal himself and announce, I am Hashem. The veil will be lifted from our eyes and we will comprehend everything that transpired throughout history. Everything will make sense. Suddenly there will be a complete clarity.
You know, I just got a phone call walking in here today from a dear friend of mine. He says to me, did you hear that they just busted an entire ISIS, an ISIS cell in London? They were planning, they had AK-47s, they had bombs, they had everything. They were about to make one of the biggest terrorist attacks against Jews in history. He said, what's going on here? What is going on here? He says, this is clearly the times of Mashiach. This is clearly the time.
He says, but we don't, we don't need Mashiach, we need Hashem. We need Hashem. We need that the entire world realizes, because I am Hashem, and Hashem is right in front of us. So what was Yosef saying to his brothers here? He says, I am Yosef, your brother, that you sold, I am Yosef, your brother that you sold to Egypt. You sold me to slavery for 22 years. For what? For money. For money.
As it says in Amos, you sold a righteous for money, for just to say, basically it's like shoe money. So you can buy shoes. So his brothers had nothing to answer. He says, he explains, what did we waste our time on? And for what? He says, imagine what Yosef says, you sold me to Egypt. God says, you sold me out for your luxuries, for your worldly desires, for your pursuits of career, of whatever it may be, instead of doing valuable, good things that the Torah
commands us to do, like studying Torah, like performing mitzvahs. We decided we're going to do other things. The son of the Chavetz Chaim built a house next door to the house of the Chavetz Chaim himself, next door to his father. So the Chavetz Chaim came to the Chanukah Saba'is, to the establishment of the home, to the party, the grand opening of the home. So the Chavetz Chaim said, he touched the wallpaper on the house, Chavetz Chaim touched the wallpaper and he kissed it.
So his son said, what are you doing? Are you kissing the wallpaper? What are you doing? He says, no, no, no, this is, this is Torah. He says, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? It's Torah. He says, well, in order to buy the wallpaper, you need to spend money. In order to spend money, to have money, to earn money, you need to work. In order to work, you have to forego the Torah.
So what you're doing, in essence, is this wallpaper is instead of Torah. And it was a critique that the Chavetz Chaim was giving to his son, that you wasted time to go and earn money so that you can pay for these fancy wallpapers for your home, instead of learning Torah. Not everyone's at the level of the Chavetz Chaim. Not everyone's at the level where every single moment is calculated. You know, the Chavetz Chaim didn't waste a minute.
He was busy all day, studying Torah, teaching Torah, sharing Torah, you know, promoting Torah. You know, the, the great student of the Chavetz Chaim, one of the great students, was Rebohanan Wasserman. Rebohanan Wasserman was murdered, tragically, in the Ninth Fort in Lithuania, taken from my grandmother's house. Taken with all of his students. They walked through the Kovne Ghetto. And they were singing Ani Ma'min. I believe, believing in Hashem, Rebohanan Wasserman once came to his Rebbe, the Chavetz Chaim, on Purim.
Purim is the end of the biggest semester in, in, in Jewish life, because we have a big semester between the holiday of Sukkot and Pesach. Sometimes six months. And the Chavetz Chaim asked him, so what are you learning, in your yeshiva, because he had a yeshiva in Baranovich. The yeshiva of Baranovich was not far, not too far from Mir. It's today, both of them are in, in Belarus. I visited both Baranovich and Radin, where the Chavetz Chaim lived.
And it's, it's absolutely remarkable that the Chavetz Chaim asks him, he says, where are you holding in, in, in the studies? The Talmud that they were studying that semester has 110 pages of Talmud. And he asked them, where are you guys holding, where's the yeshiva holding? I think they told him they were doing, they were up to page 90 in the Talmud. Page 90 in the Talmud. Now, I can tell you, I've been in many, many yeshivas. There's no yeshiva that studies 90 pages in six months.
That's a lot. They'll do 10 pages if they're speedy. 10 daf, 10 pages of Talmud, you know, in a semester. And that's a big semester. 90 is like, it's unfathomable that a yeshiva can learn at such a pace. And you know what the Chavetz Chaim did? Chavetz Chaim started crying. He says, only 90? How are you going to finish the tractate by the end of the year, by the end of the semester, which is another three weeks later, from Purim to Pesach?
How are you going to finish another 20 pages in the next 30 days? They're not going to finish the tractate. They're not going to finish it. Chavetz Chaim was so focused on immersing ourselves in study. I want to share with you that there's so many people I know who have utilized every moment they had to study. I've been to people's celebration upon the completion of Mishnah, the whole Mishnah, Halacha, all of the Shulchan Aruch. From when? From time they were waiting on line at the bank.
From time they were... I asked my rabbi on the Sefer Chavetz Chaim, a lesson a day, Rabbi Yitzhak Berkowitz, wrote all of the Halacha, one side of Halacha, one side of stories. I asked my rabbi, I said, Rabbi, I know you're so busy. When in the world did you have the time to write it? He said, on my bus ride from the old city, from Eshet Torah to my house, he used to take the bus, it was a 13-minute bus ride.
