Ta Shma

Last week Hadar celebrated the arrival of a newly commissioned and completed Sefer Torah, which was generously donated by the Schiller family in memory of Martin Schiller z”l. Rabbi Ethan Tucker’s address, focusing on the important and timeless elements of Torah scrolls, speaks directly to Hadar’s core values, while honoring the memory of Martin Schiller. Recorded in October 2024. Transcript and source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/TuckerHakhnasatSeferTorah2024.pdf

We ask the wrong questions about the story of the Flood.We ask how God could do such a thing. We ask how a God who is good could destroy a world. We ask how a just God could ignore the difference between perpetrator and victim in His zeal to wipe the world clean. We ask how a loving God could abandon His creation.The right question, for anyone who knows the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Babi Yar is not how God could have done such a thing. The right question for those who remember is how it is that God has never been compelled to do it again.

Dr. Devora Steinmetz joins Rabbanit Leah Sarna in conversation around the release of Dr. Steinmetz’s book Why Rain Comes From Above: Explorations in Religious Imagination (Hadar Press, 2024) They discuss the book and explore how imaginative engagement with religious texts and practices might transform our relationship to the world around us. Recorded in March 2024. Learn more and order the book at: https://hadar.org/torah-tefillah/books/why-rain-comes-above

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.