Rabbi Shaul Youdkevitch – Zohar & Kabbalah Study

Shemini 5786 (2026)

·55 min·5 clips

Rabbi Youdkevitch reveals how prophecy requires shutting down the brain's sense of time and space.

Listen close: the calendar is where the teaching starts. The host opens with the odd placement of Parashat Shemini, since Pesach often falls between two readings of the same portion. He is not treating that as a scheduling quirk. He counts the cycle, names the leap-year exception, and keeps circling the same question: why does Shemini wrap around Passover? Then the eighth day comes into focus. Leviticus chapter 9, verse 1 becomes a time marker, and the lesson moves toward Exodus, the desert, Shavuot, and Mount Sinai. The pace is careful. One small textual detail turns into a map of spiritual growth, beginning with leaving Egypt and ending with revelation after forty-nine days. Then the Zohar enters the room. The host says the Zohar and the Arizal point to something fierce on the night of Pesach. Pesach means passing over, but this is not a gentle escape story. It is a rush of light strong enough to wreck Egypt and give Israel the ability to leap levels. He reaches for modern language with the EMP comparison, an electromagnetic blast that burns out circuits and leaves a power structure unable to come back online. Egypt is that broken system. Israel follows the instructions: removing leaven, slaughtering the lamb, eating the lamb with matzah, and entering the ritual in the right way. The law becomes spiritual cause and effect. Same light, different vessel. Egypt is destroyed by it. Israel uses it to jump from slavery into freedom. Then the teaching gets sharper. What counts as freedom if a person leaves bondage but stays ruled by disappointment, fear, and forgetfulness? The answer is calling. Freedom arrives when a person remembers purpose, divinity, and another level of freedom still ahead. Prophecy becomes the sign of that return. The host connects redemption with divine spirit, teaching that liberation is not comfort. It is the ability to recognize God as God. So Shemini comes back again, now as a portion about entering another level of freedom through the Seder and the light drawn into each action. Forget the calling, and bondage remains. Remember it, and Pesach becomes a vessel for the kind of freedom ordinary success cannot satisfy.

As heard by us

A calendar pattern around Pesach becomes a focused teaching on freedom, purpose, and spiritual calling.

Parashat Shemini turns into a calendar puzzle with spiritual stakes. The episode begins with the portion's unusual placement around Pesach: in 12 of 19 years, it is read before and after the festival, with a 10-verse Mincha reading on the Shabbat before Pesach.

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Press play when Shemini's place around Pesach makes you wonder what the calendar is trying to reveal.

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