Aryeh-Leib Thorne

Daily Learning Portions Master Package — 5 Tishrei 5787

5 Tishrei 5787 · Wednesday, 16 September 2026 · Aseret Yemei Teshuvah · Parashat Ha’azinu (4th)

I. Today’s Portions

Secular date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Hebrew date (Israel / Jerusalem): 5 Tishrei 5787
Season and station: The Ten Days of Repentance, four days after Rosh Hashanah 5787, five days before Yom Kippur (begins Sunday evening, September 20, 2026). This coming Shabbat, 8 Tishrei / September 19, is Shabbat Shuvah / Shabbat Ha’azinu.

Chumash

Parashat Ha’azinu, fourth portion: Devarim 32:19–28.
Text and Rashi on Chabad.org · Sefaria

Tehillim

Daily chapters: 29–34.
Baal Shem Tov custom (three additional chapters each day from 1 Elul until Yom Kippur): 100–102.
Daily Tehillim

Tanya

Iggeret HaKodesh, middle of Epistle 20 — beriah as yesh me’ayin; daat elyon and daat tachton.
Daily Tanya

Rambam (three chapters)

Hilchot Tum’at Okhalin, chapters 7–9.
Daily Rambam

Hayom Yom

Tishrei 5: the second method of teshuvah — Shiviti Hashem lenegdi tamid, awareness of Havayah as the constant bridging of ayin to yesh.
Hayom Yom

Laws and customs

Psalm 130, Avinu Malkeinu, and the special insertions of the Ten Days remain in the daily tefillah. The three extra chapters of Tehillim continue through Yom Kippur, when the remaining thirty-six chapters complete the book.

Today in Jewish History

Daily teaching circulating with the calendar

The “Day of Embrace” teaching associated with Yom Kippur: repentance is not only regret for what one has become; it is being received for what one truly is — a pure divine soul returning home.

II. The Station of the Day

The fourth aliyah of Ha’azinu falls, this year, inside the corridor between the two great days of the year. Rosh Hashanah has already sounded the kingship. Yom Kippur has not yet sealed it. The Torah reading of the coming Shabbat will be the whole of Ha’azinu; the haftarah will be Shuvah Yisrael. Wednesday of this week is therefore not a “neutral” weekday. It is the interior of the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, and the portion assigned to it is the most severe movement of the Song: hiddenness, measure-for-measure, the fire that reaches Sheol, and then — suddenly — the Divine self-limitation that will not allow the enemy to write the last sentence of Israel’s story.

A Yeshiva ear hears two voices at once. One voice is juridical and historical: this is what happens when a covenanted people becomes a dor tahpuchot, a generation that turns the will of Heaven into anger. The other voice is Chassidic and interior: hiddenness is not absence. Hiddenness is the condition in which a created yesh can still choose. The Tanya of the day and the Hayom Yom of the day do not soften Ha’azinu. They teach how to stand inside it.

III. Ha’azinu 32:19–28 — The Text in Its Own Gravity

The Song has already called heaven and earth to witness. It has rehearsed kindness, ingratitude, and the fatness that kicks. Now the movement turns:

32:19. “And Hashem saw and spurned, from the anger of His sons and His daughters.”
The covenant is not an abstraction. The language is parental. Sons and daughters are named. The wound is inside the household.

32:20. “I will hide My face from them; I will see what their end will be. For they are a generation of reversals; children in whom there is no emun.”
Rashi reads dor tahpuchot as those who invert His goodwill into anger. On lo emun bam he gives two lines that must both be kept. First: “My rearing is not recognizable in them; I taught them a good way and they turned from it.” Second, from Sifrei: emun as faithfulness — at Sinai they said naaseh venishma, and in a short hour they cancelled the promise and made the calf.

32:21. Measure for measure. They provoked jealousy with a non-god and anger with vanities; He will provoke jealousy with a non-people and anger with a goy naval. Rashi, again from Sifrei, points the “foolish nation” toward those who say in their heart there is no G-d (cf. Tehillim 14:1).

32:22–25. Fire kindled in the Divine wrath burns to the lowest Sheol, consumes land and yield, sets the foundations of mountains alight. Evils are heaped; arrows are spent. Famine, plague-heat, bitter destruction, teeth of beasts, venom of dust-creatures. Outside, the sword bereaves; inside the rooms, terror. Young man and young woman, nursing infant and grey-haired man.

32:26. “I said: I will scatter them, I will make their memory cease from mankind.”

