Farbrengen!

The basic message of this week’s parsha is—Judaism is not meant to do alone.

The Secret to a Long Life

Life expectancy keeps climbing year after year. Old age is taking up a larger and larger share of our lives. We’re no longer talking about “extra time” tacked on at the end, but about a whole new chapter—“the third age,” “the golden years,” and plenty of other names for it.

Many older adults find themselves with an unexpected surplus: more time on their hands, and often reasonably good health—sometimes too good. And that leads to a very modern question: what do you do with all that extra life?

Around the world there are five places that consistently top the charts for exceptional longevity. They’re known as the Blue Zones—regions where reaching 100 isn’t rare.

First is Sardinia, Italy, home to the highest concentration of men over 100 anywhere in the world.

The oldest women are found on the island of Okinawa, Japan. If you want to see the lowest mortality rates in middle age, you’ll need to travel to the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Fourth is Ikaria, Greece, where both men and women live remarkably long lives with unusual strength and vitality. Some even claim that people with cancer recovered after moving to the island. Rounding out the list is Loma Linda, California, where residents live about a decade longer than the average American.

Interestingly, many of these long-lived people say that religion plays a real role in their resilience.

Researchers and curious observers keep trying to crack the code. One factor Time magazine highlighted as common to all five places is geography: they’re coastal—by the sea, along the shoreline. But there’s something else they share just as strongly: thriving community life. People look out for each other. No one is left feeling alone. There’s mutual help, steady support, and a social fabric that holds people up.

The Importance of Community in Judaism

Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t bring you the beach. 

But the second common factor that shows up in those long-living communities is something the Torah gives us in this week’s portion. 

The parshah opens with the words, “Moshe gathered (ויקהל) the entire congregation of the Children of Israel” (Exodus 35:1). The Torah is hinting that this gathering is meant to serve as a repair for the Sin of the Golden Calf. There too, a similar word appears, with slightly different vowelization: “The people gathered (ויקהל) against Aaron” (Exodus 32:1). These are the only two times in the entire Book of Exodus that the root kahal, “community” or “gathering,” appears in any form. 

That’s because there is a connection between the two.

In the words of the Midrash: “How fortunate are the righteous, who know how to bring peace between the Jewish people and their Father in Heaven. That’s why Moshe said ‘Vayakhel’—he gathered everyone together. Let the community Moshe gathered bring atonement for the community that gathered around Aharon, as the verse says: ‘The people gathered around Aharon.’” (Midrash Aggadah, Vayakhel)

In other words, the Jewish people didn’t fail as scattered individuals; they failed as a public, as a collective. And Moses therefore understood that the repair also has to happen through a public coming-together, through community.

So, in our parshah, Moshe gives the Jewish people two gifts that help create and sustain community: Shabbat and the Mishkan. At the start of the Torah portion, Moshe repeats the mitzvah of Shabbat. Shabbat is the time when people naturally come together. The family gathers around the Shabbat table, and people finally have time to visit one another. For one day, the constant chase after responsibilities is put on pause. 

Then the parshah moves on to the Mishkan. In our time, the closest parallel is the synagogue, which becomes a center point for communal life. People leave their homes, meet friends, pray alongside others, and the relationships that form there become the fabric of a community. 

Judaism treats community as something essential, not optional. The first time the Torah uses the phrase “not good” is in the context of loneliness: “It is not good for the human being to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). 

A person is not meant to live isolated. We need family, partnership, and community. And a large part of Torah life can only be lived through connection with others. Some of the most important prayers are meant to be said specifically with a minyan. Kaddish can only be recited with a minyan. The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, the Yud-Gimel Middot HaRachamim, are also traditionally recited with a minyan, and there are many other examples. 

Yarchei Kallah

Moshe Rabbeinu didn’t teach the Jewish people how to build community by pulling Aharon aside for a private briefing. He did it through a public gathering: “Moshe assembled the entire congregation of the Children of Israel” (Exodus 35:1). Because there are things that have to be said out loud, in public, the way it was at Mount Sinai—where the Torah describes the revelation as something the entire nation experienced together, “and all the people saw the sounds” (Exodus 20:15). 

