Mechon Hadar Online Learning

There is a script for mothers of sick children. There are imperatives: do everything.  Seek a second opinion, and a third, and a fourth.  Learn to sleep sitting up.  Show up to doctors appointments prepared with a binder the size of a local phonebook.  Ask every question, pursue every option.And never, ever give up.

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/HeldShirimSunday2023.pdf

It’s possible that if things had been different, if things had gone as planned, that Yishmael, Avraham’s half-Egyptian son of a slave, might have been our ancestor instead of Yitzhak.

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.

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

The rules of inheritance are just another law in Deuteronomy’s massive catalog of laws, but something in the way it’s written sounds like a fragment from some lost legend. It somehow breaks the heart to hear them. A hated wife, in the shadow of a beloved one. A husband’s unfair disregard. And the poor child who was innocently born into disfavor. It reads like a story.

What does it mean to think of hesed as the bedrock of Jewish practice? Rav Aviva explores this question through an essay by Rav Yitzhak Hutner, the author of Pahad Yitzhak, in which he argues that the most foundational attribute of the world is Hesed. Recorded at the Manger Winter Learning Seminar 2024. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/MWLS2024RichmanHesed.pdf

Back in Elul of 2023, when I began this year of writing Divrei Torah for the holidays, we didn’t know what devastation lay ahead.  In retrospect, each of the Divrei Torah I’ve written this year can be read in light of the events of October 7th.  Each holiday celebrated, every encounter with Torah is refracted through the lens of the last eleven months.  If there has been a theme that has tied all of this Torah together it is: How do we observe and mourn and celebrate our holy days in light of a continually unfolding tragedy that plagues our people and the people in Gaza?  Or, perhaps: Is Torah equipped to help us make sense of such devastation and what meaning can we glean from Torah in this period of violence and loss?

Of all the anthropomorphic images used to describe God in the Torah, one of the most richly developed is “the hand of God.” The image appears for the first time in the Book of Exodus, and then is reworked and nuanced in various ways throughout the rest of that book. Here in the Book of Deuteronomy, in Parashat Eikev, Moshe will draw on several of those earlier images in order to frame a new religious message for the people about to cross over into the Land.