Ta Shma

Human beings don’t have to be told that we are living outside of paradise.  It’s not just the fact that the world is not perfect: it’s that deep inside many of us, we feel a longing for a place that might be.  Within each of us there is a longing for a home we have never fully found.Midrashically, this human experience of exile begins almost immediately, on the eighth day of creation, immediately after the first Shabbat.

We tend to think of Shemini Atzeret and Simhat Torah, which conclude the somber and at times terrifying High Holiday season, as a time of tremendous joy. This year, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ brutal attack and the terrible war that followed, the exultation we associate with these days will be impossibly incongruous with how many of us will feel.  How are we supposed to live with these complicated feelings on this holiday?  A closer look at the holiday’s practices offers some direction, suggesting a much more complicated emotional landscape than pure, unadulterated joy. In some ways, Shemini Atzeret/Simhat Torah is as much about existential fear as it is about celebration.

The first verse in the Torah I ever learned by heart comes from its final parashah.  When my brother and I would go visit our father in New York for the summer, he would try to figure out things for us to do during the day, and one year—I must have been about ten or eleven—he sent us to this Chabad day camp for a week.  We were not observant during the rest of the year at my mom’s house, so my father probably thought it would be good training for us, maybe fill in some gaps.  The thing I remember most vividly from that week is that every morning, all the campers would stand outside on the grass in a big formation and chant together: Torah!  Tzivah!  Lanu!  Moshe!  Morashah!  Kehilas!  Ya’akov!

It is one of the last acceptable prejudices in American culture: the God of the "Old Testament" is a God of vengeance, focused on strict justice rather than mercy, given to anger rather than love. This perception is as mistaken as it is widespread. In this lecture, we'll encounter a series of biblical texts that make the stunning claim that what makes God unique, what makes God God, is God's unfathomable capacity for love, mercy, and forgiveness. We'll explore the common complaint that a God of love is (too) anthropomorphic, and we'll ask whether belief in a God of love is still plausible in this day and age. Recorded at the July Learning Seminar 2024. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldGodofLove2024.pdf

In its time, the destruction of the Temple, habayit (the house), brought with it tremendous violence, loss and suffering. In this session, we'll turn to new midrashim written post-October 7th by Dr. Nurit Hirschfeld-Skupinsky, a professor of Midrash in Israel. In these midrashim she understands the destruction of one kind of bayit, the Temple, as a kind of a destruction of another kind of bayit, the house and families whose lives were shattered on and after October 7th. Based on traditional midrashim from Eichah Rabbah (lamentations) and the Talmud, Hirschfeld-Skupinsky's midrashim tell the stories of the devastation and loss wrought on Israeli families with a particular focus on the stories of women. Recorded on Tisha B'Av 2024. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/Strausberg9Av2024.pdf

Last week, we discussed the significance of the poem that God tells Moshe to write down in Parashat VaYelekh, "Now, write for yourselves this poem and teach it to the Children of Israel" (Deuteronomy 31:19). Most of the classic Medieval commentators (Rashi, Ramban, Rabbeinu Behaye, Abarbanel, and others) understand “this” to be a reference to the poem that makes up most of this week’s parashah, Ha’azinu. Yet the Talmud (in Nedarim 38a) considers another possible meaning of the phrase “this poem.” In search of proof that the Torah was given to all of Israel, the verse above is cited, indicating that “this poem” refers to the entire Torah. 

In Parashat Nitzavim Moshe’s grand oratory comes to a close, and in Parashat VaYelekh he turns to the process of writing the Torah down.  The parashah records two distinct acts of writing, in two very different styles: a book and a poem.

To prepare ourselves for the approaching Days of Awe, we'll engage in two sets of reflections. In this second part, we'll consider some of the very different ways that Rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Joseph Solveitchik conceptualize teshuvah and ask whether and how they can each challenge us to grow as Jews and as human beings. Recorded on Hadar's Virtual Beit Midrash, Elul 2024. Source sheet:https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldTeshuvahPart22024.pdf

In Parashat Ki Tavo, Moshe and the elders of Israel command the people, on the day they arrive into Land, to set up twelve large stones, and “to write on them all the words of this Torah” (Deuteronomy 27:3).  Moshe then repeats this charge a few verses later, but this time adds extra emphasis with an unusual verb.

To prepare ourselves for the approaching Days of Awe, we'll engage in two sets of reflections. In this first part, we'll explore some key passages on teshuvah from Maimonides', paying special attention to how he creatively reads Talmudic sources to make the spiritual-ethical-educational points he thinks are important for us. Recorded on Hadar's Virtual Beit Midrash, Elul 2024. Source sheet:https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldTeshuvahPart12024.pdf