Why the Number Six Shows Up Everywhere in This Week's Torah Portion — And What It's Trying to Tell You

Continuing in Parshas Vaetchanan, Rav Kalatsky notices a pattern that keeps repeating: the number six. The declaration that nothing exists besides God appears six times in the Torah, paired six times with a phrase naming Him master of the earth. He connects this to Adam, created on the sixth day as a single individual, so that every person could say the world was created for him alone, a teaching invoked in Jewish law when witnesses testify in a capital case, to impress on them the weight of taking one life.

From there, the shiur turns to a harder question. The Talmud contains statements, like references to mermaids, that are factually false. Doesn't that undermine it? Rav Kalatsky cites a teaching that answers no: alongside its plain legal content, the Talmud also carries a hidden, esoteric layer, historically passed down orally to select students. Once it had to be written down, the rabbis used facts accepted as true in their era as a kind of code, concealing that deeper layer from casual readers. The Talmud, in short, was never meant as a science text. As Rav Kalatsky closes, the same principle applies to daily life: outcomes trace back to God's will, not to the natural process that seems to produce them.