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Avraham walked out of Nimrod's blazing furnace alive, so why does the Torah never tell the story? Why is one of the biggest miracles of his life hidden inside a place name, while a plain command to pack up and move gets open, detailed pesukim? Rabbi Asaf Prisman brings Rav Frand and the Sam Derech on Avraham's ten tests, and tells the story of a wounded soldier in Lebanon whose friends could not understand why he kept rolling onto his side. A Lech Lecha episode about what the Torah really counts, and where in your own week it may be hiding.

Of all the leaves in the world, why did the dove come back to Noach with an olive leaf, and why would anyone choose bitter over sweet? The answer takes Rabbi Asaf Prisman from a Gemara in Eiruvin all the way to a struggling young man in the diamond district and two phone calls he never questioned.

If Hashem didn't want Adam and Chava to eat from the Eitz HaDaas, why plant it at all? And why right in the middle of the garden, where they would pass it every single day, when any loving father would push the danger into a corner? Rabbi Asaf Prisman opens the new cycle with a chiddush of the Tiferes Shlomo on one small word in the pasuk, and why the creation of Chava comes right after it. From a crown on a king to a lifeguard's summer job, this one changes how you look at every limit in your life.

Why is Sukkos in Tishrei? The Clouds of Glory first surrounded us in Nissan, when we walked out of Mitzrayim, so the festival that commemorates them should really fall in the spring. The Tur asks it, and the Vilna Gaon answers it in a way that quietly rewrites what the whole Yom Tov is about: the Clouds we sit under are not the first Clouds at all.To bring it to life, I share the story of a young man who drove to his warehouse at two in the morning, in his pajamas, and watched every dollar he had ever earned dissolve in front of him. That night he nearly gave up entirely. What he did the next morning made his own workers think he had lost his mind, and it is the reason a certain kind of jeans exists in the world today.How it all ties together is in this week's episode.

Why does Hashem say "I" twice in Haazinu? What is the sin of "timhon levav" that we confess every Yom Kippur? And why would the seforim call the holiest day of the year "a day like Purim"? In this week's episode, Rabbi Asaf Prisman follows the Kli Yakar and Rav Gedaliah Schorr into a concept that is basic to these days of Aseres Yemei Teshuva, as we prepare for Yom Kippur. He ends with a remarkable story of how this idea shows itself, sometimes in a very unusual way: how going to prison for a crime he never committed turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to one man.

What is the single worst thing you could do to a priceless Picasso? Slashing the canvas ruins the picture, but it doesn't destroy the value. In this Rosh Hashana episode, Rabbi Asaf Prisman uncovers why our calendar seems completely backwards. Rosh Hashana is the Day of Judgment and Yom Kippur is the Day of Forgiveness, so why are we judged before we are cleansed? Should we not come into the Day of Judgment with a clean slate? The answer reaches why Hashem refuses to audit your failures on the Day of Judgment, and the hidden royal signature inside every single soul that no mistake on earth can ever erase.

Why does the Torah tell us to choose life so that both we and our children will live? Why should a parent's choice determine what the next generation wants? Rav Moshe Feinstein finds a startling warning in the wording: a person can keep every mitzvah and still fail to pass Torah on. A father preparing for his son's bar mitzvah faced five stranded yeshiva students and made a choice that turned an entire feast into something his son would never forget. This episode asks what children truly inherit when they watch our avodas Hashem, and why the feeling they see may matter as much as the actions themselves.

Ki Savo promises that the blessings will chase you down and overtake you. But who runs away from a bracha in the first place? And what does it even mean that a bracha has to catch you, if Hashem already promised you would get it? Hold that question, and listen to this. A young father in kollel dies, and his nine-and-a-half-year-old son shuts down completely. The specialist's diagnosis runs several conditions long, and the treatment plan costs more money than the family will ever see. So the mother goes to the Rosh Yeshiva of Chibin and asks him to pay for it. He listens to the whole thing, and then he asks to meet the boy, sits down on the floor, and plays a game with him for hours. Months later the therapy is finished, the medication is finished, and the diagnoses are simply gone. See what the story and the pasuk have in common. Two weeks before Rosh Hashana, it changes what you should be asking for.

Ammon and Moav did not come out to meet us with bread and water. Amalek attacked us in cold blood, and we are commanded to erase their memory. So why does the Torah bar a convert from Moav from marrying into Klal Yisrael forever, while a sincere convert from Amalek may marry right in, and the descendants of Haman himself learned Torah in Bnei Brak? The answer turns on where a nation's failing actually lives, and it changes what you think is fixable about yourself. I also tell the story of a woman who waited two days outside a Berlin office in the late 1930s. She was told the visas were finished. Everyone in that line heard the same words. What she said before she walked away is the reason her great grandchildren are alive.

Why does the Torah send a soldier home from the front line — not for cowardice, but for having spoken between his tefillin shel yad and his tefillin shel rosh? Of every aveirah in the Torah, why is that the one that disqualifies him? This week we bring the Tolner Rebbe's approach: the arm-tefillin is a man's own strength, the head-tefillin is his awareness of Who gives him that strength, and the whole avodah is refusing to let the two come apart. A soldier who has already severed them is right to be afraid. And we are all going out to some battle every day.

A woman locks herself in her house for months after losing a child, furious at anyone still laughing, still living. Dragged to a wedding against her will, she escapes into an old pay phone just to scream and cry without being watched — and an elderly woman selling nothing but a dollar's worth of tzedaka walks over and tells her she's "wasting her tears." Then that old woman reveals she lost ten children in Auschwitz. What she says next — about where grief is supposed to go — is the whole episode. This is not a Holocaust story. It's a story about what your own tears are actually for.

Hashem asks only one thing of you. Then the pasuk lists four more. So which is it? In Parshas Eikev, Rabbi Prisman opens a question that sits in plain sight in Devarim, and finds the same puzzle again in L'Dovid Hashem Ori, where Dovid HaMelech asks for one thing and then names several. The answer reframes what yirah actually is: not dread of punishment, but awe -- the same letters as re'iyah, seeing. And it explains why Chazal read the word Ma as Me'ah and built a hundred brachos a day on top of it. A man once told Rabbi Yaakov Galinsky he was still researching his surgeon. Galinsky asked him about the pilot.

A man gets blamed by the Gemara for destroying Jerusalem — and he didn't do anything. He wasn't invited to the party. He didn't start the fight. He just stood there and watched someone get humiliated and thrown out, and said nothing. That silence, Rabbi Prisman argues, is the real story of the Churban — not hatred, just people who stopped noticing each other. This Tisha B'Av, that's the connection worth making: not just mourning a building, but closing the gap between not hating someone and actually feeling their pain. Ahead of Tisha B'Av, a hard question worth sitting with: if "I don't hate anyone" is the bar you're clearing, is that actually enough?

A family did everything to find their daughter a match: every segulah, every school, every tzedakah, and nothing worked. Then a Rav asked one question that had nothing to do with shidduchim: is there someone you're holding a grudge against? What they uncovered, and what happened the very next year in their own backyard, is one of the most quietly stunning stories about what's actually blocking our brachos. This episode is about why sometimes the good isn't missing, it's just waiting for us to clear something out of the way first.

A chassidish performer made a joking promise to an 18-year-old boy dying of cancer: "Hashem will dance at your wedding." The boy just smiled and said, "maybe in another life." Years later, an invitation arrived from a wedding he didn't recognize — and what happened on that dance floor is why Rabbi Asaf Aharon Prisman says your mouth might be the most powerful thing you own. It all comes back to two words hidden in this week's parsha that most people read straight past.