Behar — Don’t Serve Servants

“They are My servants, whom I freed from the land of Egypt” (Vayikra 25:55).

Although the Talmud’s comment on the phrase “They are My servants” – “but not the servants of servants” (Bava Kamma 116b) – has a technical, halachic meaning, it also hints at a broader one.

In other words, not only does it say that a Jew cannot own another Jew, it also signals that Jews are not to indenture themselves to causes other than the Jewish mandate. Not to a political party, social cause or personality. A Jew’s exclusive ultimate role is to be a servant of Hashem.

Because the freedom we were divinely granted from Egyptian bondage was not what many consider “freedom” – libertinism, the loss of all fetters. It was a passage from being “servants to servants” – to Egyptians and Egyptian mores – to becoming servants of Hashem. As Moshe, in Hashem’s name, ordered Pharaoh: “Let my people go so that they may serve Me” (Shemos 9:1).  

The Hebrew word for freedom, cherus, the Mishna (Avos, 6:2) notes, can be vowelled to render charus, “etched,” as the Aseres Hadibros were on the luchos.  “The only free person,” the Mishna concludes, “is the one immersed in Torah.”

True freedom doesn’t mean being retired and moneyed, lying on a beach with sunshine on one’s face and a cold beer within reach, without a care or beckoning task. 

In the words of Iyov, “Man is born to toil” (5:7).  True freedom, counterintuitively, comes from hard work.  Applying ourselves to a higher purpose liberates us from the limitations of our inner Egypts, and is what can bring true meaning to our lives.

Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote:

“I have on my table a violin string. It is free to move in any direction I like. If I twist one end, it responds; it is free.

“But it is not free to sing. So I take it and fix it into my violin. I bind it, and when it is bound, it is free for the first time to sing.”

A timely metaphor, as we progress from Pesach, the holiday of our release from bondage, to Shavuos, the day we entered servitude to the Divine. And when, like on Pesach, we will sing the words of Hallel.

Fraud in Fact… or in Fiction?

One doesn’t expect an anti-racist organization to help finance white supremacist groups. But that is precisely what Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a public interest law firm that fights discrimination, stands accused of.

The accuser is the Department of Justice, which last week issued a surprising indictment of the SPLC, charging it with secretly funding hate groups, including affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America.

According to the government, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid over $3,000,000 – laundered through bank accounts registered to fictitious entities – to people in those groups.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, further claimed that the SPLC had failed to comply with its non-profit status, saying they committed fraud against their donors by failing to disclose the payments.

“And in no fundraising efforts that the investigation found,” he noted, “did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’ So that’s fraud.”

Mr. Blanche, speaking alongside FBI Director Kash Patel at a news conference, said the organization made payments to at least eight people, including those affiliated with violent extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi organizations.

“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Mr. Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

Mr. Patel said that the SPLC “used the money they raised from their donor network to actually pay the leadership of these very groups.”

Established in 1971 and based in Alabama, the SPLC, over many years, successfully battled the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups in courts, and helped reporters and law enforcement keep tabs on domestic extremists.

In recent years, though, the group widened its net, identifying arguably mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups, which it defines as having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people.”  Among the more recently SPLC-targeted groups are the Family Research Council and Turning Point USA (TPUSA).

In 2024, the SPLC said that TPUSA’s “primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants… and civil rights activists… [The group] is at the forefront of the movement to promote Christian nationalism, the theocratic worldview that the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian country and that Christian values and beliefs should inform the government and wider culture…”

It notes that the late Charlie Kirk, TPUSA’s executive director until his murder in 2025, said, “You cannot have liberty if you don’t have a Christian population.”

Whether TPUSA is a hate group or what most people would simply consider a conservative (okay, “ultra-conservative”) organization, the SPLC certainly alienated some Republican lawmakers – and President Trump.

During a December congressional hearing, House Republicans accused the group of “being partisan and profitable.” In October, Mr. Patel severed FBI ties with the SPLC, alleging that it “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.”

