Ta Shma

Vayikra is a book that is concerned with the holy and the profane; the pure and the impure.  Nearly every mitzvah in Vayikra contains these categories.  The Jewish people are told that they are to be kadosh because God is kadosh.  In Vayikra, it is the holy that is the primary pathway to God.  The mishkan (tabernacle), the center of holiness on earth, is the pathway for that connection.

It shouldn’t be possible to say such a thing, but I have spent most of my life taking the Holocaust for granted.  My father of blessed memory was a child survivor; my mother, she should live a long life, is herself the child of survivors.  I have no memory of learning about the Holocaust, no recollection of a parent telling me what it was, of what happened there.  It is as if my brain came into the world pre-seared with this knowledge, my father’s screaming nightmares a “normal” part of my childhood, the stories of death and survival, hope and desolation simply the narrative landscape in which I grew up. For me, there has never been a world without the Holocaust.  There has consequently never been a time in which I could think about God and my relationship with God in which the unspeakable was not an assumption of the conversation.

The burnt ashes of the korbanot (sacrifices), piled on the altar, represent the intermingled prayers and dreams, experiences and regrets, of the Jewish people.

We are doing a lot of prep work this week.  We are cleaning our homes, kashering pots and cutlery, making sure we’ve got everything on our Seder shopping lists.

The unspoken drive towards human sacrifice lurks in the background of Sefer Vayikra.  

The first Pesah was a leil shimurim, a night of watching, a night of fear and uncertainty.  Amid darkness and screams, the fate of the Israelites hung in the balance, with hopes of redemption and freedom in their hearts. They were asked to believe in a God they didn't know and to set out on a journey with no destination in sight. Amazingly, they trusted in God and they followed Moshe out of Egypt. What does it mean to believe today in a moment of great uncertainty and doubt?  What is the source of faith and in what must one have faith to believe?  This lecture was delivered in memory of Jerome L. Stern z"l in April 2024.Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/SternPesahLecture2024StrausbergChildrenBelievers.pdf

Human beings love to make idols of our dead.  Desperate to keep our lost loved ones within reach, we create forms that we can cling to in their stead.  We name buildings and mark park benches; install portraits and keep voicenotes on our phones.  We believe, somewhere in our hearts, that if we can create the right form, capture the right image, wear the right talisman—his scarf, her watch—then they are not really gone.

The psalms attached liturgically to each day of the week are often mumbled over quickly, without much attention to their meaning. In this series, we'll engage in careful literary-theological readings of these psalms, looking at how various midrashim interpret the psalms, and bring new meaning to this part of our daily prayers. Key themes explored will include the idea that God creates the world by subduing the chaotic forces that threaten life; the notion that a concern for justice is what makes a god "qualified" to be one; and the question of what kind of character those who seek to live in God's presence must have. Recorded in Fall 2023. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldShirimThursday2023.pdf

It’s only in the moment when Moshe once again commands the Jewish people to keep Shabbat that we know they are truly forgiven.

Prague at the turn of the 17th century was the site of a critical period in the development of pre-modern Jewish thought. The great rabbis of that city developed a unique theology, synthesizing the rational philosophical tradition that shaped religious thought in the Middle Ages with the growing influence of Kabbalah. In doing so, they created a new kind of religious language - one that set the stage for the emergence of Hasidism in the following century. This series will explore this unique period of Jewish thought through three of its greatest representatives: the Maharal, the Keli Yakar, and the Shelah. These thinkers  provide unique and surprising ways of thinking about the nature of God, the purpose of the mitzvot, and how literally to read our sacred scriptures. Recorded in Winter 2025. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/WinterLectureSeries2025KasherGolemPart3.pdf