Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein

Self-help is one of the most popular genres of books in the world. Walk into any bookstore and the shelves are weighed down with them. Self-development, personal growth, becoming your best self. This series has been about self-development too. Pirkei Avot is the Torah of who a person can become, what we have been calling Torah bein adam l'atzmo. But the philosophy of self-development from a Torah perspective is very different from contemporary culture. The clue to understanding is in this week's parsha. Ha'azinu holds 43 verses of poetry that carry the entire sweep of human history: creation, free will, the failures of the early generations, the emergence of Abraham and then of the Jewish people, our own drifting, and the long road to the end of history. It is called the Shirah, the song. The verse instructing us to write it down becomes the source for writing the whole Torah, which tells you that something at the heart of this parsha holds the essence of what Torah is. It is also read every year in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rav Yisrael Salanter read the famous Gemara about the three books opened on Rosh Hashanah in an astounding way, and it answers a question the commentators have been asking for many centuries. How can the Gemara say the righteous are written immediately for life, when every one of us can name righteous people who died this year? His answer reframes what the judgment of these days is asking of us. And it reveals a radically different way of understanding what self-development is actually for. Key Questions Self-development is one of the biggest industries in the world. What does the Torah think it is actually for? How can working on yourself become the very thing that blocks your growth? In all the generations back to Sinai, not one let the chain break. What did that cost the people who carried it? The Gemara says the righteous are written immediately for life. What do we do with the righteous people who died this year? What changes if you are not the point of your own self-improvement?

What are we actually meant to be doing on Rosh Hashanah? What are the goals of the day? What does an ideal Rosh Hashanah look like? What should be going through your mind when you are sitting in shul? The answer to these questions can completely change your experience of Rosh Hashanah this year, and, even, transform your entire life. Every Jewish festival has a clear objective. On Yom Kippur we repent and confess. On Pesach we remember the Exodus. On Sukkot we remember how God protected us in the desert. Each one takes a theme that matters all year round and gives it a specific time of complete focus. Rosh Hashanah looks like the exception. We never mention sin. There is no explicit reference to repentance. We call it the Day of Judgment, but what does that ask of you when you are sitting in shul with the machzor open in front of you? The key lies in one line of the Mishnah, which departs from its usual legal language and turns poetic. On Rosh Hashanah, all who pass through this world come before God one by one, in single file. Not as a congregation. Not as a family. Alone. Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Rambam, Rabbeinu Yonah and the Rema, Chief Rabbi Goldstein explores the mitzvah that lies at the heart of Rosh Hashanah and gives meaning to its judgment, its prayers, the shofar and the kingship of God. We call these days the Yamim Noraim. Many people hear that as the days of dread. But the phrase is better understood as the Awesome Days. Understanding why can transform not only our experience of Rosh Hashanah, but the way we live throughout the year. Key Questions Every other festival tells us exactly what to do. What is Rosh Hashanah actually asking of us? What does it mean to be judged on a day when we never once mention sin? We spend Rosh Hashanah surrounded by family and community. Why does the Mishnah describe us coming before God one by one? What does it really mean to call Rosh Hashanah one of the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe? Can two days of the year really change how a person lives the other 363 days?

Inner strength is needed to succeed in everything in life. But how do we build the strength we need? Avot gives us high-impact tactics for this. And more than that, it offers a profound understanding of the nature of life itself that can give us the strength we need to overcome all the obstacles in our path. Courage is usually defined against fear. In the parsha of Vayelech it is defined against weakness, which makes courage a matter of strength. And that turns an abstract virtue into a practical problem. Where does a person actually get strength? The parsha sits at a moment of handover. The forty years in the desert are ending, and Moshe is giving way to Yehoshua. A people who have had everything provided for them are about to enter a land they will have to fight for and then run themselves. Two words carry the whole transition, stated three times here and repeated another four more at the opening of the book of Joshua. Chazak ve'ematz. In our lives, the stakes are more ordinary rather than epic. We set out to build families, earn a living, become the people we want to be, and we meet resistance we did not expect. Resistance from other people, from circumstances, and from our own character. Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Malbim, Rashi and the Maharal, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein works through the practical answers to dealing with fear and anxiety, and then deeper to what the Mishnah says about the nature of this world. Key Questions If courage is the opposite of weakness rather than the opposite of fear, what have we been calling courage all this time? We are told to be strong. What use is that instruction to someone who does not feel strong? Which is harder to stand against, the people in your way or the parts of yourself that are? The soul, before it enters this world, meets no obstacles and no friction at all. Why is that not the better arrangement? What would change if the resistance in your life turned out to be the point of it?