First is most people don't even know that it takes 13 minutes because time is expendable. To him, every second is valuable. He knew exactly how much time it took. He said he wrote one Halacha a day in that 13 minutes, on the bus. And that's that book. One page a day, because each one is one Halacha. You met with him. Doesn't he sleep like two hours a night? He sleeps only two and a half hours a night.
And I asked him, when I was learning in the kolah, I asked him, I said, Rabbi, when are you going to sleep? You have to get to sleep. He says, when I'll die, I'll have plenty of time to sleep. That's the way he lives. It's an unbelievable way of approaching life. We're here for a very limited time. And this, by the way, is not to get us depressed. It's to invigorate us, to be motivated, to not sleep through life.
So he wrote a folio a day of Halacha. And that's what came into his book. I know someone who would take a bus from Betar, in Israel, to Jerusalem, to Yeshiva, every day. So he got a study partner to sit next to him. And every day, they would study. They finished Tanakh, all of Tanakh, studying Tanakh, on a 40 minute bus ride, every single day, back and forth. Finished all of Tanakh, finishing all of Mishnah, finishing all of Talmud. From what?
From these little, short rides. Now, people can be sitting there. There's a famous story that's told by Ripnoah Weinberg. He would say, imagine you're sitting on a bus. And the guy in front of you stands up, takes a few dollar bills, and starts throwing them out the window. He sits back down. You look at him like, what? What did he just do? And a few minutes later, he stands up, throws a few more dollar bills out the window.
And then again, and again, and you're wondering, what in the world is this guy doing? But let me ask you, what's more valuable, time or money? Time is much more valuable. But you can't get time back. You can always make the money back. You cannot make the time back. You know, the Ponavidzha Rav, the leader of the Ponavidzha Yeshiva, who built the Yeshiva, it was the most massive Yeshiva in the early days of the state of Israel. He built the Yeshiva for a thousand students.
A thousand students is unheard of. Today you have Yeshivas all over the place with, you know, many thousands of students. He said he came to America and he heard this new terminology, time is money, right? Time is money. And he said, no, no, no, no. It's a mistake. Money is time. Money is time that you invested that you will never get back. Money is the result of spending your time, which is, again, we're not saying that a person
shouldn't go get a job and we're not saying that a person shouldn't earn a livelihood and a person shouldn't pursue a career. We're not saying that. We're saying that we need to have priorities and we need to ensure that the things that are on the top of our priority list don't get pushed to the back. Because a day will come where God will say, I am Hashem. And what are we going to answer?
We're going to say, oh, well, I don't know why I didn't pursue the right things. I don't know why I didn't invest my time properly. By the way, this is something that happens with parents in parenting, where parents say to their children, where their children ask them, can I have a catch with you? Can I play a game with you? You'll never regret that time. I will tell you, my daughter, she's so delicious. She's eight years old. And it was last Shabbos, Friday night.
She says to me, Abba, can we play a game? Now everyone was sleeping already. I was cleaning up after the meal Friday night. Everyone went to bed. She was still up. She says, Abba, can we play a game? I was really not in the mood. Like 10 out of 10, not in the mood. And I said, you know what? It's an opportunity to build a relationship stronger, to do something special with her. It's just the two of us. And I said, OK, fine.
What game do you want to play? And I was really tired. I did not want to. That day I had just arrived back from Israel, that earlier that afternoon. I said, fine, let's do it. And we sat over there on the floor. And I taught her how to play backgammon. And we played a couple of games. And it was more than the game, more than anything, it was that bond of spending quality time with my daughter, spending quality time.
How many times do people regret the time that they spent in the office to earn another buck instead of spending that time with their children? Nobody ever said on their deathbed, I wish I spent more time at the office. Reb Noah Weinberg, another quote from him, he would say that if you don't know what you're ready to die for, you haven't begun living. Figure out what you're ready to die for and live for it.
You see, everybody says, I'm willing to take a bullet for my family, for my wife and my children. Yeah, but why would you die for your family? Live for your family. Be home earlier so you can have a catch with your son, so you can play a game with your daughter, so you can do things together, so you can spend quality time. Live for them. Don't die for them. Live for it. Think about what you're ready to die for.
You're not ready to die for your job, so why do you live for your job? If you're ready to die for your family, live for your family. A person's ready to die for their Judaism. It's actually a very important thing. It's something that comes up a lot. People ask about, they want to make sure that they're buried in a Jewish cemetery. They ask this a common question I get, is it true that if you have a tattoo, you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery?
First is it's not true. But why do you care? Why do people care so much? They want to die as a Jew. Live as a Jew. If it's so important for you to die as a Jew, live as a Jew. And this is, I think, the important lesson here that we're seeing from this week's Parshah. It's a wake-up call. It's a realignment. The Chavetz Chaim once was asked about a certain book that he used as a source for many of
the halachas that he brings in the Mishneh Beru and one of his incredible books on Jewish law, with a fundamental book on Jewish law that every single Jewish home has. He was asked by his student, Rebel Hanan Wasserman, do you have that book? He says, no, no, I borrowed it from someone a few towns over and I had returned it to him already. So he asked the Chavetz Chaim, he said, I don't understand, you quote this book so many times, why don't you just buy it?
