ומשה עלה אל האלקים ויקרא אליו ה' מן ההר לאמר כה תאמר לבית יעקב ותגיד לבני ישראל. And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, \"Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel: אתם ראיתם אשר עשיתי למצרים ואשא אתכם על כנפי נשרים ואבא אתכם אלי. You have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself. ועתה אם שמוע תשמעו בקלי ושמרתם את בריתי והייתם לי סגלה מכל העמים כי לי כל הארץ. Now therefore, if you will hearken unto My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then you shall be Mine own treasure from among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine; ואתם תהיו לי ממלכת כהנים וגוי קדוש אלה הדברים אשר תדבר אל בני ישראל. and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak unto the children of Israel.\" ויבא משה ויקרא לזקני העם וישם לפניהם את כל הדברים האלה אשר צוהו ה'. And Moses came and called for the elders of the people, and set before them all these words which the Lord commanded him. ויענו כל העם יחדו ויאמרו כל אשר דבר ה' נעשה וישב משה את דברי העם אל ה'. And all the people answered together, and said, \"All that the Lord has spoken we will do.\" And Moses reported the words of the people unto the Lord. ויאמר ה' אל משה הנה אנכי בא אליך בעב הענן בעבור ישמע העם בדברי עמך וגם בך יאמינו לעולם ויגד משה את דברי העם אל ה'. And the Lord said unto Moses, \"Lo, I come unto you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.\" And Moses told the words of the people unto the Lord. ויאמר ה' אל משה לך אל העם וקדשתם היום ומחר וכבסו שמלתם. And the Lord said unto Moses, \"Go unto the people, and sanctify them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments, והיו נכנים ליום השלישי כי ביום השלישי ירד ה' לעיני כל העם על הר סיני. and be ready against the third day; for on the third day the Lord will come down in the sight of all the people upon Mount Sinai. והגבלת את העם סביב לאמר השמרו לכם עלות בהר ונגע בקצהו כל הנגע בהר מות יומת. And you shall set bounds unto the people round about, saying: Take heed to yourselves, that you go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it; whosoever touches the mount shall be surely put to death; לא תגע בו יד כי סקול יסקל או ירה יירה אם בהמה אם איש לא יחיה במשך היבל המה יעלו בהר. no hand shall touch him, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not live; when the horn sounds long, they shall come up to the mount.\" וירד משה מן ההר אל העם ויקדש את העם ויכבסו שמלתם. And Moses went down from the mount unto the people, and sanctified the people; and they washed their garments. ויאמר אל העם היו נכנים לשלשת ימים אל תגשו אל אשה. And he said unto the people, \"Be ready against the third day; come not near a woman.\" [Non-speech audio]

Which brings us back to the question: if there's no halachic issue, then what's wrong with doing it? If there's no halachah against it, then what is the issue? So the classic responses are three: one, it violates modesty, tzniut; two, it's copying the non-Jews, חוקת הגוים; three, מנהג ישראל תורה הוא, it's not our custom. And I want to evaluate all three of these reasons, and to discover what really lies beneath them. Because each one of these three reasons is easily debunked halachically. First, tzniut. Second, חוקת הגוים. Third, מנהג ישראל. Let's take tzniut first. Many people feel that a woman in a talit is inherently lacking modesty. It's ostentatious, it's gaudy, it's drawing attention to oneself, it's boastful, it's haughty, it's אומצניעותדיק. But the concept of tzniut does not mean fading into the background. And the idea that women are supposed to be passive and quiet and never call attention to themselves is actually not a Jewish value. If tzniut simply meant invisible, then Deborah the judge, or Miriam the prophetess, or Esther the queen, or Judith the warrior could never have existed. The Torah celebrates women who stood up, who took leadership, who spoke publicly, and who saved the Jewish people. Tzniut is not invisibility, tzniut is dignity. Tzniut is not about hiding, it's about not being vulgar. Tzniut is about not treating the sacred as mundane, or the private as public. Wearing a talit is not a violation of tzniut. A woman wearing a talit in shul during davenen is wrapped in a garment of holiness. There's nothing vulgar about it, there's nothing provocative about it. If someone finds it distracting, that is their issue, not hers. The Shulchan Aruch does not say women shouldn't wear tzitzit because of tzniut. That's simply not a halachic argument. What about חוקת הגוים? That's the second claim. A woman wearing a talit is imitating the Reform or Conservative movements, or worse, imitating feminist secular culture, which is חוקת הגוים, following the ways of the nations. But חוקת הגוים has a very specific