Understanding that feelings of guilt come from the depth of the soul, can empower us to transform the discomfort they bring into a catalyst for personal change and new beginnings. This understanding comes from understanding the deeper meaning of teshuva, which is often mistranslated as repentance. Repentance comes from the Latin for penitence, meaning remorse and regret. The same root gives us penitentiary. A prison. Time served for what you have done. That is not what teshuva means. Teshuva means return. During Elul, the month of teshuva, we are then faced with a difficult question: if teshuva is return, what is it we are returning to? The distinction is not just semantic. It changes what a person is actually being asked to do at this time of year, and what they are being asked to believe about themselves. The parsha of Nitzavim is read every year in the days before Rosh Hashanah. Drawing on this parsha, Pirkei Avot, the Ramban, the Rambam and others, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein follows that question from guilt through to redemption, and asks what the discomfort has been trying to tell us all along. Key Questions Guilt tells us something is wrong. Why can't it tell us what is right? Is the wrong a person has done evidence of who they are, or evidence of the distance they have travelled from it? If our deepest nature is already good, why would we need commandments at all? If the mitzvot express who we already are, why do they so often feel like rules imposed from outside?

What does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The Rambam was a physician as well as one of our greatest sages. In his introduction to Pirkei Avot, he draws a remarkable parallel between the health of the body and the health of the soul, describing the sages themselves as "doctors of the soul." But spiritual illness presents a unique problem. When something distorts our character or the way we see the world, it can also distort our ability to recognise that anything is wrong. In this next part of our journey through Pirkei Avot, The Chief explores what it means for the soul to function as it was created to function, why we may need help seeing what we cannot see for ourselves, and how Avot offers us a path back to spiritual health. Drawing on the Rambam and the great commentators on Avot, we discover a vision of spiritual health that reaches from our character and the way we see the world, to the very heights of what a human being can become. KEY QUESTIONS If spiritual illness can distort our ability to recognise it, how do we know when something is wrong? We accept that the body sometimes needs a doctor. Why do we assume the soul does not? Anger, arrogance and envy are usually treated as faults. What changes if we understand them as symptoms? Is there a connection between becoming a better person and becoming a calmer one? The Mishnah says that the human being is created in God's image. The Sforno reads that not simply as a description, but as an instruction. What is it asking of us?

Over the course of this journey through Pirkei Avot, we have been piecing together its vision of the human being: how we think, the character we develop, the choices we make, and the responsibility we take for the world around us. In Part 6, those pieces come together around one of life's most fundamental questions: What does it actually mean to succeed? We naturally measure a life by what someone accomplished. And as Jews, we might assume the answer is even clearer: learn Torah, fulfil the mitzvot, live according to halacha. But Pirkei Avot makes a startling claim. All of that is indispensable — and yet it is possible to do everything required of us and still miss something essential. Drawing on the Rambam, Ramban, Maharal, Netziv and the great commentators on Avot, I explore what the Rambam calls hatzlacha amitit — true success — and why the ultimate measure of a life may lie somewhere deeper than a checklist of what we have done. Because at the end of the journey stands another question entirely: Who did we become? KEY QUESTIONS What does it actually mean to live a successful life? Can a person fulfil all 613 mitzvot and still somehow miss the purpose? Why are Torah and mitzvot necessary, but not the final measure of who we become? What does Pirkei Avot mean by shleimut — the completeness of the human being? At the end of a life, should success be measured by what we did or by who we became?

In this episode the journey we have been on together over this series takes an unexpected twist. It turns out that Avot is not only about who we become. It is also about leadership. And it changes what that means for each of us in a way that makes it relevant for how we live every day. One of the most famous lines in Pirkei Avot is Hillel's question: if I am only for myself, what am I? Many of us think of who we are as something fixed. A fixed size, a fixed list of people who count as ours. Hillel's question doesn't accept that. It asks how far the boundary of "I" can actually move. Drawing on the Rambam, Rav Shimon Shkop, and the opening chapters of Pirkei Avot, we begin to uncover a new concept, and it is one that changes the meaning of personal development itself. Perhaps becoming the person you're meant to be was never an inward journey alone. KEY QUESTIONS · When you say "I," who are you actually talking about? Your body? Your family? Your people? Something wider still? · If you are only for yourself, what are you? · Is your sense of identity fixed, or is it something that can actually grow? · Can personal growth ever be complete? · What does it mean if the highest form of Kiddush Hashem required no words at all?

