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Why Is Life Always Plan B?

Question:

I am living the wrong life. I should have done sciences in college, not humanities. And even in humanities, I should have gone for a law degree, as my parents wished and not a major in basket weaving. I was supposed to marry Jessica, not Ellen and we were supposed to live in Atlanta, not Atlantic City. From there on, it only gets worse… What do I do now?

Answer:

You may not want to hear this: All your fears are justified. You are not paranoid. You are probably right on every point. How do I know? Because this entire world is operating on Plan B.

Of course, there is The Plan. Plan A. The way things are supposed to go. But in the history of the world, there hasn’t been a single thing that went the way it was supposed to go.

Adam wasn’t supposed to eat from that tree. Cain and Abel were supposed to talk things out. Everyone was supposed to get along. Things got so out of hand the first time around, G‑d drowned all the specimens and started all over. But things never stopped going wrong.

Take the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was born with certain challenges, but he was supposed to have gotten a hold of himself. He was supposed to grow up as “El Macho Fearless Provider” while Jacob would sit and study. Esau got carried away with the El Macho part and Jacob ended up having to do the job of two brothers in one life — including getting Esau’s blessings and marrying his wife. It took Jacob twenty years to get those two wives out of Laban‘s lair. Esau could have taken care of it in a day. Nobody messes with Esau. Laban would endure some discomfort pinned up against the wall of his tent but Leah would be Esau’s no sweat. But Jacob? Wrong man for the job. But that’s Plan B.

Then there’s the balagan with Joseph and his brothers — an exercise in just how many things could go wrong in one story. Joseph miscommunicated. His brothers misinterpreted. Judah miscalculated and Reuben missed the boat.

The Exodus seems exciting, but keep in mind that the first meeting with Pharaoh was a complete, counter-productive disaster and nine out of ten plagues were effectively failures. And then, when we finally make it to the high point of the story, at the Giving of the Torah, the people make the grandest blunder of history with a dumb golden calf. That calf just wasn’t according to script.

There is a script, but it never gets played. That’s why the Torah starts with the letter Beit — the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Because everything in this world works according to Plan B. In fact, if you study the six days of creation with the classic commentaries, you’ll see that not a day went by without something coming out not quite the way it should have.

Apparently, before this world began, in a time continuum that does not infringe upon ours by a nanosecond, there were other worlds where things went right.1 There were worlds where Adam and Eve were good little kinderlach and didn’t even touch the fruit of that tree. Where Cain and Abel were the best of buddies for all their eternal life. Where Esau married Leah and supported his kid brother, Jacob, so he could earn his degree in transcendental enlightenment by meditating in the wilderness. All people were so good and nice, the world was filled with light, and evil didn’t have a chance. Those worlds in G‑d’s grand imagination were all Plan A. The Plan.

What happened to all those worlds? Well, G‑d looked at each of those worlds His supreme wisdom had conjured up and He said, “Blech.” And He scrapped them one by one and went on.

Until finally He made this world, where He invested His Infinite Consciousness into the confines of a frail being that takes one step forward and falls on its face, where Murphy has more credibility than Newton, where Dear Derailed marries Ellen instead of Jessica and all the progress of life and history is nothing but grand rescues from big blunders.

And He said, “Now this is what you call a world!” And He chose the world of Plan B to become a real world, not just a fleeting imagination like the other worlds, and here He gave His Torah.

So, you may ask, what is so exciting about a world of blunders, mess-ups and downright sins? What’s up with a G‑d Who creates beings who flagrantly obfuscate His Divine Plan? If it’s goodness, beauty, light and wisdom that He wants, why choose a harsh, dull, dark and stupid world to have it in?

Continue reading  on Chabad.org…

Defending the Indefensible: Modern Orthodoxy’s IDF Frontline Feminism and the Real Misogyny

Misogyny is masked as modern progress while halacha is sacrificed on feminism’s altar

By Mordechai Sones
July 22, 2025
14 Min Read

While Modern Orthodox Judaism was conceived to balance ancient traditions with today’s realities, it frequently appears to favor modern values over core Torah principles.

