Ta Shma

Hadar Institute

Bringing you recent lectures, classes, and programs from the Hadar Institute, Ta Shma is where you get to listen in on the beit midrash. Come and listen on the go, at home, or wherever you are. Hosted by Rabbi Avi Killip of the Hadar Institute.

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780 episodes
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Episodes780

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Sep 29, 2025 · 9 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Ha'azinu: Living in Between
Homeless in life, Moshe is fated to remain without a home even in death. That, perhaps, is the most difficult part of God’s decree: not that Moshe must die, a fate that all human beings share. Not that he must die outside of the land: Ya’akov and Yosef also died far from Israel. What is most difficult about Moshe’s death is that, even in death, he cannot go home.
Sep 22, 2025 · 8 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Vayeilekh: Recreating Sinai
The generation that will enter the Land of Israel never heard God’s voice at Sinai. They never experienced the earth shattering voice, the terror, the awe. In place of memory, all they have is a story.
Sep 17, 2025 · 5 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Nitzavim: The Long Goodbye
When Moshe gathers the generation of the desert together to enter them into the covenant once again, he knows that it is his last chance to teach the people how to live according to the Torah—and, crucially, how to live without him.
Sep 15, 2025 · 42 min
R. Tali Adler: When Teshuvah Is or Should Be Impossible
Are some things unforgivable? Is Teshuvah always an option? What would it mean if the road to repentance were blocked? In this class we will explore questions of whether we ever lose the opportunity to do Teshuvah and what it might look like to repent from a place where we are unsure of the possibility of forgiveness. Recorded in Elul 2023. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/AdlerTeshuvahImpossiblePart12023.pdf
Sep 10, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Ki Tavo: No Final Chapter
We’ve made it. That seems to be the promise of bikkurim, the first fruits gift to God.
Sep 8, 2025 · 1 hr
R. Dena Weiss: The Mechanics of Mercy: How Does Forgiveness Actually Work?
The liturgy of the High Holiday season is replete with promises about God's forgiveness but is less specific about how God forgives. In her lecture, R. Dena Weiss explores how forgiveness works, and asks if there are any strategies that we can adopt to make us more forgivable and forgiving. This lecture was delivered in memory of Rabbi Jonathan D. Levine z"l in 2024. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HHDLecture2024WeissHowForgivenessWorks.pdf
Sep 3, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Ki Teitzei: Living in the Double Exposure
I was eight years old in Basel, Switzerland the day I learned about the way places have layers. It was a chilly, autumn shabbos, and my father and I were on a walk by the river. My father pointed out different sights as we walked: there is the house where his elementary school friend lived. There is the gate they walked through to get to school, there is the shop run by the woman rumored to be a witch. And there, he said, pointing to a small, shady area, is the place where they burned the Jews in the 14th century.
Sep 1, 2025 · 34 min
R. Shai Held: Biblical Theology in a Time of Climate Emergency Part 3
What can the Bible teach us about navigating our way through a time of climate emergency? In this series, R. Shai Held explores three key biblical texts that offer differing (but perhaps complementary) approaches to understanding our place in this divinely created and much-more-than-human world. Recorded in Winter 2025. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldClimateChange2025Part3.pdf
Aug 27, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Shoftim: Even So
What do you do when you feel—or when you know—that because of your actions, you are entirely alone in the world?
Aug 25, 2025 · 9 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg on Rosh Chodesh Elul: Teshuvah: Light or Salvation?
Thinking about our own transgressions and repentance is hard, and so it makes sense that we often latch on to metaphors to help us think about these ideas. Perhaps the strangest metaphor I know of appears in the Zohar.
Aug 20, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Re'eih: Mourning as Children of God
There is something about our relationship with God that holds us back from unbridled grief.
Aug 18, 2025 · 31 min
R. Shai Held: Biblical Theology in a Time of Climate Emergency Part 2
What can the Bible teach us about navigating our way through a time of climate emergency? In this series, R. Shai Held explores three key biblical texts that offer differing (but perhaps complementary) approaches to understanding our place in this divinely created and much-more-than-human world. Recorded in Winter 2025. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldClimateChange2025Part2.pdf
Aug 13, 2025 · 5 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Eikev: Back to Eden
Of course the Jews thought that they would starve when they left Egypt. In Moshe’s retelling of the story of the mann (manna), that is deliberate. There is something about the mann that is inextricably linked to hunger—or, at least, our fear of it.
Aug 11, 2025 · 47 min
R. Shai Held: Biblical Theology in a Time of Climate Emergency Part 1
What can the Bible teach us about navigating our way through a time of climate emergency? In this series, R. Shai Held explores three key biblical texts that offer differing (but perhaps complementary) approaches to understanding our place in this divinely created and much-more-than-human world. Recorded in Winter 2025. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldClimateChange2025Part1.pdf
Aug 6, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Va'Ethanan: With All Your Heart
There is no such thing, for a Jew, as loving God without loving human beings as well. Our love for God is bound up with our love for others: for the parents who taught us His name, and the grandparents who taught them. For the children we raise to know Him. For every ancestor, too far back for us to remember their names, who remembered God’s covenant with our people and dedicated their lives to transmitting that memory.
Aug 4, 2025 · 52 min
R. Shai Held on the Jewish Philanthropy Podcast: Judaism is About Love
In this episode of What Gives?, The Jewish Philanthropy Podcast, JFN CEO Andrés Spokoiny welcomes Rabbi Shai Held to discuss the claim that love is Judaism’s central value. Together, they confront common misconceptions about the "God of the Old Testament," reflect on theology in the shadow of October 7, and consider how Jewish philanthropy can help nurture a more compassionate and spiritually engaged community. Held makes the case for a Judaism rooted in justice, mercy, and human dignity—and why that vision is so necessary at this moment in which we are living.
Jul 30, 2025 · 10 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Devarim: The Torah of Exile
The danger, when the two tribes decide to stay on the other side of the Jordan, is not just that we might become two peoples: it is that we may develop two Torahs.
Jul 28, 2025 · 7 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg on Tisha B'Av: Between Exodus and Exile
One of the poetic laments we recite on Tisha b’Av is the poem that begins Eish tukad bekirbi (“A fire shall burn within me”). An acrostic, each stanza of the poem juxtaposes something glorious that occurred during the Exodus from Egypt, with something equally ignoble from our exile from Jerusalem.
Jul 23, 2025 · 9 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Mattot-Mas'ei: On the Other Side of the Jordan
Moshe’s real concern, when Reuven and Gad ask to remain on their side of the Jordan, is the way that distance can split families apart.
Jul 21, 2025 · 41 min
Dr. Jeremy Tabick: Is Tisha B'Av Eternal?
Both Talmuds record that Rabbi, one of the last leading sages of the Tannaim, tried to abolish Tisha B'Av. Why would someone want to abolish this fast day? Through this surprising example and its aftermath, this class explores the role of myth and history in the Jewish calendar. Recorded on Tisha B'Av 2024. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/Tabick9AvEternal2024.pdf