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Torah Talk for Parashat Va’etchanan

July 24, 2018 by Sharon Freundel (Community)

In this parasha, Moshe stresses to the Bnei Yisrael the importance of keeping Hashem’s commandments when they enter the land of Israel; Moshe repeats the Aseret HaDibrot, the Ten Commandments, and utters the Shema and V’ahavta, the ultimate statement of belief in and fealty to the One God.

The Oral Law tells us that there are four ways to interpret the Torah. These are given the acronym פרדס – pardes, which stands for p’shat, remez, drash, and sod (simple meaning, hint, explanatory meaning, and secret). When learning trope, the cantillation used when reading from a Torah, we discover that there are many “secrets” contained in the way the Torah text is written that can often be seen only when looking into the actual Torah scroll itself. This parasha contains a number of those secrets. Read more >