Near the end of Deuteronomy, Moshe gives an actual mitzvah built around this idea: Hakhel. 

Once every seven years, after Shemitah, on Sukkot, the king of Israel is commanded to gather the entire nation in Jerusalem, in the Beit HaMikdash, and to speak to them from an elevated platform. He reads selected sections from Deuteronomy, and the Torah explains the purpose in one sentence: “So that they will hear, and so that they will learn, and they will be in awe of Hashem” (Deuteronomy 31:12). In other words, it’s a national event designed to strengthen Jewish faith through a shared public experience. 

In the time of the Talmud there was a famous project known as Yarchei Kallah. Rav—the great leader of Babylonian Jewry—instituted that twice a year, in Adar and Elul, when farmers could most realistically take time off, people would converge on the academy in Sura (in the area of today’s Iraq) to learn Torah together. Thousands would come. The name Yarchei Kallah is a well-known Torah-based metaphor: the Torah is described as a bride, and these “months of the bride” are the months when the groom—Klal Yisrael—comes to be with her. 

On paper, it seems unnecessary. A Jew could sit in his village and learn on his own, instead of spending days or weeks traveling to a central location and then traveling back. Why insist on learning together? Because learning alone is not the same as learning as a group. The energy is different, the seriousness is different, the sense of belonging is different, and the experience stays with you in a way that private study often doesn’t. 

Interestingly, there is a parallel idea even outside the Jewish world. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson—one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence—encouraged the practice that every Independence Day, on July 4th, the Declaration would be read publicly. Many places still do some version of it. Of course anyone can read it at home, but the shared public reading creates a different kind of experience entirely. In a sense, it’s an echo of the Torah’s Hakhel. 

This week’s parshah is also the source for the entire idea of the rabbi’s Shabbat sermon. 

A midrash notes something fascinating: “From the beginning of the Torah until the end, there is no portion that opens with the word ‘Vayakhel’ except this one. The Holy One, blessed be He, said: Make for yourself large gatherings and teach them publicly the laws of Shabbat, so that future generations will learn from you to assemble gatherings every Shabbat, and to gather in batei midrash to teach and to guide the Jewish people in words of Torah” (Yalkut Shimoni on the verse). 

The Rebbe explains: from the time of Moshe, Shabbat was established as a day for gathering communities and teaching Torah in public, just as Moshe himself did; and from then on, in every place and in every era, all the way through the generations, Jews gather on Shabbat in synagogues and study halls and occupy themselves with Torah (Hisvaaduyot 5750, vol. 1, p. 314). 

The Rebbe didn’t only say it—he lived it. For most Shabbatot of the year, and in his later years essentially every single Shabbat, at around 1:30 in the afternoon, thousands would pack into 770 for a farbrengen with the Rebbe. He would open with a talk of around forty-five minutes, then a break for singing and a l’chaim, then another talk, another break, and so on for hours. He spoke about the weekly portion, but also about Talmud, Kabbalah, Chassidus, and whatever the moment demanded, and people stood there trying not to miss a word. Even though it happened week after week, each farbrengen felt new. 

It was the high point of the week. People waited for it, and afterward they lived with it—repeating what was said, arguing it over, sharing it at their Shabbat tables. In the winter, you could come to 770 in the morning for prayer and leave only after Havdalah, because the farbrengen ran late, and then Minchah and Maariv followed right after. 

It was a different kind of Shabbat. It felt like a different kind of life. That experience of Torah in public—the feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself—stays with a person forever. That’s why, in synagogues across the world, Shabbat is a day of learning and public teaching, a day of gathering and building community. 

So, if anyone has complaints about the length of the sermon, they can take it up with the one who established the policy in the first place: Moshe Rabbeinu.