Why has the Jewish people always stood alone? Recorded on the night of Tisha B'Av, this shiur begins with a simpler question: what does it actually mean to mourn? The grief turns out to be only the surface of it. Underneath sits something else, the very aloneness the day is built to make you feel. It's there in the halachot that shape Tisha B'Av, in the law that forbids a mezumen at the seudah hamafseket even though mourners, in every other context, are permitted one. And it's there from the very opening line of Eicha: eicha yashva badad, how she sits alone. Drawing on Rav Soloveitchik's reading of that halacha, and on the prophecy given to Bilaam that Israel would be 'a nation that dwells alone,' the Chief traces two entirely different kinds of aloneness: one born of desolation, one born of a mission nothing else can replace. He follows the thread into the present moment, into the three years since October 7th and the resurgence of antisemitism worldwide, and into where Theodor Herzl's founding assumption about Jewish history went wrong. What would it take to move from one kind of alone to the other? And on a day built entirely around loneliness, what would it mean to choose it, rather than simply endure it? Key Questions What is actually happening, beneath the grief, when a person mourns? Why does Jewish law forbid mourners from comforting each other on the one day mourning is most intense? What is the difference between a nation that dwells alone because it has been broken, and one that dwells alone because of what it carries? Where did Herzl's founding theory of antisemitism go wrong, and what does Tisha B'Av say instead? What would it mean to choose the very aloneness we've spent three years trying to escape?

Personal mourning fades with time. Our national mourning, the Three Weeks leading into Tisha B'Av, on the other hand, move in the opposite direction. It grows more intense until a day described as "sitting shiva for the world itself." Why would we deliberately awaken grief for a loss most of us have never personally experienced? Drawing from Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, Rabbeinuyu Bechaye, Pirkei Avot and the wisdom of our Sages, The Chief Rabbi explores why Tisha B'Av is not only about mourning the destruction of the Temple, but about learning to see the brokenness of the world itself. And why that grief was never meant to end in sadness. It was meant to become the beginning of hope, action, and redemption. Key Questions Why would grief for a loss most people have never personally felt need to intensify as the day approaches, rather than ease? What does the Chief mean when he calls Tisha B'Av "sitting shiva for the world"? Why is fasting on Tisha B'Av treated as an act of repentance rather than an act of mourning? What actually changes at midday of Tisha B'Av, and why does the day work in two such different registers? If grief is only the doorway, what is it a doorway to?

Why do we spend three weeks manufacturing grief for a building none of us ever saw? This is the question the Chief puts directly to his audience in this year's Shemiras Halashon shiur, delivered the Shabbos before Tisha B'Av - a program he has been part of given every year for over two decades. The laws of communal mourning work backwards from the laws of personal mourning. Grief for a relative starts intense and eases with time. Grief for the Beit Hamikdash starts light and intensifies toward Tisha B'Av, because, as Rav Soloveitchik points out, the feeling isn't naturally there. We have to be walked into it. Drawing on the Ramban's philosophy of mitzvot, the Chief Rabbi argues that this manufactured grief was never meant to be the goal. Misery isn't a mitzvah. The mourning exists to sensitize us to a loss most of us have never named correctly. Not bricks or sacrifices, but the diminished honor of Hashem's name in the world. And the Gemara's answer for what restores it starts somewhere surprisingly close to home. It's the same place the Chofetz Chaim started when he built an entire program around the laws of lashon hora: how we speak to, and about, one another. Key Questions If grief for the Beit Hamikdash doesn't come naturally, why does Jewish law go out of its way to manufacture it? What did we actually lose when the Temple was destroyed, and why isn't it the building itself? Why is fasting on Tisha B'Av not, technically, an act of mourning at all? What does the way we speak about other people have to do with the dignity of Hashem's name in the world? Why does Chillul Hashem stand apart from every other sin in Jewish law?

Few aspects of human relationships are more uncomfortable than criticism, whether giving it or receiving it. Yet we cannot grow without it. If we are to become better people, we have to recognise our mistakes, learn from them, and change. The question is not whether criticism has a place in our lives, but whether we know how to give it and receive it well. This week's parsha, Devarim, begins with one of the Torah's most important moments of correction. As Moshe prepares to take leave of the Jewish people, he reflects on forty years in the desert and offers them words they need to hear, not necessarily words they want to hear. Drawing on Parshat Devarim, Pirkei Avot and the example of our greatest leaders, the Chief Rabbi explores one of life's most difficult questions: how does telling someone they're wrong become an act of love rather than an act of harm? Key Questions If speaking up risks the relationship, is silence really the safer choice, or just the easier one? Can criticism be an act of friendship, or is that always self-justification? Why does Moshe correct the people without ever naming them? What does a person have to become before they're allowed to correct someone else? Is the goal of a hard conversation to be right, or to make someone else greater?

