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Rosh Hodesh Adar | ראש חודש אדר
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Welcoming Adar
As we welcome the new Hebrew month of Adar, we invite you to read, listen, and share the words of Torah in this newsletter—bringing your lives to Torah and Torah to your lives. We thank Nireh Or Instagram Project founders Rabbi Hayley Goldstein`19 and Lizzie Sivitz for their words and artwork.
This new month of Adar stems from the Akkadian word "adaru," meaning "to obscure." It is a month of obscuring reality, of turning things on their head, and of increasing our joy. We learn in the Talmud, “as soon as Adar has entered, we increase in happiness.” What does it really mean to increase our happiness? Perhaps the Talmud isn’t instructing us to force ourselves into a state of joy, but rather to tend to the seed or spark of joy that is always within us. How can we allow more room for our inner joy to breathe during this month of Adar? Try putting some time aside each day for play, dance, and laughter.
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Rules Made to Be BrokenParashat Mishpatim (Exodus 21:1-24:18)
By Frankie Sandmel
Hebrew College rabbinical student
There’s a moment in Fiddler on the Roof where a villager says, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” And Tevya responds, “Very good, that way the whole world will be blind and toothless.”
The villager is quoting from this week’s parashat, Mishpatim, which is almost entirely full of laws. (Tevya might be quoting Ghandi, but we’ll leave that aside for now.) In these chapters, we meet laws like, “you shall not subvert the rights of the needy in their disputes” (ex 22:6); laws about how to treat a slave; laws regarding how to pay monetary remittances to a father for injury caused to a daughter. We also meet laws that fall along the lines of “an eye for an eye” that would elicit a shrewd remark from Tevya. The laws in Mishpatim can feel challenging, upsetting, disempowering, irrelevant, laughable—many just make us feel bad.
Fortunately, when we read Torah and Talmud, the intergenerational rabbinic conversation based on the Torah, we realize that these rules may not be completely written in stone. Rather, our ancestors wrestled with those same written words and felt similarly challenged by their meaning.
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Why We Say "70 Faces of Torah"
The ancient rabbinic expression “70 Faces (or Facets) of Torah” is a simultaneous call for epistemological humility and interpretive creativity. It is a reminder that only the Divine possesses ultimate truth and that as finite seekers, we need the contributions of many distinct voices. Torah can be compared to a precious gem that refracts differently based on one’s perspective. We, must, therefore, “turn it and turn it” in the company of passionate and compassionate teachers, students, and peers, who each bring their own unique gifts—“faces”—to the ongoing search for light and life.
By Rabbi Or Rose (above), Director of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership at Hebrew College & Founding Editor of the Hebrew College Seventy Faces of Torah blog
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Season Two!
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Translator
"People think of Hasidism as a movement that was mostly a movement of men; men left their families behind and went to be with the Rebbe, and the audience for whom the Rebbe wrote was an all-male audience. Women were really left out of Hasidism. But Nehemia, through his discovery of his book, has made a case for the fact that women were often very powerful in these Hasidic dynasties." — Rabbi Arthur Green
Season Two of Speaking Torah is here! In the first of this season's episodes, Hebrew College Rector Rabbi Arthur Green reads Hebrew College faculty member Rabbi Nehemia Polen's essay "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Translator." In his essay, Nehemia shares his lyrical and beautiful reflections on the experience of translating Malkah Shapiro’s The Rebbe’s Daughter, and the challenges of separating himself from the work while remaining an integral vehicle in its delivery.
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Torah For This Moment
As we look forward to Purim, we invite you to visit our On Torah page to read, listen, and watch the words of Torah on holidays, music, social justice, spirituality and more that are emerging from our students, faculty, and alumni. May they draw you more deeply into sensitive listening, probing questioning, and humble speaking of Torah and Jewish living.
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Hebrew College is an innovative national institute for Jewish learning and leadership based in Newton, Massachusetts. We are dedicated to Jewish literacy, creativity, and community, and a world of dignity and compassion for all. Our students are future rabbis, cantors, and educators, and people at every stage of life who love to learn. Together, we are infusing Jewish life with substance, spirit, beauty, imagination, and a sense of purpose. Please join us and support our work with a tax-deductible gift.
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