Ta Shma

As he approaches the man that he thinks is the viceroy, entrapped in the massive lie that Yosef has arranged, Yehudah begins to tell the truth. It has been a long road to this moment.  For so long, the brothers have been committed to a lie, the vision of their family as they wished it was, in which their father loved all of them, in which there was no favorite—most beloved wife and her favorite, m...

Asarah b’Tevet (10th Tevet) commemorates the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem in the lead-up to the destruction of the First Temple, a blockade that lasted at least 18 months.  Unlike the related fasts of 17th Tammuz or Tishah B’Av, each of which memorializes a concentrated event (the breaching of the walls; the actual destruction of the Temple), 10th Tevet marks the beginning of a lengthy peri...

Growing up as the only Jew in my class in Iowa, I got lots of practice telling the story of Hanukkah.  The story of the oil that was only enough for one night but which, miraculously, lasted for eight, as I learned it and retold it every December in a classroom full of Christmas decorations, is the most familiar in all of American Judaism. In recent years, this telling of the tale is often critici...

By the time Yosef reaches Egypt, he is one of a long list of lost children in the Abrahamic family. It’s a family that has always been made up of insiders and outsiders, those who stay and those who are exiled. 

Over the past year, Rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Shai Held each published major works in Jewish thought, The Triumph of Life and Judaism Is About Love , respectively.  In honor of the recent appearance of Rav Yitz's book, join Hadar for a freewheeling discussion between Rav Yitz and Rav Shai-- about Judaism's celebration of life, about its insistent focus on love, and about the relationship...

In order to understand why Yehudah does not want Tamar to marry Shelah, his youngest son, after his first two sons die, we need to understand who Yehudah has become since Yosef's sale.

From the Talmud to the Rambam and into the modern period, Rabbinic tradition generally views anger negatively. Anger appears as a kind of weakness, a temptation, even as the root of idolatry. In his third and final lecture on righteous anger, R. Micha’el Rosenberg turns to Hasidic texts about managing anger to try and answer the question: how might we relieve the feeling, and perhaps even make it...

What was Ya’akov doing the night he was left alone on the other side of the river, the night he wrestled with an angel? According to the Rashbam, Ya’akov was trying to run away.

From the Talmud to the Rambam and into the modern period, Rabbinic tradition generally views anger negatively. Anger appears as a kind of weakness, a temptation, even as the root of idolatry. But is rage always a bad thing? Can it be useful or morally sound? In this second of three lectures, Rav Micha’el takes us through a talmudic discussion about one who tears in a fit of rage on Shabbat. He ask...

The stories we tell about sacrifice tell us about who and what we believe is valuable and noble.  In telling us about the thing that is sacrificed, these stories tell us about what we believe is most difficult to give up. In telling us what we sacrifice for, these stories tell us about what our supreme values should be.  In telling us what inner resources are required to bring the sacrifice, these...

From the Talmud to the Rambam and into the modern period, Rabbinic tradition generally views anger negatively. Anger appears as a kind of weakness, a temptation, even as the root of idolatry. But is rage always a bad thing? Can it be useful or morally sound? In this first of three lectures, Rav Micha’el dives into Maimonides’ approach to anger, which seems, at first, contradictory. How can anger b...

We all know the story we are supposed to tell about our matriarchs and their journeys to motherhood. The story structure is simple, even if the journey is not. Woman wants to be a mother. Woman cannot become a mother. Woman waits, prays, and, if necessary, enlists help to conceive. Woman becomes pregnant, finally gives birth to a child, and thanks God. It’s a tidy story, and it expresses most of w...

What does it mean to celebrate Thanksgiving as a Jew?  In some sense, the question is a cipher for a larger one:  What does it mean to take our identities as American and as Jewish both seriously?  We regularly speak of Moroccan Jews or Polish Jews, German Jews or Algerian Jews; we understand that each of these Jewish communities represents a meaningful expression of Judaism, reflecting both the e...

At the end of this week’s parashah , Avraham—who has been promised time and time again ownership over all the land of Canaan—owns nothing but a grave. When we read Avraham’s journey carefully, this ending may not surprise us.  From the very beginning of Parashat Lekh Lekha, Avraham’s life is marked by fantastic, unbelievable promises, shortly followed by obstacles that make their fulfillment seem...

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 wor...

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 wor...

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...

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 Ya...

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 a...

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, immediatel...

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...

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 fa...

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,...