Parsha Review Podcast · Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe

You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of TORCH in Houston, Texas. This is the Parsha Review Podcast.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Parsha Review Podcast. This week's Parsha is Parsha Vayikra. We begin the book of Leviticus. As we remember, the book of Genesis is about the family of Israel. The book of Exodus is about the nation of Israel. The book of Leviticus is about the holiness of Israel, the spirituality, the connection with with God of Israel, and
then we have about the travels of Israel, which is Bamidbar, and then the review of the books of the Torah in Deuteronomy. We begin the portion of Vayikra with Vayikra, El Moshe, Vayidaber, Hashem, a love, and He called to Moses, and Hashem spoke to him, Me'oel, Moed, Lemor, from the tent of meeting, saying... So there's a couple of very important things. The first is that one we've mentioned previously, is that if you look at the aleph of Vayikra, the first word in the
book of Leviticus, it has a small aleph at the end of the word. A smaller than normal aleph. And our sages tell us that Moshe, on his own, didn't want to be prominently displayed in the Torah as someone who was frequently engaging with God. It would seem arrogant. So he had it, instead of it being Vayikra, and God called him, God summoned me. As he's writing it, he says, you know what? I'm gonna make the aleph a small aleph,
which is Vayikar, and it happened to be. It was happenstance. It happened upon that I was called by God, but not that it was, oh, I'm so holy, I'm holier than everyone else, and therefore God called me. It was a sign of humility. But then we see that our sages teach us that Moshe didn't go into the tent of meeting till he was called. Moshe, the leader of the Jewish people,
who had the rights and access to everything, says, no, I'm gonna wait. When God calls me, then I'll go. So our sages tell us here something very, very important, that this is the definition of intentional Judaism. You know, in prayer, we have a concept of kavana. That is the same idea of intentional prayer. We can say the words. We can be in a habit of saying words. You know, I've given this example numerous times here.
I've had many of our beloved students here at the Torch Center who have said, you know, Rabbi, it's not fair because you grew up religious. So for you, everything is natural, but for me, it's changing my whole life. So from one perspective, people were saying to me that it's just not fair. I have an edge over them. I said, that's not true. It's just the opposite. You have the edge over me. Why? My son is 12 years old right now. Next year, he'll be Bar Mitzvah.
Do you know that by the time he turns Bar Mitzvah and is obligated to recite the Shema twice daily, he will have said the Shema probably 10,000 times already. 10,000 times recited the Shema. What is the likelihood that at the age of 13, he will have the proper intention for the Mitzvah that he's about to perform? Now, the hope and prayer is that we do have intention and that we do understand that we're talking to God, understand the words that we're reciting.
That's the most important elements of prayer. But when someone does something so frequently, it becomes habit. It becomes rote. It becomes just it just happens. What we see here is that Moshe did not let that happen. Moshe says, I'm not just gonna walk in. I'm gonna walk in because God commanded me to walk in. We talk about this a lot in our Monday Lunch and Learn about intentional Judaism through simplicity. We need to keep our relationship with God simple. You know why we put on tefillin every single day?
Because God commanded us to. Keep it simple. If we have that focus, it's very easy. We're not doing it because, oh, this is what I do every day and not even think about it. I do it because God commanded me to do this. And that's a very intentional action. Very intentional. I'm doing this because this is the commandment from God. But then we see something else in this week's parashah that I think is equally as important. We talk about three different
voluntary, the first three chapters talk about all these different voluntary offerings that we have. The first entire chapter talks about the burnt offering, which is the ola, otherwise known as the elevation offering. And Rashi tells us that the ola atones for mitzvahs that were not performed. So if heaven forbid that parashah of tefillin was not worn one day, a person can bring an ola for the missed opportunity. But we also know that we have something called teshuva. We have repentance.
So why do we need also an ola offering and teshuva and repentance? If repentance fills in the blank, the missing space, the missing mitzvah, why do I need the ola? Why do I need the offering? So we all know that when someone sins against another person, I do something to hurt someone I love, a friend, I offend them, I embarrass them. So we all know that you can apologize and you should apologize. But sometimes the apology doesn't allow that relationship to get back to where it was.
You hurt me, you insulted me, it's great that you apologized, but I don't know if the friendship is repairable to the level that it was before. Our sages teach us that teshuva is an apology and you're forgiven. But in ola, when someone is able to bring an offering to God, that repairs the relationship to its intentional state. You're able to get it to a higher level, to a much higher level through the offering. More than just repentance can do.
