May 14, 2026 • כ״ז אייר תשפ״ו | | From the Desk of the Executive Vice President | | |
RCA Updates
In Our RCA Family
Partnered Content
Chomer Lidrush
Manning the Media
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RCA Updates
1) America at 250
For chaveirim in the US: The RCA is here to provide you with materials surrounding the America at 250 celebration.
a) This Shabbos of Bamidbar has been set aside by President Trump as a Shabbos to mark Jewish Americans and America at 250. Click Here for the materials we distributed last week from the RCA, OU and YU.
b) With the help of our chaver Benjamin Samuels, we have collected many resources on America at 250 which can be used for a Shavuos or Summer Shabbos series. See below for more details.
2) RCA Convention 2026
Convention 2026 was an uplifting and exhilarating experience. It was wonderful to see the largest crowd in more than a decade, and participants left on a collective high. Recordings of the sessions will be forthcoming.
Thank you to all of our convention sponsors and vendors:
RIETS Press, the Sha'ar Group, American Friends of Magen David Adom, KosherKlaf, Machon Aleh Zayis, Ematai, Yigak Realty, Koren Publishers, Boots of Israel/Just One Chesed, In Shifra's Arms, Barkai, the Beth Din of America, America 250, Tzurba Olami, Torah Anytime, Maaglei Nefesh, Mantzichim, the Chesed Fund, Sofer.Ai, JWB Jewish Chaplains Board, FIDF, Torah Live
And a special thank you to those who sponsored individual parts of the convention: The Grossman family, in memory of Rabbi Rafael Grossman, the Guttmann family of Toronto in memory of their parents, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in honor of Rabbi Menachem Penner, Rabi David Zirkind and the Riverdale Jewish Center in honor of Rabbi Willig, Tzurba, in honor of Rav Schachter, Rabbi Kalman Topp and the Beth Jacob Congregation of Beverly Hills, The Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst in honor of the incredible work of the RCA, and the Fine Family Foundation in honor of Rabbi Menachem Penner and his leadership of the RCA.
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Raffle Winners:
- A special thank-you to our raffle sponsors: R. Yuval Noff, KosherKlaf, Koren Publishers, and Twillory. And Mazel Tov to our raffle winners: Tuvia Brander, Yogev Cohen, Yosef Konofsky, Shlomo Yaffe, and Etan Mintz
- Thank you to all of our members who visited our vendors!
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2) Summer 2026 RCA Missions
We are looking to organize both a mission to Israel (either July 13-17 or August 17-21) and to Sydney, Australia (for Parshas Ekev or Parshas Re’eh at the beginning of August). If you are interested in joining us (wives included) on either or both of these opportunities, please get in touch with me at mpenner@rabbis.org as soon as possible. We'll share more details and pricing once we have surveyed basic interest.
3) Save-the-Date: Christine Rosen Zoom with the RCA!
Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a regular contributor to Commentary Magazine, will be our guest speaker at a special Zoom presentation on May 29 at 12:30 PM Eastern (note corrected time)—more details to come.
4) Meeting with Our Colleagues in the UK
The Officers and Executive Committee met yesterday with Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis to discuss the security situation in Great Britain and to express our solidarity with our fellow rabbis from the UK.
It was also our pleasure to welcome members of the United Synagogue to our convention, including Rabbi Nicky Liss, Rabbi of the Highgate Synagogue and the Director of the Center for Rabbinic Excellence, which provides United Synagogue Rabbis and Rebbetzins with ongoing professional development opportunities. I had an opportunity to spend real time with the group yesterday, sharing best practices for rabbinic support and discussing ways to partner in our Avodas HaKodesh.
Rabbi Mirvis shared divrei chizuk with us that you might want to pass along to your kehillos and talmidim, based on the pasuk of:
והיה זרעך כעפר הארץ ופרצת ימה וקדמה וצפנה ונגבה ונברכו בך כל־משפחת האדמה ובזרעך: (בראשית פרק כח פסוק יד)
The Seforno comments:
וְהָיָה זַרְעֲךָ כַּעֲפַר הָאָרֶץ וּפָרַצְתָּ. אַחַר שֶׁיִּהְיֶה זַרְעֲךָ כַּעֲפַר הָאָרֶץ, כְּעִנְיַן "וַתָּשִׂימִי כָאָרֶץ גֵּוֵךְ וְכַחוּץ לָעוֹבְרִים" (ישעיהו נא:כג). וְזֶה שֶׁיִּהְיוּ בְּתַכְלִית הַשִּׁפְלוּת, אָז תִּפְרוֹץ בָּאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה שֹׁכֵב עָלֶיהָ בְּכָל צַד יָמָּה וָקֵדְמָה וְצָפֹנָה וְנֶגְבָּה, כִּי אָמְנָם תְּשׁוּעַת הָאֵל הָעֲתִידָה תִּהְיֶה אַחַר רֹב שִׁפְלוּת יִשְׂרָאֵל הַהֹוֶה הַיּוֹם בְּגָלוּתָם אֲשֶׁר כָּמוֹהוּ לֹא נִהְיָה, כְּמוֹ שֶׁאָמְרוּ זִכְרוֹנָם לִבְרָכָה: "אִם רָאִיתָ דּוֹר שֶׁצָּרוֹת רַבּוֹת בָּאוֹת עָלָיו כַּנָּהָר, חַכֵּה לוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר "כִּי יָבֹא כַנָּהָר צָר" וְסָמִיךְ לֵיהּ "וּבָא לְצִיּוֹן גּוֹאֵל" (ישעיהו נט:יט-כ).
