Life is Not Linear | Parsha with the Chief: Matot-Masei
Release Date: 07/09/2026
Part 6: The Key to Success | Avot with the Chief
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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Part 5: The Ultimate Guide to Leadership | Avot with the Chief
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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....
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A Nation That Dwells Alone | Tisha B'Av Night at West Str Shul
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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Sitting Shiva for a Broken World | Tisha B'Av with the Chief
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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....
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What is the Point of Mourning? (From the annual Shemiras Halashon Program, Johannesburg, 2026)
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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The Art of Criticism | Parsha with the Chief - Devarim
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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Life is Not Linear | Parsha with the Chief: Matot-Masei
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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Part 4 of My Personal Journey | Avot with the Chief
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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Solving the Mystery, Part 3 | Avot with the Chief
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
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My Personal Journey, Part 2 | Avot with the Chief
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein
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...
info_outlineWe 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
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What if the years you thought were setting you back were actually shaping you?
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Is someone who takes forty years to learn something behind, or exactly on time?
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Why do the things that matter most refuse to be rushed?
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Can you trust that none of it was wasted?