After telling the Hanukkah story, the Talmud records that "the following year, these days were established as a holiday." The mystics explain that the following year people sensed the same cosmic energy and that's why the holiday was established. What was this cosmic energy? When Moshe was lonely and forlorn, God reached out to him

Most of our Parasha is about how Joseph lands in Egypt but the episode of Tamar and her father-in-law Judah puncture the middle of this lengthy story. Why was this unrelated story allowed to break the flow of the Joseph story? Out of the problematic union of Judah and Tamar comes forth the lineage of

Jacob journeyed on to Succoth and he built himself a house...Jacob came in peace to the town of Shehem...and he set up an altar there...Succoth and Shechem were the first places that Jacob travelled to after wrestling the angel. Why did he wait until he arrived at the second place, Shechem, to build an altar? When

The small breaks in the text of the Torah scroll are there for us to stop and digest what came before, yet this lengthy parasha has no breaks.  It is about Jacob's exile, When he was on the run from Esau and trying to make it in the world. If one paused in the middle,

While the main drama of our parasha is the story of Jacob and Esau, there is a secondary story about the wells that the Philistines kept sabotaging. The wells were a blessing for everyone, as "a rising tide lifts all boats," so why did the Philistines sabotage them? The Torah tells us: Isaac had possessions