(Kli Yakar derives this idea from the way in which the 4 directions are listed in the pasuk. See here).
Rabbi Mirvis added that while our enemies may trample upon us like the dust of the ground, they will, one day, be buried beneath that dust. We will remain.
5) NEW SERVICE! Rabbinic Rolodex
As announced at the Convention, we have launched a new peer-to-peer Rabbinic Rolodex service. If you have any recommendations for professionals, be they doctors, lawyers, real estate brokers, Sofrim, or really anything that you feel could benefit other chaverim, we encourage you to share. Please Click Here to submit.
6) Rabbinic Interns
RIETS is looking for 4th-year internship sites for a handful of talented young semicha students. Because of several unrelated factors, many perennial internship sites are not opening for 5787. RIETS is open to increasing its portion of student stipends to make this program available to shuls with smaller budgets. Please contact me if your shul – in the NY Metropolitan area or outside of it – may be interested.
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In Our RCA Family
- Condolences to the family of our distinguished chaver Rabbi Dr. Herbert Dobrinsky, z"l, on his passing
- Mazel Tov to the RCA's Special Assistant to the Executive Vice-President, Maury Rosenfeld, on his appointment as the incoming Assistant Rabbi of Congregation Ahavath Torah in Englewood, NJ
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Esteemed Rabbanim,
Friends of the IDF was grateful to participate at the convention and to spend time with so many members of the RCA. The FIDF is proud to partner with shuls to bring meaningful and inspiring weekday and Shabbos programming featuring high-ranking IDF officials and distinguished speakers from Israel.
These partnership programs provide a unique opportunity for your membership to hear firsthand accounts of courage, leadership, and resilience, while also showcasing how Friends of the IDF supports the critical needs of the brave soldiers of the IDF. Through engaging talks, Q&A sessions, and personal stories, these heroes help strengthen the bond between our communities and the men and women who defend Am Yisrael.
Hosting an FIDF speaker over Shabbos can greatly enhance the Shabbos experience for your community, creating moments of inspiration, connection, and unity that resonate long after Havdalah.
Over the past five years, the FIDF Shul Initiative has engaged more than 60 communities across the United States, including but not limited to Baltimore, Bal Harbour, Boca Raton, Beverly Hills, Cleveland, Dallas, Englewood, the Five Towns, Long Branch, Manhattan, New Rochelle, Palo Alto, Palm Beach, San Antonio, Scottsdale, Skokie, Teaneck, and West Hempstead.
To learn more about bringing the FIDF to your shul, please contact Yehuda Friedman, Director of the Synagogue Initiative at Yehuda.Friedman@FIDF.org or 646-276-2075.
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Chomer Lidrush
Some ideas to turn your gears heading into the parsha
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1) Two Counts
There are two countings that bracket the weeks before Shavuos: the daily counting of Sefiras HaOmer and the census right at the start of Sefer Bamidbar. On the surface, they are unrelated: one is a personal spiritual exercise, the other, a military headcount. But R. (Avraham) Yosef Weiss z”l (LeYosef Amar) sees them as a single, unified statement about the nature of Torah itself.
The Sefirah count moves upward: with it, Bnei Yisrael are climbing, day by day, from Pesach towards Matan Torah. The census of Bamidbar moves in the opposite direction: the Torah descending, as it were, to meet a numbered, named, enumerated people. Together, they enact the thesis that Chazal saw in Moshe's argument to the angels (Shabbos 88a): Torah has no home in the heavens. Its entire existence is contingent on Klal Yisrael. Just as there is no Jewish People without Torah, there is no Torah without the Jewish People.
That interdependence is why the count matters. A sefer of names is not bureaucracy but the precondition for revelation. The Torah cannot descend until there is a people to receive it, count by count, name by name. A people filled with individuals who will learn, cherish and live by that Torah.
