A Rose?

A man in Chelm is walking down the street and passes another fellow. "Yankel!" he shouts, "You look so different... You used to wear conservative clothes, now you're dressed flamboyantly... And your hair - it used to be black, now it's blond... Yankel you used to be fat, now you're a stick..." He goes on and on until the other guy cuts in and says, "My name isn't Yankel, it's Moishie," to which the reply bounces back, "You even changed your name!"

The age old question, "What's a name?" is a profound one. Perhaps we don't pay enough attention to the fact that the Torah is divided into paragraphs. A lot can be learned from giving a name to each section. Rabbi Noach Weiberg, Z"TL, was a great advocate for studying Torah through naming the sections. In The Living Torah, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan's masterful bible translation, he provides a title for each Torah paragraph. Sometimes Chazal themselves named the mini sections of a parshah.

The second paragraph in Parshat Ki Tavo was named "Vidui Maasrot," - ""The Tithes Confessional" by The Rabbis. Given that there is no apparent confession in this section, the question arises, "Why is this title superimposed on this text?"

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That's basically how I started my drashah on Shabbos. Then I went into the ideas of the previous post. I ended with another story...