In an article last year, Margaret Huang, who was then the president and chief executive of the group, wrote that with President Trump’s second election, hard-right extremism now had “an ally in the highest office in the nation.” Needless to say, Mr. Trump was not pleased.

What, though, exactly, did the SPLC do to earn the administration’s charges?

It hired informants to infiltrate the targeted groups and convey back information about them and their plans. Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s chief executive, said that the group no longer used informants, but did so when extremist violence was common.

“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” he said.

There is nothing illegal about paying informants to spy on groups, something that government agencies like the FBI themselves have often done. Which fact has let the president’s critics to accuse him of vindictively targeting the SPLC with specious charges.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History,” Mr. Trump exulted on his social media platform, “has been charged with FRAUD.”

And, he added, somewhat incongruously, “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”

© 2026 Ami Magazine

Emor – Embracing Our Worlds

A poignant phrase is found in Rashi, in his comment on the Torah’s introduction of the account of the mekalel, the blasphemer: “And he went out” (Vayikra, 24:10)

Rashi, quoting Rabi Levi in a Midrash, elaborates: “He went out of his world.” 

The idea of an individual’s personal “world” is also employed by the renowned 18th century Italian mystic Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzato in the very first sentence of his famous work Mesilas Yesharim. He introduces his book by stating that the essence and root of human service to the Divine begins with a person’s effort to clarify and establish “what his obligation is in his world.”

That each of us has his or her own world is a curious notion. What I think it means is that each of us has a unique spiritual essence that needs to be expressed in a unique way and utilized in a unique service to Hashem. Intriguingly, that idea resonates powerfully with the second Midrash Rashi cites about the phrase “And he went out” – that the blasphemer had just left the court of Moshe, where he had lost his case.

That case involved his claim, since his mother was Jewish (although his father was an Egyptian) that he was entitled to a portion of the Holy Land in the portion designated for his mother’s tribe, Dan. The ruling, however, was that, while he was a member of the Jewish people, he –  uniquely, among the people – would receive no portion of the land.

That left him with two options: Either to accept that fate, and recognize that the ruling was “his world” – was assigning him a personal situation that somehow positioned him for a particular, singular role to play in society.  Or to reject the ruling angrily. He chose the second path, and then some.  He thus “left” not only the court but his world, the specific role for which he was chosen.

Some people who see their life circumstances as “unfair” face similar choices. The key to true success in life – which, of course, is unrelated to profession, wealth, fame or pleasure –  is the seizing of one’s individual, unique circumstance, no matter how limiting or painful or puzzling it may be, the recognition that it is his or her “own world” – what makes them unique. 

And then, after ascertaining what that specialness seems to demand, getting down to work.

Kedoshim – Skin in a Zero-Sum Game

Although, in the end, all tattooing, even of mere designs, is forbidden to Jews by halachah, one opinion in the Mishna (Rabi Shimon ben Yehudah in Rabi Shimon’s name) sees the prohibition as referring specifically to tattooing the name or symbol of an idolatry. The pasuk can be read as hinting to that approach: “And a tattoo you shall not place upon yourselves – I am Hashem” (Vayikra, 19:28) – as if to imply “Nothing else is.” The power contest, so to speak, is zero-sum.

And the Rambam, in fact, places the prohibition in his “Laws of Idolatry.” 

So it would seem reasonable, if seeking some message in the tattoo prohibition, to imagine that it might be a rejection of the designation of something, anything, other than Hashem as one’s ultimate object of dedication.

And, in fact, tattooing is, at least in many cultures, not a mere “decorative” practice but rather a demonstration of devotion – whether to “Mom,” “Jane,” “Jim” or “Semper Fi.”

Or to any less-than-holy ideal, no matter how worthy. What to an idolater is his deity’s name or symbol is, to a contemporary potential tattoo-ee, any of the broad assortment of “isms” – socialism, capitalism, Zionism, environmentalism… that are popular at any given time. Rav Elchonon Wasserman famously identified “ isms” as the idolatries of the modern era.