We instinctively look for the quickest most efficient path from where we are to where we want to be. But life rarely unfolds in straight lines. It twists, detours and doubles back, leaving us wondering whether we've lost time along the way. This week's parsha opens with a list: forty-two stops, forty years, for a journey Rashi says should have taken eleven days. Rashi also brings a midrash: God recounting each stop is compared not to an accounting, but to a parent narrating every stage of a sick child's slow recovery. Not a report, but something closer to a love letter. Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Chief takes that same tenderness and turns it toward our own lives. "Efficiency is everything in commerce," he says. "But the human being is not a product." The years you thought were setting you back may have been the years that were shaping you most. Every stop got written down, because every stop was precious enough to be remembered. Key Questions What if the years you thought were setting you back were actually shaping you? Is someone who takes forty years to learn something behind, or exactly on time? Why do the things that matter most refuse to be rushed? Can you trust that none of it was wasted?

After countless hours of searching, I thought the picture was complete. We had found the heart of Avot - the Torah of who you become, the third pillar of Jewish life - and mapped it across the whole tractate. Everything felt like it made sense. Then I noticed something I couldn't explain. Woven in among all the mishnayos about character and Torah learning, are mishnayos about action. About mitzvahs. About the imperative to do. Not study is the main thing, but deeds. Run to a mitzvah. Be careful even with the lighter commandments. Our entire theory had been built on the idea that Avot is not about what you do. It is about who you become. So how do these fit? The clue comes from a single mishnah, of a tree with great branches and shallow roots. And what the Maharal says about it begins to pull the entire picture - Avot, the 613 commandments, the whole of Torah - into a relationship I hadn't seen before. This is Part 4 of the journey. The moment the pieces stopped being separate and began to form something whole. KEY QUESTIONS · If Avot is about who you become - not what you do - why does it keep insisting on the importance of action? · What does it mean to have brilliant branches but shallow roots? And what does that say about a person who understands everything but hasn't lived it? · Is there a version of Jewish life where the mitzvahs you keep and the person you are becoming are actually the same project? · What would it mean to do a mitzvah and ask not only "did I fulfil this?" but "what is this doing to me?" · If Avot is the beating heart of the entire system of Torah, what changes about how you understand everything else you do?

The theory was beautiful. The Maharal, the Vilna Gaon, the Rambam, all pointing to the same conclusion: that Pirkei Avot is the third pillar of Torah, the book of who you become. But where was that picture actually visible in the text? In Part 3 of his series, the Chief opens his notebook, and lays out all 126 mishnayos of Avot. He counts. He categorises. And slowly, what had been there all along starts to come into focus. Two themes dominate. And under both, a deeper claim about how we come to see the world. Drawing on the Maharal, the Vilna Gaon, the Rambam, and Avot d'Rabbi Natan's surprising claim, this is the moment in the journey when the pieces finally begin to fit together. Key Questions What changes when the way you see the world changes? What had been hiding in plain sight in Avot for 2000 years? Why is Avot the only tractate of the Mishnah structured chronologically rather than thematically? If Torah learning is one of the 613 commandments, why does it appear so heavily in a book that isn't about commandments?

This episode is the next stage of my personal journey to discover the soul of Pirkei Avot. It is a search for what lies at the heart of the human being, and what Pirkei Avot empowers us to become. In the previous episode, I shared a discovery that had taken me years to reach. I thought I had finally discovered the central idea of Pirkei Avot. I assumed, at that point, that the journey was almost over. Then I realized that sometimes a breakthrough is not the end of a journey, but the beginning of one. In pursuit of a deeper understanding, I opened the Rambam - Maimonides - who wrote an eight-chapter introduction to Pirkei Avot. An introduction that is longer than the book itself. If anyone could confirm what I had found and show me what it meant, it was this great sage. Instead, the mystery deepened. KEY QUESTIONS · If you stripped away everything you do - every obligation, every role, every action - what would be left? What are you, underneath all of that? · The Rambam says we have free choice not just over our actions but over our character and intellect. What does it actually mean to choose who you are? · What is the difference between a person who does good things and a person who has become good? · If the core of who we are is our character and understanding, why does so much of Jewish life feel focused on what we do? · What would it mean to take your inner life as seriously as your obligations?

