Freedom and Necessity at Mount Sinai

By Rabbi Shmuel (Richie) Lewis, Rosh Yeshiva

Freedom and Necessity at Mt. Sinai Sources (pdf)
Freedom and Necessity at Mt. Sinai E-shiur (pdf)

grain shavuot One of the most famous images in the Talmud is that portrayed by Rav Avdimi in Shabbat 88a; G-d held Mt Sinai over the heads of the Children of Israel and threatened: if you accept the Torah – fine, but if not – this will be your burial spot. Rav Avdimi derives this from the words in Exodus 19:17 b’tahtit hahar (see source #1). Rav Avdimi was not the first sage to use the image of the mountain being held over the heads of the children of Israel. Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael (a tannaitic midrash on the book of Sh’mot) is probably the earliest source to interpret the phrase b’tahtit hahar as implying that the Children of Israel stood under an uprooted Mt Sinai (see source #2). According to this midrash, exposed to a host of frightening natural phenomena (meteors, quaking, thunder, lightning), the people huddle together underneath the mountain. The darshan reads tahtit not as the “foot” of the mountain, but as the “underside,” and explains that the mountain was uprooted to provide a secure place for Israel in the face of these frightening phenomena. Israel voluntarily goes under the mountain. The image here is one of protection, reassurance and playful intimacy (Let me see your face, hear your voice, etc).

Celebrating Yom Ha’Atzmaut

By Shoshana Cohen

Celebrating Yom Ha’Atzmaut E-shiur (pdf)

According to Kohelet: “A good name is better than precious oil, and the day of death than the day of birth” (7:1). James Kugel, in his book The Art of Biblical Poetry, explains that this verse must be read according to its counterpart in (10:1), “dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a foul odor.” By reading these two verses together we can understand the meaning of the first half of the verse and the connection between its two parts. An example of this is that it takes only one fly to ruin a bottle of oil and it takes only one bad incident to ruin a person’s reputation or good name. A newborn has the potential to be good or bad, but one bad choice or action can ruin things forever. If one’s reputation remains intact at the day of death that reputation remains secured.

Who Really Split the Sea?

By Rabbi Mordechai Silverstein

Who Really Split the Sea CY Sourcesheet (pdf)
Who Really Split the Sea E-Shiur (pdf)

When the children of Israel reached the sea, they were trapped. Behind them was Pharaoh’s marauding army and in front of them the sea. With nowhere to go they were terrified, sensing that death was imminent. Outwardly, Moshe tried to calm his people, but at the same time he cried out to God for help. The leaders of the tribes feared jumping into the sea. At the height of desperation, a chieftain from the tribe of Judah, Nahshon ben Aminadav, took a leap of faith into the raging sea. The sea was calmed and split, allowing the children of Israel to pass through. This midrashic story, which does not appear in the Torah, has entered the collective memory of the Jewish people, marking Nahshon as one of the great folk heroes of the Jewish people.

Tisha B’Av: Causes of Destruction, Seeds of Hope

By Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Director of the Conservative Yeshiva

Text Sources for Tisha B’Av E-Shiur – Causes of Destruction, Seeds of Hope (pdf)
Tisha BAv E-Shiur – Causes of Destruction, Seeds of Hope (pdf)

Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, is not mentioned in the Torah. It is hinted at in Zechariah 8:19 (Source 1 and Qs). The Mishna tells that five disasters occurred on this date, including the destructions (churban) of the First and Second Temples (Source 2 and Qs).

The Rabbis, living in the centuries after churban Bayit Sheni (the destruction of the Second Temple), were preoccupied with the causes of these calamities. In one well-known source they tell us that the First Temple fell, in 586 BCE at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, because of the high rate of idolatry, sexual immorality and bloodshed. The Jews of the Second Temple time behaved much better, they say, but nonetheless the Romans were still able to capture Jerusalem and destroy the Temple, in 70 CE, because of sinat chinam (causeless hatred) (Source 3 and Qs).

Why Do We Still Celebrate Hanukkah?

By Dr. Joshua Kulp

Sources for Why Do We Still Celebrate Hanukkah (pdf)
Why Do We Still Celebrate Hannukah E-shiur (pdf)

Today, we know of the historical events surrounding Hanukkah because they are described in several texts, including the two books of Maccabees and the writings of Josephus. However, these books were either written in Greek or originally written in Hebrew but transmitted only in Greek translations. The rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud do not know of these books and therefore could not have learned of the story of Hanukkah through them. Rather they learn of the events of Hanukkah from a work called Megillat Taanit and the commentary on this work, called the Scholion.

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.

Extraordinary People In An Ordinary World – The Story of Ruth

By Vered Hollander-Goldfarb

Extraordinary People in an Ordinary World Sourcesheet (pdf)
Extraordinary People in an Ordinary World E-shiur (printer-friendly pdf of this page)

The story of Ruth is set in the time in which judges led the people of Israel, a period known for lack of order, government, and cohesiveness among the tribes ofIsrael. The story is set in the midst of the additional crisis of a famine. Against this backdrop we meet Elimelekh and his sons, Makhlon and Kilyon, a well-to-do family from Bethlehem in Judah, who moved to Moab in trans-Jordan. There they settle, the sons marry Moabite women, and subsequently all three men die. They leave behind three women, all of whom seem to be minor characters in the story of these men.

The Social Side of Pesach

By Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb

The two week-long festivals – Pesach and Sukkot – share many common features, such as mikra kodesh (holy convocation), the prohibition on work, special sacrifices, and an important home-centered religious activity (Lel haSeder and the Sukkah), but there are also differences between them. The Torah wants Sukkot to be a happy holiday, v’samachta b’hagecha (“and you shall rejoice in your festival,” Deut 16:14) and that verse enjoins us to include the slave, the stranger, the widow and the orphan in the celebration.

