Collected Archive of Shoemaker Reports
The Shoemaker Report is Rav Hoshea’s weekly Torah publication. Its focus is on internalizing and living Torah from the heart, not only from the head. The divrei Torah often take the parashah of the week as their point of entry and address central questions of inner avodah — including teshuvah, prayer (tefillah), emunah, bitachon, and related areas of spiritual and personal refinement.
The writing assumes seriousness from the reader and speaks from within Torah life, with meaning emerging organically from honest analysis of our holy Torah and the words of Chazal, rather than from short-lived inspiration or simplified conclusions.
How to Come Out from Under the Control of the Sitra Achra: Imagine a prison, a fairly standard prison – at least standard in the way that many prisons used to be. From sunrise to sunset, the prisoners are forced into hard labor. They don't get much time to rest
What the War of Gog and Magog is Really All About: "Moshe ben Amram! Why do you keep letting up and giving the Egyptians one respite after another? That just hardens their hearts and emboldens them even more. Don't you understand that? Just finish them off already! Enough is enough.
A Deeper Look into the Weeks of Shovavim Shimon ha-Tzaddik, one of the last surviving members of the Anshei Knesset ha-Gedolah – 120 elders of B'nei Yisrael, including a number of prophets, which instituted many of our customary practices in Judaism, such as the wording of the Shemoneh Esreh –
A Deeper Reason Why Ya'akov Adopted Yosef's Two Sons: If we're not careful, the Torah can appear to us as a collection of unrelated events with no connectivity between them – this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and so on. Further compounding the problem is that
The Day the Viceroy Became Yosef – Insights from the Midrash: For twenty-two long years, Ya'akov Avinu sat on the ground, covered in sackcloth and ashes, inconsolably grieving the death of Yosef. And throughout all those years, no one said a word. Why not? The brothers had bound themselves by