Rav Weiss adds another layer though, and take a look at the full piece for this: Rashi notes that the degalim and their formation around the Mishkan replicated the order in which the sons of Yaakov surrounded his bier. Every yahrzeit observed, every child born into a Jewish family, every new generation is also a counting, a kind of declaration that the chain remains unbroken, and that the Torah's presence in the world depends on exactly that continuity.
2) Honor Your Kohen!
Why does a Kohen get the honor of the first aliyah during krias haTorah, yet nobody thinks twice about letting him wait his turn in the checkout line? The Meshech Chochmah offers a deceptively simple answer: kavod requires the right setting. Honor given on the street or on the bus confers nothing, because the surroundings drain it of meaning. Chazal said as much: ein mekhabdim baderachim (Berachos 46b).
Standing before a mayor feels more significant than standing before a neighbor. Standing before a king, more than a mayor. But even that, says the Meshech Chochmah, is ultimately empty: these are flesh and blood, kachalom ya'uf. True kavod exists in only one place: in the presence of the Melech HaKavod, in a space charged with kedushah. A Kohen receives the first aliyah because krias haTorah is meant to create precisely such a space.
This very same idea is embedded in Bamidbar 2:17. Why does the Torah bother telling us that the Ohel Moed traveled betoch hamachanos — in the midst of the camp? One might have assumed that the formation of the degalim, each shevet in its spiritually ordained place, an order rooted in what Yaakov himself established, only mattered during chaniyah, when the Mishkan stood assembled and the cloud rested above it. But during travel, with the Mishkan dismantled, perhaps the Shechinah had lifted and the order no longer applied. So, explains the Meshech Chochmah, the Torah juxtaposes the traveling Ohel Moed with the marching formations: ka'asher yachanu ken yisa'u. The Shechinah does not depart when the camp moves. Af al pi shenas'a, Ohel Moed hu — even when moving, it remains the Tent of Meeting.
5) See last year's Chomer Here.
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Manning the Media
“The World in its Extreme”: Profile of a Desert
William C. Langewiesche, The Atlantic (PDF)
Most of us have no conception of what desert life actually entails. You might be thinking about it, beginning sefer Bamidbar on Erev Shavuos (the Torah was given in the desert, after all). We imagine sand dunes and occasional oases, perhaps some romantic notion of Bedouin camps under starlit skies. But William Langewiesche's extraordinary 1990 journey through the Sahara reveals a reality far more extreme and spiritually significant than our comfortable assumptions.
In the world's largest desert – "about the size of the United States including Alaska" - Langewiesche encounters a landscape that strips away all pretense and forces a confrontation with absolute dependence on divine providence. It was specifically in this harsh, unforgiving environment that Hashem chose to give us the Torah. Not in the comfort of settled civilization, but in a place where survival depends entirely on divine providence.
The Midrash teaches that the Torah was given in the midbar because it belongs to no nation – it is hefker, available to all who are willing to make themselves like the wilderness. But Langewiesche's account suggests something deeper: the desert creates the spiritual condition necessary to receive divine wisdom. When stripped of all material security, when faced with the raw power of creation, one develops the humility and faith essential for spiritual growth.
A quick note: parts of it are graphic and difficult to read – such is the reality is this kind of place.
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Read something that made you think? We’d love to read it, too – and then feature it! Drop us a line.
Did our chomer help you over Yom Tov? Want to see more of less of an idea? Let us know!
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SPECIAL CHOMER LIDRUSH FOR AMERICA'S 250th ANNIVERSARY
(A joint project of the RCA and RIETS. With much more to come from the RCA!)
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UNDERSTANDING THE FACE ACT
(a free webinar)
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Thursday, May 21, 2026
1:00pm Eastern ~ 12:00pm Central ~ 10:00am Pacific
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Strategy Without Surrender
by Tzvi Sinensky, Click Here
The Rabbi Who Showed Up
by Menachem Penner, Click Here
Rabbinic Authority in an Age of Independence
by Binyamin Blau, Click Here
Jewish Leadership for a Post-Trust Society
by Noah Cheses, Click Here
| | SERIOUSLY INJURED SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS | | With thanks to Rav Dovid Fine | | |
Updated List of Injured Soldiers for the Iran War
אייל בן מירב
אייל בן קרן
אריאל בן אסתר
בניה חברון בן רויטל
דוד בן סימה
ינון בן אורית
ינון בן הדסה
מתן מרדכי בן מאירה
מתנאל בן ציביה
רון בן נטליה
יאיר בן ליאת
נתן בן נועה
דניל בן טניה (נפצע קשה)
עמית בן סוניה
לרפואה שלמה ומהירה בתוך שאר חולי ישראל
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