definition in halachah. The Ran and the Maharik explain that חוקת הגוים only applies to practices that either have idolatrous roots, or practices that have no logical basis and therefore are suspect of having idolatrous or superstitious origins. But doing a mitzvah? How can doing a mitzvah be חוקת הגוים? Tzitzit is a mitzvah from the Torah! If a woman puts on tzitzit, she is fulfilling a mitzvah. She's not copying non-Jews, she's copying the Torah! Even if non-Orthodox Jews or feminists do it, that doesn't make it חוקת הגוים. We don't stop doing mitzvot just because people we disagree with are doing them. If Reform Jews start eating matzah on Pesach, do we stop eating matzah? If Conservative Jews start blowing shofar on Rosh Hashanah, do we ban the shofar? That's absurd. The Maharik explicitly says that if there is a positive, legitimate reason for an action, it cannot be considered חוקת הגוים, even if non-Jews do it. And a woman who wears a talit because she wants to connect to Hashem and fulfill a mitzvah is motivated by the purest Jewish intentions. There is no חוקת הגוים here. Which leaves us with the third and most powerful argument: מנהג ישראל תורה הוא, the custom of Israel is Torah. It's not our tradition, women in our community have never worn talit, and to change the minhag is to undermine the whole system. Now this is a serious argument, because minhag in Judaism is very powerful. The Rema famously writes that we do not change minhagim lightly. But we have to understand what a minhag is, and what it isn't. Not everything that people have done or not done for generations qualifies as a binding minhag. The poskim make a clear distinction between a minhag, an established communal practice with legal weight, and merely שב ואל תעשה, passive non-performance. Just because women generally did not wear a talit does not mean there was a binding minhag forbidding them from doing so. It was a societal norm, not a halachic prohibition. Moreover, throughout Jewish history, there were always women who did wear talit. Rashi's daughters famously wore tefillin. Michal bat Shaul wore tefillin. The Vilna Gaon's mother and wife wore talit katan. Lady Judith Montefiore wore a talit. This was not unheard of. It was rare, but it was accepted. But even beyond that, minhagim are not frozen in amber. A minhag that was established in a specific historical or social context can evolve when that context changes. For centuries, women did not study Talmud. There was a strong minhag against women learning תורה שבעל פה. And yet, in the early 20th century, Sarah Schenirer founded the Beis Yaakov movement, revolutionized women's Torah education, and the greatest poskim of the generation, the Chafetz Chaim and the Imrei Emes, fully endorsed it. Why? Because the reality had changed. In the modern world, if you don't educate women in Torah, they will drift away. The minhag had to adapt to save the souls of Jewish women. The same principle applies here. In a world where women are educated, professional, independent, and seeking spiritual fulfillment, telling them that they cannot perform a mitzvah that the halachah explicitly permits them to perform creates alienation and cynicism. When a woman who yearns for a closer connection to Hashem is told, no, that's not for you, that's only for men, she doesn't hear holiness. She hears exclusion. She hears that her spiritual aspirations are secondary. And that pushes women away from Torah, rather than bringing them closer. The Aruch Hashulchan writes that when the reason for a custom ceases to exist, the custom itself loses its binding force. If the only reason women didn't wear a טלית was because of societal conventions that no longer exist, then clinging to that convention at the expense of women's spiritual engagement is not preserving tradition, it's ossifying it. So if it's not צניעות, and it's not חוקת הגוים, and it's not a binding minhag, then what is it? What is really going on here? The truth is, the objection to women wearing טלית is not halachic. It's sociological. It's emotional. It's about identity, and it's about power. For many people, a woman in a טלית is a threat to the established social order. It blurs the lines between male and female roles. It looks too much like the denominations they want to distance themselves from. It triggers anxiety about slippery slopes and creeping assimilation. And those anxieties are understandable. The Orthodox community has survived by maintaining strong boundaries. But we have to be honest with ourselves. We cannot conflate our cultural discomfort with halachic prohibition. We cannot use halachah as a weapon to enforce sociological preferences. When we tell a woman who wants to wear a