32:27. The hinge of the aliyah, and one of the most politically and theologically charged verses in the Torah:
“Were it not that I feared the enemy’s wrath, lest their adversaries distort, lest they say: Our hand is high, and Hashem has not done all this.”

32:28. “For they are a nation void of counsel, and there is no understanding in them.”

The Song does not end here — tomorrow’s portions will speak of understanding, of vengeance stored, of atonement for the land — but today’s assigned verses stop at the edge of the abyss and at the self-restraint that keeps the abyss from being the last word.

IV. Classical Meforshim

Rashi

Rashi’s work in this stretch is to keep the peshat from floating free of Sifrei. Hiddenness is not a mood; it is a decision: “I will see what their end will be.” Dor tahpuchot is a moral inversion, not a change of fashion. Lo emun is both failed formation and broken oath. The “non-people” and the “foolish nation” are historical instruments, not metaphysical equals. The fire that reaches Sheol tells the student that no depth of consequence is outside the covenant’s jurisdiction. Rashi’s brevity is itself a discipline: he will not let the reader take refuge in allegory before the plain words have been faced.

Ramban

Ramban, here and in his larger treatment of hester panim (especially on Vayelech 31:17–18 and in the context of exile), insists that hiddenness is the gravest of the Torah’s historical conditions. When the Face is hidden, providence does not cease, but it ceases to be readable as providence. Events look like nature, politics, and chance. That is precisely why teshuvah in such a generation is so difficult and so precious: one must return without the obvious signs. The Ramban’s line matters for this week because the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah are the opposite movement — “Seek Hashem when He is to be found” (Yeshayahu 55:6), which Chazal apply to these ten days. Today’s aliyah describes the disease; the season describes the appointed hour of the cure.

Ibn Ezra

Ibn Ezra reads the Song with a poet’s and linguist’s exactness. Tahpuchot is instability of will. The “arrows” of 32:23 are the full inventory of calamity, spent until none remain unused. He keeps the reader inside the grammar so that theology cannot outrun the verse.

Sforno

Sforno hears in 32:26–27 a double subject. Israel, having lost counsel, is on the path of erasure. The nations, seeing Israel fall, are ready to write a theology of their own power. Hashem’s restraint is not sentiment. It is refusal to permit a false account of history. The Name will not be interpreted as absence. Sforno thus makes Chilul Hashem the limit-concept of even the harshest decree.

Ohr HaChaim

The Ohr HaChaim, characteristically, will not leave hiddenness as mere punishment. The Face that hides is also the Face that waits to be sought. Er’eh mah acharitam can be heard not only as “I will watch their ruin” but as “I will watch what they become.” The end is not sealed in the moment of anger. That reading is native to the Ten Days. It does not cancel the fire of verse 22; it refuses to treat the fire as the definition of the relationship.

Kli Yakar

The Kli Yakar presses the educational scandal of banim lo emun bam. Formation failed in public. The children do not look like the household that reared them. For a father, this is not an academic line. It is the terror and the work of chinuch: the derech tovah was taught, and it is not visible. The Kli Yakar’s severity here becomes, in the Ten Days, a summons to repair the visible household — speech at the table, honesty in the small weights of family life, the refusal to let Torah remain an uninhabited inheritance.

Malbim and Abarbanel

Malbim tracks midah keneged midah with systematic precision: non-god answered by non-people; vanity answered by a nation that cannot found a true public. Abarbanel, reading as statesman and exegete, treats Ha’azinu as a philosophy of national history. Israel’s catastrophe is never permitted to become the proof of another nation’s sovereignty. Verse 27 is, for him, the Torah’s veto on pagan and imperial historiography. The Most High will not allow the archive of the world to be written as if power were self-generated.

These seven voices do not say the same thing. They converge on three points that a serious learner must carry into the day: hiddenness is real; measure is exact; the last word is not given to the enemy’s mouth.

V. Tanya and Hayom Yom — Why Created Beings Can Hide, and How They Return

Tanya, Iggeret HaKodesh 20 (middle)

The Alter Rebbe is in the middle of a precise metaphysical argument. Beriah, in Lashon HaKodesh, names coming into being ex nihilo — yesh me’ayin. The Ramban is cited: this is the only term that means absolutely innovative creation. An alul that proceeds from an ilah already existed in another state. A yesh that is created from ayin did not.