Purim and Assimilation

By Rabbi Joel Levy

Purim and Assimilation Sourcesheet (pdf)
Purim and Assimilation E-Shiur (printer-friendly pdf of this page)

Alone among all the Jewish festivals, Purim is a holiday with a traditional injunction to become intoxicated. Our first text is from the Babylonian Talmud and is the primary source for that obligation (Source 1). This shiur will be an attempt to look at some different ways of understanding this obligation.

The first way is straightforward: drinking is simply a means by which to celebrate. Megillat Esther is the story of a huge inversion. The Jews of Shushan move from being on the verge of annihilation to actually wiping out their enemies. A verse found towards the end of the Megillah describes this huge change (Source 2).

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.

The Scarlet Tongue and the Goats of Yom Kippur

Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Director, The Conservative Yeshiva, Jerusalem

The Goats of Yom Kippur Sourcesheet (pdf)
The Goats of Yom Kippur E-Shiur (pdf)

The Biblical Holiday – Purity and Goats

Unlike Rosh Hashanah, which receives minimal mention in the Torah, Yom Kippur is dealt with at length. Leviticus 16 describes the annual Yom Kippur ritual, centered on a series of sacrifices and sprinklings of blood on the altar, all to purify the Mishkan (the Tabernacle in the wilderness, and later the Temple in Jerusalem) and make it fit for the Shechinah (God’s presence) to dwell among Bnei Yisrael.

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.

Hanukkah: The Miracle of Freedom

By Shaiya Rothberg, PhD, Instructor in Bible and Philosophy

The Maccabees rose up against their oppressors, attained freedom, and reinstated the Temple’s holy service. There was oil for only one day but miraculously it provided eight days of light.

This story contradicts a strictly rational world view. You might think I’m referring to the miracle of the oil. But the truly irrational element in the Hanukah story is freedom. There is a very compelling contemporary philosophic and scientific argument that freedom doesn’t exist. The argument says that everything we think and feel is encoded in the material processes happening in our brains. And these material processes mechanistically follow the laws of nature. Freedom makes no sense. However, we may reasonably object: even while the logic of that argument is solid, here, inside my head, I experience myself as free, whether that makes sense or not! But how can it both be true that freedom can’t exist, because matter – including our bodies and brains – simply follows the mechanistic laws of nature, and that freedom does exist, as in our subjective experience?

Hanukkah: Public or Private Observance?

By Rabbi Hillel C. Lavery-Yisraeli

CY Hanukkah Public or Private Observance E-shiur Sourcesheet (pdf)
CY Hanukkah Public or Private Observance E-shiur (pdf, printable version of this webpage)

Hanukkah is often celebrated as the holiday of “religious freedom.” More accurately, it is a holiday celebrating our ability to practice Judaism unhindered, without pressure or influence to do otherwise. At the time, in the second century BCE, many Jews attempted to combine their ancient Jewish practices with newly popular Hellenistic ones; the Maccabees sought to put an end to this.

Janukáh: ¿Observancia Pública o Privada?

por el rabino Hillel C. Lavery-Yisraeli

YM eShiur Janukah 5773 fuentes (pdf)
YM eShiur Janukah 5773 (pdf)

Will the Real Hanukkah Please Stand Up?

By Shoshana Cohen, Instructor in Bible and Jewish Law

According to popular Jewish tradition on the 25^th of Kislev the Maccabees defeated the evil Greeks and rededicated the defiled temple. Hanukkah celebrates not only the military victory but also a spiritual one, of good over evil, of light over darkness.

Several non-Rabbinic sources (I&II Maccabees and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews) tell the Hanukkah story in much greater detail, and more significantly, indicate that the story did not end on 25 Kislev. In fact, immediately following the rededication that day, the Greeks recapturedJerusalemand were not defeated for good until 13 Adar, when the head of their leader, Nikanor, was cut off and displayed at the gates of the city. According to these accounts our Hanukkah was just a stage along the rather circuitous route to victory and independence.

Hanukkah: Byamim HaHem u’Bzman HaZeh – the Test of Time

Rabbi Shmuel Lewis, PhD, Rosh Yeshiva

The Talmud relates the famous story of the pitcher of oil that miraculously burned for eight days and the mitzvah instituted by the Sages to light Hanukkah candles for eight nights. When we perform this mitzvah we use the standard blessing formula – asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu (“who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us”) – as if this mitzvah were a Torah obligation transmitted through Moses to the children of Israel. The Talmud asks where God commanded us to light Hanukkah candles (Bavli Shabbat 23a).

Tu BiShvat – How Green is our Judaism?

By Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb, Yeshiva Director

This E-Shiur is made possible by a generous grant from Temple Zion Israelite Center, Miami, Florida. It is dedicated to the memory of the 44 people who lost their lives in the Carmel Forest fire.

CY Tu Bishvat SOURCE SHEET (pdf)
CY Tu Bishvat E-Shiur (pdf)

The 15^thof the month of Shvat, Tu BiShvat, has enjoyed a real growth in popularity in recent generations. It is probably “celebrated” on a wider scale today than ever before. Jews all over the world, many totally secular, will eat a variety of fruits and nuts, 15 if possible, or even take part in Tu BiShvat Seders. Every Jewish child in Israel has a Tu BiShvat program at school. The Jewish National Fund arranges for tens of thousands of saplings to be planted in Tu BiShvat activities every year.

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