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.
In the previous issue of The Shoemaker Report, in the article entitled The Primordial Criminal Mastermind we explored the essence of the sin of Adam ha-Rishon [אדם הראשון, Primordial Man] and discovered that he relied on his “superior” intellectual prowess to try to out-think Hashem. Instead of obeying the explicit
Even though we have written about the sin of Adam ha-Rishon [אדם הראשון, Primordial Man] previously (see “Daat, Daat Everywhere and not a Drop of Truth” and “The Sweetness of Silence”), we are revisiting this topic because without a solid understanding of where we came from and what happened at
Something came up in my life recently that caused me to ask the following: Have I ever done anything in my life that was done for someone else without any ulterior motives on my part, without even a trace of self-interest? After searching and searching, I found nothing. I couldn’t
In a recent article How Transparent is Your Aspaklaria? we explained how מידה כנגד מידה [middah k’neged middah] is a gift from the Holy One blessed be He. If we pay attention, especially to the ‘negative’ or unpleasant things that happen to us, we should be able to understand the
Can you remember when tears flowed freely on Tisha b’Av or on Yom Kippur? If not, have you ever heard stories of how even just one or two generations ago almost every Jew could cry and cry on such days? To paraphrase the lyrics of an iconic Pete Seeger song,
Upon seeing a skull floating on the water, Hillel said (Pirkei Avot 2:7): עַל דַּאֲטֵפְתְּ אַטְפוּךְ וְסוֹף מְטִיפַיִךְ יְטוּפוּן (Because you drowned others, they drowned you, and eventually those that drowned you will be drowned). He was teaching with a real-life example what the prophet Yeshaya said many years earlier
Describing the time in the future when Mashiach will reign, David ha-Melech expressed a beautiful thought simply and eloquently (Tehillim 149:3): יְהַלְלוּ שְׁמוֹ בְמָחוֹל בְּתֹף וְכִנּוֹר יְזַמְּרוּ־לוֹ (Let them praise His name with a circle-dance; with tambourine and with lyre let them make music to Him). Let us understand why
All of us are familiar with the three basic dimensions of space: length, width and height. Some of us are even aware that in some way or another (incomprehensible to most of us) Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity treats time as a dimension on par with the three dimensions
In the 1980s, a team of neuroscientists at the University of California, San Francisco led by Benjamin Libet published numerous papers interpreted by many, including Libet himself, as demonstrating that our brains initiate conscious voluntary movements as well as the will to move before we are consciously aware of the
Fake ice cream. Fake money. Fake friends. Fake free markets. Fake free speech. Fake education. Fake elections. Fake news. Even fake spirituality. Everything seems fake these days Why is this so? What happened to the real stuff? The truth is that what we are seeing in our world today is
We live in a very noisy world. To a certain extent, we have become programmed to eschew silence. Silence has become an enemy of sorts. The moment we might come to experience a moment of silence, we grab our cell phones, turn on a computer, listen to music, etc. The
William Ernest Henley was an English poet, writer, critic and editor who lived from 1849-1903. At the age of 16, he had his left leg amputated due to complications arising from tuberculosis of the bone. When he was in his 20s, he developed major problems with his other leg and
