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.
The Essence of Kedushah and Swords of Iron In the past few articles, we explained the fundamental distinction between good and bad and the importance of having emunah. We also learned that we have the power to create angels by learning Torah, observing mitzvot and doing acts of kindness. These
We are now in the final countdown to Rosh Hashanah 5784, and thoughts of teshuvah should be constantly in our minds. The question is, what is the essence of teshuvah that we need to be working on and how does it relate to the theme of Rosh Hashanah? Let's begin
R' Abahu said (Berachot 34b): מָקוֹם שֶׁבַּעֲלֵי תְשׁוּבָה עוֹמְדִין צַדִּיקִים גְּמוּרִים אֵינָם עוֹמְדִין שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר שָׁלוֹם שָׁלוֹם לָרָחוֹק וְלַקָּרוֹב לָרָחוֹק בְּרֵישָׁא וַהֲדַר לַקָּרוֹב (In the place ba’alei teshuvah stand, complete tzaddikim cannot stand, as it says [Yeshayah 57:19], ‘Shalom, shalom to him who is far away and to him who is
When you hear the word teshuvah, what do you think about? Perhaps the first ideas to come to mind are that it means to repent or to return to Hashem and His ways. We could add the notion of moving from being far away to being closer to Hashem. Maybe
Fears can be extraordinarily debilitating, and generally speaking sane people don’t want to be debilitated. This is the reason why a great deal of psychology exists around fear, i.e. how to deal with it, how to overcome it, and even how to benefit from it. On the surface this sounds
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
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,
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
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