The difficulty he anticipates is sharp. If “all is before Him as naught,” why insist that yesh me’ayin is required in order for creatures to feel separate? His answer distinguishes two knowledges. Daat elyon — knowledge from above downward — sees created being as a sunray still inside the orb of the sun: essentially nullified, ke-ziv hashemesh bashemesh, as explained in Shaar HaYichud VeHaEmunah. Daat tachton — knowledge from below upward — is the creature’s own apprehension. From below, the yesh feels itself a separate thing. It calls its Source ayin not because it denies the Source, but because the Source is incomprehensible to it and exists in a different register of existence.

This is not a curiosity for kabbalists. It is the inner mechanics of Ha’azinu’s hiddenness. Hester panim is what daat tachton feels when the ray no longer reads as light from a sun. The world looks self-sufficient. Nations look self-made. “Our hand is high, and Hashem has not done all this” is the political sentence of a consciousness that has taken yesh as ultimate.

Hayom Yom, 5 Tishrei

The entry is a résumé of “the second method”:

Shiviti Hashem (Havayah) lenegdi tamid. Havayah indicates the coming-into-being of the universe and of creatures. The coming-into-being of all creation and its vitality is accomplished by bridging an incomparable gap — from ayin to yesh. This form of the avodah of teshuvah comes from one’s constant awareness of the way in which the universe and all that is in it is (constantly) brought into being.

The first word of the verse, as the surrounding Chassidic literature develops it, also bears shaveh — equality, equanimity. The Baal Shem Tov’s reading in Tzavaat HaRivash teaches a person to stand the same before praise and insult. The Hayom Yom of today chooses the other axis: not stoic balance first, but ontological remembrance. Teshuvah here is not only regret for a deed. It is the restoration of the true sentence about existence: I am being created now.

Set Tanya and Hayom Yom against Ha’azinu and the Ten Days become one structure. The Song describes what the world looks like when daat tachton hardens into a culture. The Hayom Yom describes the avodah that thins that hardness: Shiviti as constant awareness of Havayah. Yom Kippur, five days from now, is named in the circulating teaching as a day of embrace — not only the regret of what one has become, but the reception of what one is. That is daat elyon touching a human life without erasing the human yesh. The soul is not asked to stop existing. It is asked to exist as a created being that knows it is created.

VI. Tehillim 29–34 and 100–102

The daily book of the day is already a commentary on the aliyah.

29. The voice of Hashem over waters, breaking cedars, shaking wilderness — the anti-hidden Face in sound. Eighteen mentions of the Name, corresponding to the eighteen blessings. In the Ten Days the psalm is a rehearsal of kingship that does not wait for Yom Kippur to speak.

30. Dedication of the house; the warning that standing is not guaranteed; weeping overnight and joy in the morning. A psalm for a people that has just heard “I will hide My face.”

31. Trust under pursuit. “In Your hand I commit my spirit.” The opposite of “our hand is high.”

32. The psalm of confession and covering of sin. “Happy is he whose transgression is forgiven.” If Ha’azinu gives the anatomy of rupture, Tehillim 32 gives the first grammar of repair. It belongs on the table today as much as the Song does.

33. Praise from the upright; the counsel of nations brought to nothing; the eye of Hashem on those who fear Him. Verse 10 — Hashem annuls the counsel of nations — is the Tehillim-answer to Devarim 32:28’s “nation void of counsel.”

34. David’s escape through apparent madness; “taste and see that Hashem is good”; “who is the man who desires life… guard your tongue from evil.” Chinuch lives in that last cluster. The Ten Days are not only cosmic. They are the government of the mouth.

The additional chapters complete the movement:

100. Serve Hashem with joy; the thanksgiving offering that remains even in the future. Joy is not postponement of teshuvah. It is teshuvah’s other face — the creature glad to be a creature.

101. Integrity in the house. “I will walk in the integrity of my heart within my house.” Again, chinuch: what is not practiced in the rooms will not survive the street.

102. A prayer of the afflicted, poured out before Hashem; a psalm of exile that still addresses the Name. It is the honest voice of hester that has not accepted the enemy’s historiography.

VII. Rambam: Tum’at Okhalin 7–9

The three-chapter cycle today is in the laws of the impurity of foods. The material is technical: how impurity is conveyed to foodstuffs, quantities, connections, and the conditions under which holiness and impurity take hold of what a person eats. It is easy, in the Ten Days, to treat this as an interruption. It is not.

Ha’azinu’s fire “consumes the land and its yield.” The Song makes produce a moral site. The Rambam, in the architecture of Kedushah and Taharah, makes eating a legal site. A people that will stand before the King on Yom Kippur is a people that must remember that the mouth is a gate — of speech (Tehillim 34) and of food (Tum’at Okhalin). Purity here is not aesthetic. It is the refusal to let the body’s maintenance become a zone outside the covenant. Even when the Temple is not standing, the study of these chapters is, in the Rambam’s own stated purpose for learning the Temple-related laws, a participation in the future rebuilding. In the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah that future is not remote. It is the horizon against which ordinary bread is judged.