He says, because to buy it, I would have to work extra. And to work extra means it would take me away from my study of Torah. So it was all a priority, everything in our life is priorities. Where do we put our priorities? And here Yosef is bringing our priorities to the focus. What are our priorities? What are we ready to say, you know something, I've gone off. I'll give you an example.
I think it's a very good thing that Google on their devices, they set something called digital well-being. We have physical well-being, but digital well-being is not a bad idea where you can put a setting on your phone that it tells you, this is how much time you spent on YouTube today. This is how much time you spent on this app or that app. We don't realize like suddenly it's 30 minutes later, 40 minutes later, 50 minutes later,
an hour later, an hour and a half later, two hours later, and we're still scrolling on these various apps. By the way, these apps are created. If you think that it's just random, it's not random. There is an entire team. I know somebody who worked on that team. There's an entire team dedicated in each of these platforms, social media platforms. There is a team, a big team dedicated to making the app addictive. How do they create it?
If it's going to be difficult for you to see the next short, if it's going to take even an extra second, you're out. You go to the next app. It has to be addictive where you don't even think about it and suddenly you go back. You're like, this is where it started. It went down this whole rabbit hole, one thing to the next, and when you come back to it, you see it's like it's killing us because it's burning time we could have been productive.
It's burning time we could have done good things. It's burning time we could have spent with our family. It's burning memories that we could have created. So I don't think this is only a wake-up call regarding the study of Torah. I think it's a wake-up call for every area of life. In every area of life we need to ensure that we keep our eye on the ball, that we are focused, laser focused on what's really important.
In doing everything we can to ensure that we don't get carried away and that we don't miss opportunities and we don't lose focus, I think this is probably the most important message we can take from this week's Parshah. If we can just, I would encourage those of you who are online and watching this, I know you're using social media to watch this class, but if we can take, and I challenge myself
to do this all the time, every time I'm on a plane, I try not to connect to the internet if there is on the plane, and I just delete apps. Delete it. Delete it. Another one. Take it off. Take it off. Take it off. Each one of them is fighting for our time. I want to be in control of my own time. I don't want them to be controlling my time.
And if we can start a movement, it doesn't mean that we become ancient creatures that are primitive and we don't have any more technology. We're not talking about that. We're living in, we're normal people in a normal world. Look, I have more technology sitting here on this table than you can imagine for those of you who are not here. It's a lot of technology. There's a lot going on here. There's nothing wrong with technology if we're in control of it.
Which reminds me, I'll just end off with this. It reminds me that we say, I mentioned previously about Moshiach, it says that Moshiach is going to come riding on a horse, on a donkey. Moshiach is going to come riding on a donkey. You've heard that before, right? Give me a break. Come on. It's the 20th century. We have beautiful cyber trucks. We have different, you know, Bugattis, we have a Rolls Royce. We have many beautiful cars that Moshiach could come riding in.
It says, no, he's going to come riding on a donkey. So we know that this, it's a euphemism. It's a, it's a parable, a parable for something. What is a donkey? A donkey is material. It's chomer, chamor in Hebrew is a donkey. Chomer means materialism. Moshiach is going to come riding on materialism, meaning he's in control. When you're riding on something, you pull the strings, you decide. You're in control, not it controlling you. It's not the donkey or the materialism or the technology controlling us.
There's nothing wrong with having technology. There is something wrong if that technology is used poorly. There is something wrong if we're not maintaining our digital well-being in a way that's constructive. If we're continuing to fall asleep, how many times I've heard from people that they fall asleep with their phone and they wake up when their phone falls on their face. Because of this, for many, many years already, I don't have my phone in my room. I don't keep my phone in my bedroom.
I don't have my phone next to my bed. It's in a different room. I don't want to fall asleep like that. I want to fall asleep with hopefully pure thoughts, with not falling asleep because I'm too tired to scroll anymore. The things we do in our lives should be a decision. It shouldn't be that we just are bankrupt of motivation. I decide that this is, you know what, you want to spend 10 minutes on, so put a timer.
I'm spending 10 minutes now entertaining myself on YouTube or on X or Twitter or whatever it may be. Fine. That's your entertainment, but don't get carried away by it. A person has to know this is a distraction or this is entertainment. Okay. I need a little break. Fine. There are those who would say, no, that's not fine either. Okay. We're trying to be a little bit more normal.
I think that the lesson here that we need to learn from Yosef is this wake-up call where Hashem will hold us accountable. Hashem will hold us accountable. Look how much you could have done had you prioritized properly. Look how much you could have done. Look at what you did by taking your eye off the target. Hashem should bless us all to have an amazing Shabbos and to realign ourselves constantly, which is what we do in our prayer, to realign ourselves with our morals, with our values,
with our ethics, with our purpose, with our priorities. Have a great Shabbos. Thank you so much.
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