Okay, so what do we do today when we don't have a temple? What do we do today? How do we repair for things that we missed out? We missed out on a mitzvah. How do I repair that? So our sages teach us that by reciting the prayers of the offerings, which we do every morning and we studied this in our prayer podcast, by bringing the ola offering in our words, in our prayer, which is the karbonot that are recited every day in the introduction of our morning prayers,
it's as if we brought the offerings. So it's as if we brought the offerings. So even though we don't have the offerings today, we don't have a temple, we can't actually bring the offering. And we see by Abraham that Abraham questioned God. He says, what's going to happen with my children? How do I know that my children are going to get the land of Israel? How do I know that they're going to deserve the land of Israel? Maybe they'll sin.
So God says, bring these three offerings, the three heifers and three goats. Bring these offerings and this will be an atonement for what they may do in the future. But then Abraham says, what's going to be when the Jewish people don't have a temple? They'll be able to recite it. And this leads us back to the first thing we said, intentional Judaism, doing things with the right intention.
You see, if we just do things out of rote, do things out of habit, and I think the worst thing in any relationship, in any marriage, is for things to just become habit. It just becomes habit, it becomes ordinary. You get busy with life, you get busy with your job, you get busy with you know, it's just like you stop investing in that relationship. You know, there's a guy who once confessed publicly that even though he's married, he still dates his wife.
That's what we need to do. Don't let it become just mundane and ordinary. A person needs to invest in that relationship every day. Find a way. I tell young guys when they're about to get married, I give them $50, I say, go to Walmart. I just saw recently that they raised the prices a little bit. But it used to be 94 cents a card. You know, those little love cards. I love you, you're so dear to me, so special, whatever, they have these beautiful drawings or paintings,
they're your Hallmark cards. So buy 50 of them. With tax, 94 cents, with tax is a dollar. Buy 50 cards. That's not the only thing, of course, we have a mitzvah right before Pesach, I'll just let you know right now. There's a mitzvah to buy your wife jewelry and or special clothes for the holiday. Torah says, you're obligated to make the holiday special for your spouse. And my wife and I, we have an agreement. My wife does not like when I buy her jewelry without her seeing it first.
So I said, no problem. Tell me what you want and I'll get it. No, I don't think we need it now. I don't think like, you know, it's like it always goes like, but I have to do my job. So I said, you know what? You can go and you can buy it, but it's for me. That's the deal. OK, but the Torah obligates us to make the holiday special because at least three times a year before the festivals, Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot, make it unique, make it special.
Don't let it just be a habit. I've heard from so many couples, again, I'm not a therapist, but sometimes as a rabbi, people come and talk. They want advice. They want whatever help I can. I can help as a non-professional, as a friend. And I say, what have you done to make your relationship special, to make it sparkle? It's like your car. If you just leave it and you're not going to take it for a car wash, it's going to look very muddy.
It's going to look very dirty. You have all the pollen here in Houston. Your car is going to get, it's not going to look nice. It's not because it's dirty, but it becomes, you know, like every time you get into a new car, you say, OK, this car, I'm going to keep clean. This car, I'm not going to have junk hanging around any place. I'm going to keep it so organized. I'm not going to have my papers here. I'm not going to have my coffee cups here.
I'm not going to have my wrappers here. But it becomes ordinary. At the beginning, it's very exciting. But a person needs to refresh their relationships. A person needs to refresh and keep it fresh, particularly a relationship with God. A relationship with God cannot become habit. A relationship with God cannot just be, whatever, I go pray and I don't even think about what I'm praying. I don't even know. I don't even recognize that I'm standing in front of God.
That God is right there listening to my prayers. I'm thinking about this and I have to call that guy back and I have to do this. And maybe I should remember to do that. When I get home, I'll order this and I have to go pick up that and have to get the cleaners. And I got to go, you know, make sure I call that person. We're busy. And by the time we're done prayer, our ordinary prayer wasn't intentional. We have to make it special.
Which is why one of the things that I love about our prayer podcast is that things that, first is there are a lot of parts of the prayer that I never even understood what I was saying. To just understand the words and to have meaning behind it. But also to now that I understand and hopefully understand to some degree after doing a tremendous amount of study and research and learning about it. To have in mind when I recite these words, these holy words, connect my emotions, my feelings with it.
To say it with meaning. To say it with intention. To say it with focus. Because to just stand and recite prayer, yeah, very nice. But it was just without heart. It was without kavanah, without intention, without focus. That's what a person needs in every part of life. In every part of life, never ever allow your life to become a life of habit. We talked about atomic habits. That's changing our habits. Investing in good habits.
But even then, don't let it become a habit that doesn't have intention. Why am I doing this? You're trying to become healthier, change your eating habits, change your exercising habits so that I have a healthier body. So that I can serve God. Not so that I idolize my body. So that I'm able to be a better person. Because I'm healthier, I have less ailments due to neglect. Our relationships are exactly the same. Our relationships, I don't want to say this, but I sat with a couple.
