Our new piece: Rashi by Candlelight

Rashi! Where to begin?

Rashi, Whose commentary I see every single week in the Tanach I use in our Minian's shul?

Or maybe Rashi, Here's my earliest memory of studying Rashi when I was a kid: learning that my BFF since birth, Dan, the second son of a pair of South African intellectual Jews, was a a descendant of Rashi's. Yes, a descendant by something like 40 generations, but still a descendant. And Dan's incredible family, from his grandparents and parents and sibling, is a worthy inheritance to name Rashi.

Or maybe how Rashi inspired us so much, we have made a new portrait of him: Rashi by Candlelight.

There are a few teachings of Rashi's that have long stood out to me; I want to share two:

One is the oft-repeated phrase "The world exists for kindness."

From our 2026 perspective, this might sound obvious, even trite.

It feels like an Instagram meme people share. (Oh, that would be funny, to share Rashi and other short simple phrases of great rabbis as Instagram Memes! Is someone doing that? Maybe we should?)

But as I've gotten older, your humble writer or not-so-humble writer perhaps, is now 50, I see the wisdom in it more and more.

All of us clearly have our neshama put into our body for a reason; and whatever that individual reason may be for each of us, it seems increasingly clear that it somehow relates to being a good person or, in our translation of Rashi's line, kindness.

Another classic observation of his is "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you."

I'll admit it: I first heard that line in a movie, the Coen brothers' Serious Man.

What is powerful about this advice is my desire--probably the desire of most humans--to overthink everything that happens. To find meaning in everything. To overstrategize. To over problem-solve. To go into a "loop" within your mind, going in circles, on everything (to use the language of my book Meditations on Forgiveness.)

This warning of Rashi's is a warning to avoid the loop. It just happens, and that's it.

That, of course, doesn't mean to turn off your minds. It means to "receive", to accept, to see the reality.

And then to move on.

And of course, moving on is the hard part.

In conclusion: Rashi, the greatest commentator on the Torah, with eternal wisdom, perhaps even was the original Instagrammer a thousand years before Instagram.

And Rashi as we imagine him, studying the Torah by candlelight, is our homage to him.

And do I get points deducted because I wrote a whole blog post about Candlelight without once referencing the great Maccabeats' song Candlelight that is The Channukah song in my house? Or "Januca", as we spell it, in Argentine Spanish.