Ta Shma

One of the most emotionally charged and provocative legal passages is found in our parashah: the case of the rebellious son.

Explore the role that language plays in our personal, religious, and spiritual lives, by challenging assumptions about core areas of speech like prayer (is it supposed to be effective?) gossip (is it really bad?), and telling the truth (is it necessary?). Recorded in Summer 2026. 
Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/WeissLanguageLensPart12026.pdf

The preoccupation with the question of who goes to war is not new. It is a question that meets us, Israeli society, in our day-to-day lives. There is an acute sense here of exhaustion of military forces, alongside awareness of the high price that those who serve and their families pay, accompanied by political tension surrounding the issue of military service, all of which grow day by day—and even fuel one another.

The month of Elul marks the beginning of a process that leads us toward the Yamim Noraim, the days of awe. Yet in another sense, even at the beginning of Elul, we are already mid-process. Going back to at least medieval France, the sequence of haftarot we read in the synagogue on Shabbat from the 17th of Tammuz until Yom Kippur were understood as representing a long process split into three periods.

In Parashat Re’eih, the Torah warns against a uniquely insidious threat: the mesit or inciter.  In Hebrew, this act of enticing or manipulating another person toward harm is known as hasatah, “incitement.”  The discourse of incitement is one of the most central and sensitive topics in social and political interaction in Israel.  The term hasatah is used by the Israeli public both as a formal legal definition (a prohibited call for violence, racism, or terrorism) and as a popular political tool designed to invalidate the other side's position and label it as dangerous.  The Torah approaches hasatah as well, indicating that incitement is dangerous because it is confusing, powerful—and primarily because it works.