VIII. Today in Jewish History — Deeper Reflection

The capture of Rabbi Akiva

The calendar records that Rabbi Akiva was taken captive on Tishrei 5, 3894 (134 CE). The later martyrdom — iron combs, the recitation of Shema, the soul departing on echad (Berakhot 61b) — is read in the Eleh Ezkarah of Yom Kippur. The date of capture, five days before the fast, is not a coincidence the calendar is willing to leave mute.

Rome’s decree made Torah itself a capital crime. Rabbi Akiva gathered congregations and taught. The Talmud’s account is not a romance of resistance; it is a ruling about what a Jew is for. Papus ben Yehudah warns him. He answers with the fox and the fishes: if we leave the water of Torah we die sooner, not later.

Set that biography against today’s aliyah. Ha’azinu warns of a generation in whom the rearing is not recognizable. Rabbi Akiva is the counter-image: a man whose rearing became more recognizable under the combs than it had been in ease. He began as an am ha’aretz. He ended as the father of the Oral Torah’s architecture. The Face that hides in the Song is the Face he addressed with Shema Yisrael while the empire wrote its own verse 27 — “our hand is high.” The calendar places his capture here so that the Ten Days will not become only inward and private. There is a public Torah that costs. There is a Name that is not surrendered to the archive of the strong.

The Rebbe’s teaching on Yom Kippur as embrace does not cancel Akiva’s death. It names what Akiva already knew: the soul is received as what it is, even when the body is in the hand of a goy naval. That is not consolation as anesthesia. It is the metaphysics Tanya just taught. From below, the combs are ultimate. From above, they never were.

The birth of Naftali

Naftali, son of Bilhah, is born on this date in the tradition the calendar preserves. Yaakov’s blessing calls him a hind let loose, giving good words (Bereishit 49:21). Moshe’s blessing speaks of the favor of the dweller of the bush and of fullness (Devarim 33:23). In a week whose parashah is a song of witness, Naftali’s gift is speed and speech that carries tidings. Chinuch can take this without strain: some children in a household are built as messengers. Their holiness is not the holiness of Yosef’s administration or Yehudah’s rule. It is the holiness of arriving in time with a true report. In days of hiddenness, a true report is not a small thing.

IX. Covenantal-Republican Resonances (Only Where the Text Requires Them)

The Torah is not a tract of political theory. It is prior to political theory. When it speaks in the language of nations, counsel, hands lifted high, and false attribution of history, a republican vocabulary may be used as a mashal, not as a master.

Three points stand without being forced.

1. Limited power under a higher Name.
Verse 27 is the astonishing moment. The decree of scattering is internally limited by a concern that does not belong to the tyrant’s handbook: the enemy must not be allowed to narrate the event as autonomous power. Even the harshest sovereignty in the Song is not arbitrary. It is answerable to the truth of Who acts in history. A politics of non-domination, in the sense that no human hand may claim to be the source of the last word, is here a theological fact before it is a civic program.

2. Free will and hiddenness.
Hester panim, read with Tanya’s daat tachton, is the space in which a created being can still choose. If the ray were always obvious as the sun, bittul would be given and avodah would collapse into spectacle. The Ten Days do not abolish hiddenness; they make seeking timely. A covenantal people is formed in that interval: responsible because not coerced by constant miracle, judged because the covenant was already given at Sinai in words that can be broken.

3. Counsel versus the nation void of counsel.
32:28 names a public without etzah and without tevunah. Tehillim 33 answers that the counsel of nations is brought to nothing, while the counsel of Hashem stands. Civic virtue, in a Jewish key, is not the self-invention of a people. It is the cultivation of etzah under Torah: honest weights, guarded speech, judges who fear Heaven, a household in which the rearing is recognizable. Particularist national responsibility — Israel as a people that must not let the Name be hijacked by another’s historiography — is the Song’s own concern, not an import.

These are resonances. They are not a replacement for Rashi.

X. Avodah of the Day — Mind, Heart, Action, Speech, Time, Identity, Community

Mind.
Hold two sentences without collapsing them. First: “I will hide My face.” Second: “I have set Havayah before me always.” Study the aliyah with at least one commentary before midday. Study the middle of Iggeret 20 slowly enough that yesh me’ayin does not remain a slogan. The mind’s avodah today is to refuse the enemy’s historiography in advance — including the inner enemy that says the small life is self-made.