And it seemed to me like they were two roommates living under the same roof. For decades. There's no harmony and love. Why did they get together 30, 40 years earlier? Because at that time they met each other's needs. But then they just became two people dorming in the same house together. Without there being a relationship that's growing. That's special. It's mundane, it's just ordinary. It's not a growing relationship. What we see here in our Torah is that we need it to be intentional.
We need to have kavana. Moshe didn't just walk in. When God asks me to, I will. We don't just do things, oh, this is what I do every day. God is asking Moshe to do it. Now I can go in. When we go and pray, what we need to declare in our mind, my grandfather says, before you go and stand to pray, sit for a minute and just contemplate the idea of what you're about to do. I'm about to talk to God. That's it.
I'm about to talk to God. Think about it. Stop, sit, close your eyes. I'm about to talk to Hashem. It's a different prayer. Oh, you're rushing in. You get, oh, you get the prayer. We have a minion. Great. Let's go. I'm talking in front of God. It's a different idea. It's a different concept than just saying words. And again, yes, someone who grew up in a religious life and has been praying since they're two years old, their first words were blessings.
They have to retrain themselves to become intentional Jews. Retrain themselves that I don't just do this because these are the habits I picked up growing up in my home. I'm doing this because this is the will of Hashem. I'm talking to God. The offerings, that's what the offering would do. It would repair that that was missed out. I didn't just say, I'm sorry, you're repairing it because you're showing an extra level of commitment, of dedication. It's taking it up, saying, I'm going to do this intentionally.
We talked about the beginning of this year, 2026. Our focus this year is to be intentional, become intentional Jews, not Jews of habit. I'm not a Jew of habit. I'm a Jew of intention. We do Jewish things. We're involved in a Jewish community. We learn Torah. We go pray. We're a member of this society and that society. Why? Just because. Makes me feel good. I'm Yisrael Chai. There's more to it. I want to build my relationship with God. It's intentional.
I'm doing this so that I can come closer. Our sages tell us that eating seems like a very physical act. I'm eating. Why am I eating? Why am I eating? Why do I need to eat? Just to indulge? Why do I need to eat? Just to indulge in my own physical desires, my own physical pleasure? Why am I eating? Our sages tell us you should have in mind when you eat, I'm eating so that I have strength so that I can serve God.
It's a totally different reason. Now it becomes with a purpose. It becomes intentional. So now I can navigate between eating and indulging and eating for my health. So that I can sustain myself. We all know all too well how eating can go way out of that realm and become something onto its own, have its own life. Where it has nothing to do with us being healthy. It has to do with us being indulgent in our own desires. And that's not where we want to be.
When we, there's a cost in a person doing a sin. We talked last evening in our Jewish Inspiration podcast. We talked about fear of heaven. What's the fear of heaven? Fear of heaven means I'm afraid, is what it should be at least. Fear of missing out. FOMO. I have an opportunity to do a mitzvah. If I do a sin instead, I missed out on the mitzvah. Opportunity cost. The ola would repair that.
The ola would repair that and give a person the closeness that they missed. While teshuva is an apology that's accepted, but it doesn't repair what was missed. It's taking it a notch beyond. My dear friends, we're now in the season of Pesach. We're in the season of Pesach. We're in the preparation time of Pesach. Pesach, in two days, we have Rosh Chodesh. On Thursday, this week is Rosh Chodesh, where we bring in the month of Nisan.
Nisan is the month where the Jewish people became a new people. We didn't yet receive the Torah. We received that in Sivan, which is two months after. But it's the time that the Jewish people were taken out of Egypt. It's the time that the Jewish people declared our desire to serve God. It's the time that the Jewish people declared that they're not going to give into their captors, where we brought the offering of the Karman Pesach and they
needed to grill it so that the smell goes out so that the Egyptians would smell that their God, the sheep, is being slaughtered by the Jews. Don't bake it in the oven. Don't bake it in the oven. It's got to be grilled so that the aroma goes all around town, that they can smell the barbecue grill. This is our time to declare a change. This is our time to declare we went through a whole winter of one day,
another day, another day, and thank God we've had an unbelievable winter here at the Torch Center, of learning day in, day out, one book after another book, one topic after another topic, one ask away after another ask away in our everyday Judaism podcast, so many beautiful opportunities to learn and to grow. Is there perhaps one thing that we can make intentional? And I think, you know, we all sit by our Pesach Seder and we have a Haggadah.
And I find myself, and I'm sure many people feel the same, that we resort back to the same basic understanding of the Haggadah that we had when we were children. This is what my dad used to say, my grandfather used to say, and we just, we suffice with that instead of looking further and deeper into new ideas and making it ours, not theirs, ours, connecting with that on a new level. So that's what I want to do for the next couple of weeks till Pesach is take some
time to invest in making the Pesach Seder our own, making it intentional that when we come to the Pesach Seder, we come prepared that it's our Seder. My dear friends, have an amazing Shabbos.

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