Why has the Jewish people always stood alone? Recorded on the night of Tisha B'Av, this shiur begins with a simpler question: what does it actually mean to mourn? The grief turns out to be only the surface of it. Underneath sits something else, the very aloneness the day is built to make you feel. It's there in the halachot that shape Tisha B'Av, in the law that forbids a mezumen at the seudah hamafseket even though mourners, in every other context, are permitted one. And it's there from the very opening line of Eicha: eicha yashva badad, how she sits alone. Drawing on Rav Soloveitchik's reading of that halacha, and on the prophecy given to Bilaam that Israel would be 'a nation that dwells alone,' the Chief traces two entirely different kinds of aloneness: one born of desolation, one born of a mission nothing else can replace. He follows the thread into the present moment, into the three years since October 7th and the resurgence of antisemitism worldwide, and into where Theodor Herzl's founding assumption about Jewish history went wrong. What would it take to move from one kind of alone to the other? And on a day built entirely around loneliness, what would it mean to choose it, rather than simply endure it? Key Questions What is actually happening, beneath the grief, when a person mourns? Why does Jewish law forbid mourners from comforting each other on the one day mourning is most intense? What is the difference between a nation that dwells alone because it has been broken, and one that dwells alone because of what it carries? Where did Herzl's founding theory of antisemitism go wrong, and what does Tisha B'Av say instead? What would it mean to choose the very aloneness we've spent three years trying to escape?

Personal mourning fades with time. Our national mourning, the Three Weeks leading into Tisha B'Av, on the other hand, move in the opposite direction. It grows more intense until a day described as "sitting shiva for the world itself." Why would we deliberately awaken grief for a loss most of us have never personally experienced? Drawing from Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, Rabbeinuyu Bechaye, Pirkei Avot and the wisdom of our Sages, The Chief Rabbi explores why Tisha B'Av is not only about mourning the destruction of the Temple, but about learning to see the brokenness of the world itself. And why that grief was never meant to end in sadness. It was meant to become the beginning of hope, action, and redemption.   Key Questions   Why would grief for a loss most people have never personally felt need to intensify as the day approaches, rather than ease? What does the Chief mean when he calls Tisha B'Av "sitting shiva for the world"? Why is fasting on Tisha B'Av treated as an act of repentance rather than an act of mourning? What actually changes at midday of Tisha B'Av, and why does the day work in two such different registers? If grief is only the doorway, what is it a doorway to?

Why do we spend three weeks manufacturing grief for a building none of us ever saw? This is the question the Chief puts directly to his audience in this year's Shemiras Halashon shiur, delivered the Shabbos before Tisha B'Av - a program he has been part of given every year for over two decades. The laws of communal mourning work backwards from the laws of personal mourning. Grief for a relative starts intense and eases with time. Grief for the Beit Hamikdash starts light and intensifies toward Tisha B'Av, because, as Rav Soloveitchik points out, the feeling isn't naturally there. We have to be walked into it. Drawing on the Ramban's philosophy of mitzvot, the Chief Rabbi argues that this manufactured grief was never meant to be the goal. Misery isn't a mitzvah. The mourning exists to sensitize us to a loss most of us have never named correctly. Not bricks or sacrifices, but the diminished honor of Hashem's name in the world. And the Gemara's answer for what restores it starts somewhere surprisingly close to home. It's the same place the Chofetz Chaim started when he built an entire program around the laws of lashon hora: how we speak to, and about, one another. Key Questions If grief for the Beit Hamikdash doesn't come naturally, why does Jewish law go out of its way to manufacture it? What did we actually lose when the Temple was destroyed, and why isn't it the building itself? Why is fasting on Tisha B'Av not, technically, an act of mourning at all? What does the way we speak about other people have to do with the dignity of Hashem's name in the world? Why does Chillul Hashem stand apart from every other sin in Jewish law?

