Vayelekh | Hakhel in Yavneh... And Beyond, by Rav Yitzchak Etshalom

What is the impact of Hakhel in our day?

The penultimate Mitzva found in the Torah is the command to assemble all of the people at the end of the Shemitta year, to hear a public reading of the Torah (התורה הזאת) - including the men, the women and the children. In a famous story recorded in Tosefta Sota, a homily of R. Elazar b. Azariah's about Hakhel is recorded, and is followed by two more homilies which all seem unrelated. Tying R. E;lazar b. Azariah's revolutionary approach (see BT Berakhot 27b) to education, we tie these three דרשות together into a weave that forms the foundation of this astonishingly new approach to teaching and publicizing Torah - all anchored in this ancient Mitzva.

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