Heart.
Tehillim 32 is the heart’s text: confession without despair, covering without denial. The heart in the Ten Days is not asked to manufacture feeling. It is asked not to hide from the gaze that the Song says is hidden. Paradox is the point. We seek the Face that, in the portion, turns away. Avinu Malkeinu is the heart’s grammar for that paradox — Father and King in one address.

Action.
Choose one concrete repair that a child could notice: a debt of speech, a delayed apology, a withheld kindness, a corner of the house that has become ownerless. Rabbi Akiva’s capture is not imitated by theatrical gestures. It is answered by not abandoning the water in which the fish live — a set time of Torah that is not negotiable today.

Speech.
Tehillim 34 and 101 converge: guard the tongue; walk in integrity inside the house. In the Ten Days the goy naval of verse 21 includes the inner voice that says there is no Judge. Do not give that voice a sentence in the kitchen.

Time.
This is Wednesday of the week of Shabbat Shuvah. The day is not Erev Shabbat, but it already leans. Prepare mentally the shuvah that the haftarah will demand: return, take words, and offer the bulls of our lips (Hoshea 14). Do not leave the first serious conversation of the week until Friday noon.

Identity.
Hayom Yom: you are a being who is being created. Tanya: you feel like a yesh; that feeling is not the last ontology. Ha’azinu: you are a child in whom the rearing is supposed to be recognizable. Identity today is not self-invention. It is recognizable descent and recognizable return.

Community.
The extra Tehillim are a communal custom from the Baal Shem Tov, not a private sophistication. Recite 100–102 as one who is joining a chain from Elul 1 to Yom Kippur. If there is a minyan that says Avinu Malkeinu with intention rather than as furniture, be there. Rabbi Akiva gathered people. The opposite of hester in public life is a congregation that still opens a book together.

XI. Chinuch and the Shabbat Table

A father of young children does not need to teach yesh me’ayin as a term. He needs to teach what the term protects.

  1. “Hashem sees even when it feels quiet.” Ha’azinu’s hidden Face is not a story to frighten. It is a story to make the quiet hours matter. The child who thinks goodness counts only when an adult is looking is already living a small hester. Practice the opposite: praise a deed that no one was supposed to notice.
  1. “We do not let another mouth tell our story.” Verse 27, in a child’s language: when something hard happens, we do not say that Hashem is gone and that only the strong person’s hand is real. We say the truth is larger than the moment. This is not a lecture on theodicy. It is a refusal of despair as a family tone.
  1. Naftali’s good words. Ask each child for one true report from the day — not a performance, a report. Speed and accuracy of speech are a tribe’s gift. Train them.
  1. Taste and see (Tehillim 34) and integrity in the house (Tehillim 101). Let one food blessing tonight be slower than habit. Let one indoor kindness be named as “this is how we walk in our house.” Yom Kippur is five days away. Children smell hypocrisy sooner than they learn the word. The table is the first Beit Din.
  1. Shabbat Shuvah preview, without stealing Friday’s work. Tell them that this Shabbat the Torah will sing and the haftarah will say “Return.” Give them one image only: a father who is also a king, waiting in the days between the shofar and the fast. Do not bury them in adult teshuvah. Give them a path they can walk — a word to fix, a thank-you that was missing, a line of Tehillim said aloud.

XII. Toward Shabbat Shuvah and Yom Kippur

The week is already shaped. Friday will be Erev Shabbat of Shabbat Shuvah. Sunday night will open Yom Kippur 5787. Today’s aliyah is the warning movement of the Song. The later verses of Ha’azinu will speak of understanding, of blood avenged, of a people that returns. The Hayom Yom has already given the method: keep Havayah in front of the eyes until creation is no longer a theory.

The “Day of Embrace” teaching is not yet the day’s liturgy; it is the week’s horizon. Teshuvah as regret is necessary. Teshuvah as return to the soul one always was is the deeper movement Tanya makes available. Rabbi Akiva, taken on this date, recites the Shema of that soul under the combs. Naftali is born as a messenger. The portions of the day, read together, are not a heap. They are a single demand: do not become a dor tahpuchot in the small life; do not grant the last sentence to any hand but the Name; do not forget that the yesh you feel is being created now.

XIII. Extended Bibliography

Primary — Chumash and Meforshim

Tehillim

Tanya, Hayom Yom, Chassidus

Rambam

Liturgy, history, and calendar

Contemporary and conceptual (used sparingly)

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