Few aspects of human relationships are more uncomfortable than criticism, whether giving it or receiving it. Yet we cannot grow without it. If we are to become better people, we have to recognise our mistakes, learn from them, and change. The question is not whether criticism has a place in our lives, but whether we know how to give it and receive it well. This week's parsha, Devarim, begins with one of the Torah's most important moments of correction. As Moshe prepares to take leave of the Jewish people, he reflects on forty years in the desert and offers them words they need to hear, not necessarily words they want to hear. Drawing on Parshat Devarim, Pirkei Avot and the example of our greatest leaders, the Chief Rabbi explores one of life's most difficult questions: how does telling someone they're wrong become an act of love rather than an act of harm? Key Questions If speaking up risks the relationship, is silence really the safer choice, or just the easier one? Can criticism be an act of friendship, or is that always self-justification? Why does Moshe correct the people without ever naming them? What does a person have to become before they're allowed to correct someone else? Is the goal of a hard conversation to be right, or to make someone else greater?  

We instinctively look for the quickest most efficient path from where we are to where we want to be. But life rarely unfolds in straight lines. It twists, detours and doubles back, leaving us wondering whether we've lost time along the way. This week's parsha opens with a list: forty-two stops, forty years, for a journey Rashi says should have taken eleven days. Rashi also brings a midrash: God recounting each stop is compared not to an accounting, but to a parent narrating every stage of a sick child's slow recovery. Not a report, but something closer to a love letter. Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Chief takes that same tenderness and turns it toward our own lives. "Efficiency is everything in commerce," he says. "But the human being is not a product." The years you thought were setting you back may have been the years that were shaping you most. Every stop got written down, because every stop was precious enough to be remembered. Key Questions What if the years you thought were setting you back were actually shaping you? Is someone who takes forty years to learn something behind, or exactly on time? Why do the things that matter most refuse to be rushed? Can you trust that none of it was wasted?

After countless hours of searching, I thought the picture was complete. We had found the heart of Avot - the Torah of who you become, the third pillar of Jewish life - and mapped it across the whole tractate. Everything felt like it made sense. Then I noticed something I couldn't explain. Woven in among all the mishnayos about character and Torah learning, are mishnayos about action. About mitzvahs. About the imperative to do. Not study is the main thing, but deeds. Run to a mitzvah. Be careful even with the lighter commandments. Our entire theory had been built on the idea that Avot is not about what you do. It is about who you become. So how do these fit? The clue comes from a single mishnah, of a tree with great branches and shallow roots. And what the Maharal says about it begins to pull the entire picture - Avot, the 613 commandments, the whole of Torah - into a relationship I hadn't seen before. This is Part 4 of the journey. The moment the pieces stopped being separate and began to form something whole. KEY QUESTIONS ·  If Avot is about who you become - not what you do - why does it keep insisting on the importance of action? ·  What does it mean to have brilliant branches but shallow roots? And what does that say about a person who understands everything but hasn't lived it? ·  Is there a version of Jewish life where the mitzvahs you keep and the person you are becoming are actually the same project? ·  What would it mean to do a mitzvah and ask not only "did I fulfil this?" but "what is this doing to me?" ·  If Avot is the beating heart of the entire system of Torah, what changes about how you understand everything else you do?

The theory was beautiful. The Maharal, the Vilna Gaon, the Rambam, all pointing to the same conclusion: that Pirkei Avot is the third pillar of Torah, the book of who you become. But where was that picture actually visible in the text? In Part 3 of his series, the Chief opens his notebook, and lays out all 126 mishnayos of Avot. He counts. He categorises. And slowly, what had been there all along starts to come into focus. Two themes dominate. And under both, a deeper claim about how we come to see the world. Drawing on the Maharal, the Vilna Gaon, the Rambam, and Avot d'Rabbi Natan's surprising claim, this is the moment in the journey when the pieces finally begin to fit together. Key Questions What changes when the way you see the world changes? What had been hiding in plain sight in Avot for 2000 years? Why is Avot the only tractate of the Mishnah structured chronologically rather than thematically? If Torah learning is one of the 613 commandments, why does it appear so heavily in a book that isn't about commandments?

