(* denotes incumbent)

US House New Jersey District 5

Josh Gottheimer (D)* 54.3%

Frank Pallotta (R) 44%

US House New Jersey District 6

Parshat Vayera

How fitting a selection is this week’s haftarah! It is fitting, not simply in its stories that relate closely to those in the parsha, but also in the very fact that — as Professor P. Meltzer writes — it is the first time since beginning of the Torah reading cycle, that the haftarah

Editor’s note: This series is reprinted with permission from “Insights & Attitudes: Torah Essays on Fundamental Halachic and Hashkafic Issues,” a publication of TorahWeb.org. The book contains articles by Rabbi Hershel Schachter and Rabbi Mayer Twersky.

We read in

If the devious and biased journalists of CNN, BBC, NYT, AP and all of the other unbalanced news agencies were around in the time of Avrohom, these may have very well been the headlines:

“Abraham Abandons Elderly Father To Seek Fortune and Fame”

“Rabbi Lied About

In the beginning of this week’s parsha, Avraham excitedly welcomes the three guests into his home and immediately springs into action preparing them a delicious meal. He asks Sarah to make bread and cakes, and then selects a cow that he gives to a “na’ar, a young man” to slaughter and prepare. Rashi suggests that the “young man” was actually Avraham’s

Finally, on Nedarim 10a, we learn what a kinuy, nickname, for a neder is! The first Mishna (2a) had declared that such nicknames were as valid as the direct neder, but then interjected with examples of shorthands (yadot) for neder—a point raised immediately by the Gemara ¹. At long last, the Mishna now

Rav Yisroel Belsky, zt”l — rosh yeshiva of Torah Vodaas — was an exceptional Torah personality and one of the great poskim of our generation. A gadol with multifaceted expertise, he was a shochet, a sofer, a musician and a mohel, and had vast knowledge and interests ranging from physics and chemistry, to engineering, astronomy and

וַיֵּרָא אֵלָיו ה’ בְּאֵלֹנֵי מַמְרֵא וְהוּא ישֵׁב פֶּתַח הָאֹהֶל
כְּחֹם הַיּוֹם (בראשית יח:א)

“And Hashem appeared to him in the field of Mammre and he was sitting at the entrance of the tent in the heat of the

Students of Hebrew are taught early on that the hitpael functions as a “reflexive” stem, i.e., that the actor is doing some action on himself. But the truth is more complicated.

One source I saw counted 984 instances of the hitpael form in Tanach. (The exact number varies from study to study.) It is

By Rav Reuven Taragin

רַבִּי אוֹמֵר, אֵיזוֹהִי דֶרֶךְ יְשָׁרָה שֶׁיָּבוֹר לוֹ הָאָדָם?

כֹּל שֶׁהִיא תִפְאֶרֶת לְעוֹשֶׂיהָ וְתִפְאֶרֶת לוֹ מִן הָאָדָם.

Question: I am saying Kaddish and, recently, went to a shiva house for tefillah. After I said a Kaddish with the aveilim, someone told me only the aveil(im) in shiva may do so in a shiva house. Is he right?

Answer: First, we need to understand the stance on the question of whether all aveilim

Questions have played an important role in Jewish education for centuries. Educators work on crafting the perfect question to assess students’ knowledge and understanding of material. And parents rely on their children’s parsha sheets to ask questions at the Shabbos table. It would seem that the mark of a good Jewish education is how