טלית that she is violating the Torah, we are not speaking the truth of the Torah. We are projecting our own fears onto the divine will. The Rambam in Hilchot Mamrim warns against adding prohibitions that do not exist in the Torah, because when you build a fence that is too rigid, people will inevitably break through it. If we want our daughters to love Torah, to love mitzvot, to feel that their relationship with Hakadosh Baruch Hu is valued and celebrated, we cannot slam the door in their faces when they ask to draw closer. The halachah allows it. The poskim permit it. The heart should welcome it. It's time to move past the sociological defensiveness, and to embrace the full, expansive, compassionate truth of our tradition. [Non-speech audio] [Non-speech audio] [Non-speech audio]

He's carrying a box, it's bigger than, it's taller than ten tefachim, so it should be a mechitzah, so it shouldn't be an issur! So the Ran explains that if you carry a box, the mechitzah doesn't stay in place. Since the box is constantly in motion, so each step that you take, you're nullifying the previous mechitzah and you're creating a new mechitzah. And since a mechitzah cannot be נעשית בשבת, so as you take your steps, you're making new mechitzot on Shabbos. Therefore, the mechitzah is completely meaningless. So the question is, why over here when a person walks with shoes, why don't we say the shoes are constantly in motion, every step that you take, you're nullifying the previous shoe, you're making a new shoe, why doesn't that become considered? That's the question that the Mishkenot Yaakov asks on the Ran. And we'll stop over here, we'll continue Be'ezrat Hashem tomorrow, everyone have a wonderful day. [Non-speech audio]

אני איני מצוה לך, I am not commanding you. אם תרצה שלח, if you wish, send. Think about this: Hashem already promised that the land was good. He said it flows with milk and honey. But the Jewish people requested to scout it out first. And Hashem says, \"I am not commanding you to send scouts. If you feel you need to, go ahead.\" This teaches us a fundamental principle of human existence: Hashem does not force us. He lays before us the ultimate good, the purest truth, the clearest path. But if we decide we want something else, even if it's born from doubt, from lack of trust, Hashem says, \"I won't stop you.\" In fact, our Chachamim say, בדרך שאדם רוצה לילך, בה מוליכין אותו. In the path a person desires to go, that is the way they are led. You see, the Jewish people stood at the threshold of the promised land. All they had to do was trust, to take Hashem at his word. Instead, they wanted to verify, to investigate, to rely on their own human perception. And Hashem allowed them to make that choice. Why? Because the very foundation of creation is Bechirah, free will. Without the ability to choose, to doubt, and yes, even to make mistakes, our connection to Hashem wouldn't be real. It would be robotic, compelled, devoid of genuine love. But here's the tragedy: When you choose to look through the eyes of doubt, you find reasons to doubt. The scouts went, they saw giants, fortified cities, and they came back filled with fear and defeatism. They convinced the entire nation that entering the land was impossible. And the consequence? A whole generation was decreed to wander and perish in the desert. Forty years of wandering because they chose the path of skepticism over faith. How often do we do this in our own lives? Hashem offers us blessings, clarity, and peace. But we choose to follow our doubts. We let our anxieties take the wheel. We say, \"Let me just check, let me just make sure,\" as if we know better than the Creator of the universe. And Hashem says, \"If you want to go down that road, go ahead.\" Today, take a moment to reflect on your path. Are you walking with faith, trusting in the good that Hashem provides? Or are you sending scouts of doubt, looking for reasons to fear, to hold back? Remember, you are in the driver's seat. The choice is yours. May we have the courage to choose trust, to choose faith, and to embrace the blessings that are right in front of us. Thank you for joining me. Wishing you a day of clear vision and unwavering faith.

part of the כת. But here the situation is different. Why? Because the very evidence that creates the Chazakah is the word of that very witness who is Pasul. And therefore the Chazakah is undermined from within. He continues: הרי נמצא שהדבר תלוי בעדות של פסול, ובדבר שבממון לא הוקבע חזקה אלא בעדות שני עדים כשרים. So here, the whole Chazakah is created by a witness who's invalid, which means that the whole claim that you have an אלים loses its validity. [Non-speech audio] Did you call his cell? Yeah. So text him.