This episode is the next stage of my personal journey to discover the soul of Pirkei Avot. It is a search for what lies at the heart of the human being, and what Pirkei Avot empowers us to become. In the previous episode, I shared a discovery that had taken me years to reach. I thought I had finally discovered the central idea of Pirkei Avot. I assumed, at that point, that the journey was almost over. Then I realized that sometimes a breakthrough is not the end of a journey, but the beginning of one.  In pursuit of a deeper understanding, I opened the Rambam - Maimonides - who wrote an eight-chapter introduction to Pirkei Avot. An introduction that is longer than the book itself. If anyone could confirm what I had found and show me what it meant, it was this great sage. Instead, the mystery deepened. KEY QUESTIONS ·  If you stripped away everything you do - every obligation, every role, every action - what would be left? What are you, underneath all of that? ·  The Rambam says we have free choice not just over our actions but over our character and intellect. What does it actually mean to choose who you are? ·  What is the difference between a person who does good things and a person who has become good? ·  If the core of who we are is our character and understanding, why does so much of Jewish life feel focused on what we do? ·  What would it mean to take your inner life as seriously as your obligations?

I spent years learning it, teaching it, writing about it. Then one day I stopped and realised I had never asked what Pirkei Avot actually is.  What I found changed how I understand almost everything else. Many of us grew up with Pirkei Avot. Its teachings feel like something we have always known. If not now, when? Acquire yourself a friend. The world stands on three things. There is a warmth and familiarity to this book that is unlike anything else in Jewish life. And that familiarity, I have come to realise, is precisely what hid the question from me. After more than two decades as Chief Rabbi — after years of giving shiurim on this text, writing commentary, serving as general editor of an encyclopedic work on Avot — I stopped one day and found I could not answer the simplest question about it. What is this book? Not what does it say. What is it? The Mishnah is an elaboration of Jewish law — more than sixty tractates, each one unpacking what a Jew is obligated to do. Every single tractate deals with commandments. Except Avot. Avot contains no law, no ritual, no halakhic ruling of any kind. So why is it in the Mishnah? Why did the greatest compiler in Jewish history put this book there, among all the laws — and why have we been reading it every Shabbos for over a thousand years without ever finding that strange? This is the question I could not let go of. And the answer — traced through the Maharal, the Maharasha, and the Vilna Gaon, three towering minds writing centuries apart who arrived, independently, at the same conclusion — turns out to be unlike anything I had expected. This episode is where that journey begins. KEY QUESTIONS ·  How can a book feel deeply familiar your whole life, and still contain a question you have never thought to ask? ·  What does it mean that the one tractate in the Mishnah without a single law is also the one people love most? ·  Is there something Avot has been doing all along that we never had a name for? ·  What would it mean to discover, after decades of learning, that you had never quite asked the right question about a text you thought you knew? ·  If the greatest minds in Jewish thought all arrived at the same unexpected answer about Avot - what is it that they saw?

We are always looking for something new. A new place to go, a view we haven't seen, a fresh experience to inspire the spirit. There is a deep restlessness in being human, and no superficial experience  ever quite settles it. In this week's talk for Shavuot - the festival whose name means weeks, the festival of the journey - the Chief Rabbi opens with this restlessness, and what it tells us about who we are. Drawing on Pirkei Avot's image of the human being as a traveller from another world, on the Maharal's reading of 'Adam' as pure potential, on the strange Mishnah about those who walk and learn, and on the Chief's own observation that animals don't get bored, this is a talk about a profound psychological need that we have, and why no destination ever quite scratches the itch. What are we searching for, and where do we find it? Key Questions Why is the human need for change so deep, and so easily disastrous? What does it mean to be a traveller from another world? Why are we never quite satisfied by the new things we find? What is the difference between travelling outwardly and travelling inwardly?