The Shehehiyanu Blessing and Tu BiShvat

By Rabbi Mordechai Silverstein

Shehehiyanu and Tu BiShvat Sourcesheet (pdf with Hebrew)
Shehehiyanu and Tu BiShvat E-shiur (pdf of this page with Hebrew)

Life is filled with special moments which, to our detriment, we take for granted. Our lives would be better if we would learn to appreciate the blessings it has to offer. Yerushalmi Kiddushin 4:12 (66b) teaches us that it is wrong to neglect even the simplest of life’s blessings:

“Rabbi Hezkiah, Rabbi Kohen in the name of Rav: In the future a person will give an accounting for everything that his eyes saw and he did not eat. Rabbi [E]liezer took this teaching seriously. He saved his coins so that he might eat of everything once a year.”

Hanukkah: It’s Greek to Them – The Apocrypha in the Eyes of the Sages

This edition of the Conservative Yeshiva’s E-Shiur is made possible by a generous grant from Temple Zion Israelite Center, Miami, Florida.

By Rabbi Hillel Hayyim Lavery-Yisraeli

Hanukkah Source Sheet – It’s Greek to Them (pdf)
Hanukkah – It’s Greek to Them (pdf, printable version of this webpage)

Sources of the Hanukkah Story
Today Hanukkah is perhaps the best-known Jewish holiday throughout the world. However, despite its popularity, Hanukkah is the holiday with the least textual basis. The story of Hanukkah does not appear in the Tanakh. And while there is a Talmudic tractate named for the one-day festival of Purim (“Massekhet Megillah”), only a few pages of the Babylonian Talmud (B. Shabbat 21b-23a) are devoted to Hanukkah, including one small paragraph describing the historical event, and a few pages dealing with the laws of lighting Hanukkah candles.

Zohar on the Holidays of Tishrei

By Dr. Shaiya Rothberg, Teacher in Bible and Jewish Thought

Zohar on the Holidays of Tishrei Sourcesheet
Zohar on the Holidays of Tishrei E-shiur

Jewish life constitutes a mosaic of ritual, law and narrative. Our most sacred text, the Five Books of Moses, weaves these elements into the holy story around which we build our lives as Jews and from which we derive the precepts of Jewish law and religion. The holidays of Tishrei are all rooted in that story of creation, covenant, slavery and redemption. This rootedness involves not only the legal codes that God reveals to Moses at different stages of the narrative, but also the sacred plot itself: Our sages discovered connections between Rosh Hashanah and the creation of the world. Sukkot is explicitly associated in the Torah with the Exodus. And the sages calculate Yom Kippur as the very day on which God fully forgave His People Israel for the sin of the Golden Calf.

Slichot: The 13 Attributes (Midot) – God Teaches Us how to Ask for Divine Forgiveness

By Vered Hollander Goldfarb of the Bible faculty and Rabbi Gail Diamond, Associate Director

Slichot 13 Midot Sourcesheet (pdf)
Slichot 13 Midot E-shiur (pdf)

The section known as “God’s 13 Attributes (midot)”, from Exodus 34:6-7, forms the heart of the Slichot (Forgiveness) prayers of the High Holiday season. Along with Birkhat Kohanim and Kriat Shma, it, as Torah verse, is amongst the oldest texts in Jewish liturgy, but unlike the priestly blessing, it was not originally meant as prayer. Its development into this role is fascinating historically and spiritually.

High Holidays: The Third of Tishrei – For Whom to Fast?

By R. Shlomo Zacharow

As we rush back to our daily routines following the majestic two day Rosh Hashanah, it is easy to overlook the third day of Tishrei, Tzom Gedaliah, a minor fast. When the First Temple was destroyed, in 586 BCE, a remnant of Jews was left in the land, and the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar appointed Gedaliah ben Ahikam to rule over them. Radical segments of the Jewish population viewed him as a Babylonian puppet and collaborator, and a Jew killed him, removing the last vestige of Jewish sovereignty in theland ofIsrael.

Author Archive

The Shehehiyanu Blessing and Tu BiShvat

Hanukkah: It’s Greek to Them – The Apocrypha in the Eyes of the Sages

Zohar on the Holidays of Tishrei

Slichot: The 13 Attributes (Midot) – God Teaches Us how to Ask for Divine Forgiveness

High Holidays: The Third of Tishrei – For Whom to Fast?

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