If you see your fellow’s donkey or ox overburdened and fallen on the road, you must not ignore it; instead you must help raise it together. (Ki Teitzei—Deut 22:4)
The Torah portion for UAlbany’s Opening Weekend and the Welcome Shabbat of Fall 2026 is Ki-Teitzei. It’s loaded with many Mitzvot, perhaps the most in any single Torah portion. It covers employee rights during harvest and on-time payment, the rule of the rooftop safety fence, and the laws of returning lost objects. It has the law of the army shovel for sanitary purposes, shooing away the mother bird before taking her eggs, the laws of honest weights and measures, and much more.
But let’s focus on the mitzvah of helping reload an overburdened donkey. Torah says we can’t ignore this, we can’t pass by. We have to stop to help reload the donkey so it can manage its load.
There’s a Yiddish expression: everyone has their “pekel”, their load, their baggage. Sometimes college and life can feel overwhelming, we might feel overloaded, burdened and collapsing under the weight.
Often the load can indeed be manageable, but may need a realignment. It may have to be readjusted or set up differently. Maybe it was too much to one-side or not evenly distributed. Sometimes it takes knowing the true weight, having a better sense of priorities and the worth and weight of things we’re dealing with.
Torah says that we can and should help others with this! If you see a friend overly burdened, or mismanaging their load or feeling overwhelmed, see if you can maybe try to help them out.
But Torah also says you raise it together – not on your own. You can’t readjust someone else’s load. You can’t do it for them. But you can do it with them, alongside them, together.
One thing we should not do: If someone is overburdened, overwhelmed – don’t add to their load! Don’t make things more difficult for them! On the contrary, we ought to ease things up, make it more manageable, help them feel that they can do it.