Few people read the Torah portion from where Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz reads it.
Appointed Rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites of Israel in 1995, he has spent three decades at the Kotel: welcoming presidents and prime ministers, standing beside soldiers and brides and mourners, and twice a year gathering the millions of handwritten notes pressed into its stones. Torah From Zion is the weekly parashah seen from that vantage point.
Each essay begins with something that doesn't sit right in the text. A strange juxtaposition, a word that seems out of place, a law without an obvious reason. Rabbi Rabinowitz turns to the Talmud and the midrash for an answer, and then lands somewhere unexpectedly close to home: raising children in a world that shouts at them from every screen, the quiet work that holds a marriage together, the discipline of gratitude, why we are responsible for one another. The writing is warm and unhurried, free of jargon, and asks nothing of the reader but curiosity.
A portion a week, a few pages at a time. For the Shabbat table, the shul bookshelf, or anyone who has ever stood at the Wall and wondered what it had to say back.