This imbalance becomes especially apparent in the community’s growing endorsement of women’s participation in combat roles within the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Such positions, once largely avoided on halachic grounds, now draw support from religious Zionist circles, raising questions about where adaptation ends and compromise begins.

This trend echoes the cautions of early 20th-century figures like Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook, who opposed women’s involvement in public life, including suffrage, viewing it as a potential disruption to family harmony and Jewish moral standards. In a similar vein, contemporary shifts in military service prompt concerns that broader societal forces are influencing halachic interpretations more than they should, often under the guise of “empowerment,” while potentially aligning with historical patterns of economic and social reconfiguration.

Halachic Foundations Under Strain

Traditional Torah sources establish firm guidelines on gender roles, particularly in areas of authority and conflict. For instance, the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah in Hilchot Melachim explicitly prohibits women from positions of serarah, or leadership, and extends this to warfare, supported by Talmudic discussions in Yevamot that highlight men’s natural role in conquest while exempting women to preserve modesty and domestic focus.

Continue reading…

From Jewish Home News, here.

Only Four Years Until The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime Again

By Every Single Person Involved in American Politics

Washington, November 5 – It’s over. Or it’s just beginning. However you experience the aftermath of this exhausting election, we must all take a step back, take a deep breath, and let go of some of the tension we’ve been nurturing all year – perhaps even for five years. Even those of us who have not lived and breathed the campaigns recognize this was the most important, the most fateful presidential contest in living memory, until the next one.

So many critical issues came to the fore, in a way that most of us feel is unprecedented: Middle East dynamics; COVID response; the Constitutional process; freedom of speech; censorship; moral leadership; media bias; fascism on right and left; political violence; involvement in overseas wars; the role and composition of the judiciary; relations with authoritarian governments; racism; trade; fracking; corruption; and a host of others. Seldom, if ever, have so many areas of controversy come to a head all at once, and they may never do so again. Unless you count November 2024, when we’ll do this all again with a slightly altered cast of characters.

A chief lesson we can draw from this, the most important election of our lifetime until the next one, is the value of voting. Even a Republican voter in a solid blue state, or a lifelong Democrat among the dyed-in-the- wool GOP crimson, felt the urgency, despite the futility of defying the overwhelming majority. For one thing, even given the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College model, the political and rhetorical value of the “popular vote” has gained new valence, lending symbolic significance to even the margin by which a state goes for one candidate of the other; for another, the Congressional and local races featured many of the same issues in play yet remained unaffected by the nature of any given state’s red or blue status, such that political-minority voters could make a difference locally where they could not in the presidential election. Voters haven’t felt this urgency since 2016 – and will not again in our lifetimes until 2024.

No matter what your political preferences or loyalties, now that the most important election of our lifetime has concluded, it’s time to exhale. We can go back to what we did before this seemingly-endless campaign, and dedicate ourselves to working up a froth over the same issues, with slight variations, that we will see as unprecedentedly fateful, existential, and do-or-die four years from now.

From PreOccupied Territory, here.

Everybody(almost) has it wrong

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

There are hundreds of words we pronounce incorrectly in Davening, learning, etc.

a few examples:

דור הפלגה

It is not Dor Haflogah but Dor Hapalgah

Haflagah = distance . וסת הפלגה, The time (distance) between the 1st and 2nd וסת
A boat leaving shore (distancing) מפליג בספינה Hapalgah = dividing, breaking up, halving

פכים קטנים-

small jugs (plural) The correct pronunciation is Pakim (with a kaf) not Pachim (with a chaf) unlike פחים with a ח (Ches) (cans – tin)

מסכת יומא

There is no such word as Youma.
The correct pronunciation is Yoma.

 משנה ברורה

The correct pronunciation is Mishna Verurah and not Berurah the same as שפה ברורה  is not pronounced Berurah but Verurah.

Continue reading on Toras Aba here…