Recap of our discussion, 15th of Adar I, 5774 (Parsha Ki Tisa)

This week we have our Kiddush and learning of parsha Ki Tisa, and a special Kiddush for the Yahrzeit of Yakki’s father.  May his memory be for a blessing.  Yakki talks about his father, how he survived the holocaust and how he did it.  It is an incredible story of being one of only a few survivors amongst many brothers and sisters.  Yakki also talks about how his father would always have an open house on Shabbos, and how his father believed the message of this week’s parsha – that we donate half of a sheckel, to symbolize that we can not be whole on our own, and we need to be part of a larger group.  Yakki spoke about how often the number 2 seems to come up.  There is man and wife, heaven and earth, body and soul.

This Shabbos, David led some learning, and we discussed the week’s parsha Ki Tisa and commentary by Rav Yeager.  In the parsha, Moses spends 40 days learning Torah, prior to transmitting this information to us.  We discussed how we are partners with Hashem in creating Torah.  The Torah contains information that we use in coming up with specifics and help with interpretation through-out time.  Moses did not get the specifics that we would follow today in the 21^st century, but he did receive the framework in which we come up with these specifics. 

We discussed how Moses was able to get all this in just 40 days.  Efroni discusses this in his book, A year of Divrei Torah, Hashem will help us learn Torah, but we have to do our part.   This is how Moses is able to acquire everything in 40 days.  Even today Hashem can help us learn Torah, and help us remember what we learned so we can write it down doing these notes!

We discussed how Moses breaks the tablets, without first checking with Hashem.  We discussed the 2 other times Hashem does something major without first checking with Hashem.  One of them is giving us an extra day – for a total of 4 days – to prepare for receiving the Torah, and the other is separating from his wife.  

We discussed how Moses breaks the tablets, because it is not the tablets themselves that bring us spirituality and enhance our relationship with Hashem.  We need to first follow the Torah.  Then physical things such as tablets that have been carved out, can be used to express our spiritual state of being.  Physical things, such as star of David necklaces, synagogues, tablets, do not cause us to become spiritual and close to Hashem.  We become spiritual and close to Hashem, and then create physical things as an expression of this.

We discussed how it could be that we commit the sin of the Golden Calf, and then Moses is asking Hashem that we be given even a greater state of being than we had before we committed this sin, similar to asking for a raise after we have done something in which we should be fired!  The answer seems to be, that we learn so much from our wrong doings and sins, that we are ready to reach new heights.  Sometimes we have to go through the worst, in order to reach the best.

We continued our discussion of the calendar and the insertion of an extra month of Adar during leap years.  We discussed what would happen if someone reached the point to have their barmitzvah during Adar I of a leap year.  Would the barmitzvah be postponed from Adar I to Adar II?  We concluded that yes, a person who reaches the point of his barmitzvah on for example the 20^th of Adar I, would have the barmitzvah on the 20^th of Adar II.  This results in some interesting situations.  First it is possible that someone who is older could have a barmitzvah on say the 5^th of Adar II, and someone who is younger would have his barmitzvah on a later date in Adar II.  Second, it is possible that someone born the last day of Shevat would have his barmitzvah a full 30 days earlier than someone born the first day of Adar, in which the time separating the births could be less than an hour!  In the case of a Yahrzeit, some hold that we should commemorate the memory twice, once during Adar I, and once during Adar II.  So during the first year there would be three events, the end of the 11 month period for saying Kaddish, and then the Yahrzeit once in each of the two months of Adar.

This is a summary of what we discussed this past Shabbos.  No Halachic rulings are intended or should be inferred.