And so, what the Torah is forbidding may be understood as inscribing one’s utter dedication to any such concept. In fact, the Hebrew for “upon yourselves” (bachem) can be read even more simply as “in yourselves.”

Political isms are still popular these days, but the most widespread ism of the nonce, I suspect, is the one beginning with the word “material.” Not easily depicted in a tattoo, perhaps, but it’s a most consuming (pun intended) idolatry all the same.

We should feel prohibited from worshiping it.

Tazria – Pity the Habitual Accuser

It’s bad enough that the person whose divisive sins caused him to contract tzora’as (a physical condition conferring tum’ah, or ritual defilement, and sometimes mistakenly identified with leprosy) has to sit apart from society, but he is also enjoined to call out to passers-by: “vi’tamei tamei yikra” –  “Contaminated! Contaminated!” (Vayikra 13:45).

Indeed, the Talmud uses that added indignity to illustrate a popular (well, at the time) saying: “Poverty follows the poor.” (Bava Kama, 92b).

But the metzora’s prescribed announcement of his condition, says the Talmud, teaches other things too. Like the importance of letting others know of one’s sufferings, so that they might pray for him (Mo’ed Katan 5a). And it hints, too, to the need to mark a grave, so that people won’t inadvertently contract tum’ah by passing over it (ibid).

The Shelah (Rav Yeshayahu HaLevi Horovitz, c.1555-1630), however, sees in the metzora’s announcement a hint to yet something else. Parsing the phrase differently, he reads it as saying “and those ritually contaminated will call out [about others] ‘Contaminated!’ ”

In other words, some people project their own deficits onto others.  As the amora Shmuel said, in the context of genealogical status: “Those who assert a flaw [in others], it is their own flaw that they in fact assert” (Kiddushin 70a).

Indeed, it isn’t uncommon to see people in the public sphere who seem to make a habit of accusing others of a particular proclivity or wrongdoing being exposed as having the same proclivity or having been engaged in the same sin.

So if we ever have the unpleasant experience of being accused of something by someone who is given to lobbing the same accusation at others, we might do well to pause. And, rather than take the allegation personally, realize that the accuser may, in fact, suffer from insecurity, and that he is really accusing himself.  

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran

Shmini – What Could Make All the Difference

Even those of us with limited exposure to farm animals can easily differentiate between a cow and a donkey. Which leads Rashi to explain that when the Torah refers to our need to differentiate between the meat permitted for us Jews to consume and that which is prohibited, it means distinguishing between things like “a trachea [of a permitted animal] that has been cut exactly halfway across [which doesn’t satisfy the requirements of shechita] and one that has been more-than-half cut.”

A rather fine distinction, of course, a matter of a millimeter. 

Rav Shlomo Yosef Zevin, zt”l, sees it as a template for judgments to be made throughout our lives.  There is a mere hairsbreadth’s difference between holiness and its opposite, he notes in his sefer LaTorah V’lamoadim. He cites the Talmudic account of Rabi Meir’s recollection of Rabi Yishmael’s words upon hearing that Rabi Meir was a sofer. “My son, be very careful in your work… for if you omit a mere letter or add one [which, in certain cases could radically change the meaning of a word], you could destroy the entire world.”

Similarly, Rav Zevin notes, we are enjoined to see ourselves as if we are half-worthy and half-unworthy; and Rabi Elazar ben Rabi Shimon adds that the world itself can be dependent on its merits outweighing – even by a single mitzvah – its demerits.  And so, with each decision we make, we should imagine that only choosing correctly will preserve the world.

Even a mere momentary thought can be that crucial element, he adds, since a marriage effected by a man who betroths a woman “on the condition that I am a completely righteous person,” but whose subsequent actions indicate otherwise, requires a divorce to be dissolved.  Because, as the Gemara says, “perhaps he had a thought of repentance” when he betrothed the woman on the condition.

The words of Robert Frost, in his famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” come to mind.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

We often make decisions in our daily lives without considering that our choices could be potentially life-changing, even earth-shattering.”

Such  mindlessness is a serious mistake.

© 2026 Rabbi Avi Shafran