I spent years learning it, teaching it, writing about it. Then one day I stopped and realised I had never asked what Pirkei Avot actually is. What I found changed how I understand almost everything else. Many of us grew up with Pirkei Avot. Its teachings feel like something we have always known. If not now, when? Acquire yourself a friend. The world stands on three things. There is a warmth and familiarity to this book that is unlike anything else in Jewish life. And that familiarity, I have come to realise, is precisely what hid the question from me. After more than two decades as Chief Rabbi — after years of giving shiurim on this text, writing commentary, serving as general editor of an encyclopedic work on Avot — I stopped one day and found I could not answer the simplest question about it. What is this book? Not what does it say. What is it? The Mishnah is an elaboration of Jewish law — more than sixty tractates, each one unpacking what a Jew is obligated to do. Every single tractate deals with commandments. Except Avot. Avot contains no law, no ritual, no halakhic ruling of any kind. So why is it in the Mishnah? Why did the greatest compiler in Jewish history put this book there, among all the laws — and why have we been reading it every Shabbos for over a thousand years without ever finding that strange? This is the question I could not let go of. And the answer — traced through the Maharal, the Maharasha, and the Vilna Gaon, three towering minds writing centuries apart who arrived, independently, at the same conclusion — turns out to be unlike anything I had expected. This episode is where that journey begins. KEY QUESTIONS · How can a book feel deeply familiar your whole life, and still contain a question you have never thought to ask? · What does it mean that the one tractate in the Mishnah without a single law is also the one people love most? · Is there something Avot has been doing all along that we never had a name for? · What would it mean to discover, after decades of learning, that you had never quite asked the right question about a text you thought you knew? · If the greatest minds in Jewish thought all arrived at the same unexpected answer about Avot - what is it that they saw?

We are always looking for something new. A new place to go, a view we haven't seen, a fresh experience to inspire the spirit. There is a deep restlessness in being human, and no superficial experience ever quite settles it. In this week's talk for Shavuot - the festival whose name means weeks, the festival of the journey - the Chief Rabbi opens with this restlessness, and what it tells us about who we are. Drawing on Pirkei Avot's image of the human being as a traveller from another world, on the Maharal's reading of 'Adam' as pure potential, on the strange Mishnah about those who walk and learn, and on the Chief's own observation that animals don't get bored, this is a talk about a profound psychological need that we have, and why no destination ever quite scratches the itch. What are we searching for, and where do we find it? Key Questions Why is the human need for change so deep, and so easily disastrous? What does it mean to be a traveller from another world? Why are we never quite satisfied by the new things we find? What is the difference between travelling outwardly and travelling inwardly?

We all reach for structure. Routines, habits, the small repetitions that hold a day together. Without them, life can feel like chaos. In this week's talk on the Parsha of Bamidbar, the Torah describes the Israelite camp arranged with extraordinary order around the Mishkan, every tribe in its place. The Chief Rabbi argues that structure is not just helpful. It is one of the deepest psychological and spiritual needs of the human being. The architecture beneath every meaningful life. But there's a problem. Too much structure crushes the soul. Where does the joy go? The spontaneity? The love? Drawing on the Maharal, on Rabbi Yerucham Levovitz's image of pearls held by a string, on the Mishnah's strange instruction to pray with structure but not as routine, and on the very word Siddur, the Chief Rabbi traces the paradox at the heart of Torah, and the way it holds structure and passion in tension. And asks what holds a life together, and what sets it free. Key Questions Why do we need structure to feel alive? Can routine crush the very thing it's meant to protect? What is the difference between Torah as structure and Torah as rote? How does the same Mishnah tell us to pray with order, and yet not by rote?

Something astounding has just happened in America. In an official presidential proclamation marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, the President has called on Jewish Americans to observe a national Shabbat — from sunset Friday 15 May to nightfall Saturday 16 May. In over 3,300 years of Jewish history, no head of state has ever officially recognised Shabbat in this way and called on Jews across an entire nation to keep it. Never before. Not in America. Not anywhere. In this address, Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein — founder of the global Shabbat Project — calls on every Jewish American to answer the proclamation. To rally every family, every community, every Shabbos table. To make this Shabbat a moment of unity, pride, and Jewish connection across the United States. Above politics. Shabbat is a gift. And this is the moment to open it.

We live in an age of headlines. One event follows another so quickly. Wars and crises. History can begin to feel fragmented and almost impossible to understand. But the Torah asks us to step back and see something larger. In this week's talk on the Parsha of Behar-Bechukotai, the Torah confronts us with one of the most difficult questions in Jewish thought: how do we understand suffering, history, and the unfolding story of humanity itself? Drawing on Pirkei Avot, the Maharsha, the Rambam, and the broader sweep of Jewish history, the Chief Rabbi argues that current events have a shape, even when they feel like chaos. Key Questions Are we living through random events, or part of a larger story? What changes when history stops feeling random? What does it mean to see yourself as part of history, rather than merely watching it? How do ordinary lives shape the moral direction of the world?