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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Feb 19, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Mishpatim: The Day After
Mishpatim, after the narrative path we’ve experienced so far in Shemot, can feel dizzying. Until now, Shemot has seemed like a straightforward story: slavery, Exodus, and revelation. It is a narrative that unfolds in a basically clear order, with a clear str¡ucture. It is a story that can be read, if not precisely like any other book, at least in much the same way.
Feb 17, 2025 · 48 min
R. Shai Held: Psalm for Wednesday
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 world by subduing the chaotic forces that threaten life; the notion that a concern for justice is what makes a god "qualified" to be one; and the question of what kind of character those who seek to live in God's presence must have. Recorded in Fall 2023. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldShirimWednesday2023.pdf
Feb 12, 2025 · 6 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Yitro: Remembering the Shepherd
It’s only when Yitro, who knew Moshe before he became a leader, comes to meet him that we learn how lost Moshe has become.
Feb 10, 2025 · 8 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg on Tu Bishvat: “The One Who Brings Forth”
Tu Bishvat has become a day on which many Jews express gratitude for the earth and its bounty. In this sense, it is closely connected to the practice of reciting blessings over food before we eat. How do we experience, when we eat fully formed produce, the miraculous intricacy that produced it? How do we go from the mundane act of eating to a deep sense of appreciation?
Feb 5, 2025 · 8 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Beshallah: Ghosts in the Haggadah
The Exodus from Egypt is, in one way of telling it, a ghost story. This is not the usual genre we assign to the tale. We describe it as a story of liberation. The emotions we associate with it are a mixture of triumph, joy, and awe. But stories are created, in part, by where we choose to begin and end them, and the Exodus is a story with many beginnings.
Feb 3, 2025 · 44 min
R. Aviva Richman: Defining Da'at: A Jewish Perspective on Artificial Intelligence
In a time of abounding artificial intelligence, we will attempt to define what makes intelligence "non" artificial. Our jumping-off point will be the Hebrew word da'at, which is prominently used in Jewish law to assert the importance of mental awareness, intention, and consent. As we excavate the many meanings of da'at, we will ask: What are the characteristics of our minds and thoughts that are at the core of our very real identities? Which parts of our minds matter most to ensure the dignity of a sense of self and to build trust in interpersonal interactions? This lecture was delivered in memory of Dr. Eddie Scharfman z"l in January 2025.
Jan 29, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Bo: Telling God’s Story
Whose story do we tell on the Seder night? The answer, at first, seems obvious: the story we tell is our own, the story of our deliverance from slavery to freedom. It is the core story of our people. It is the grand drama of Jewish history in which we are still enmeshed today. But this week’s parashah offers another interpretation, one in which it is God, not (only) ourselves, at the center of the story.
Jan 27, 2025 · 36 min
R. Shai Held: Psalm for Tuesday
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 world by subduing the chaotic forces that threaten life; the notion that a concern for justice is what makes a god "qualified" to be one; and the question of what kind of character those who seek to live in God's presence must have. Recorded in Fall 2023. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldShirimTuesday2023.pdf
Jan 22, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Va'Era: Remembering Who We Are
After Pharaoh's first refusal, after the Jewish people's burden increases because of his words, Moshe can't imagine redemption.
Jan 20, 2025 · 7 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg on MLK Day: A Mighty Stream
One of the most memorable and impactful lines of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” is his invocation of the prophet Amos (5:24): “…No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Dr. King introduces the words of the prophet to close a section with the repeated refrain “We cannot be satisfied.” Each repetition of the phrase describes a different oppression that Black Americans face, reaching its climax with Dr. King’s charge that protest against injustice cannot rest until justice and righteousness are as prevalent and unambiguous as the mighty waters.
Jan 15, 2025 · 7 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Shemot: Choosing Hope
Women’s wombs lie at the heart of the Exodus.
Jan 13, 2025 · 42 min
R. Miriam-Simma Walfish and R. Deborah Sacks Mintz: Nigun Hannah
The narrative of Hannah in Tanakh paints the picture of a yearning journey through prayer as dynamic expression - one of varied posture, volume, intensity, and presence. Rabbis Miriam-Simma and Deobrah Sacks Mintz explore rabbinic sources, punctuated by learning and singing together a newly composed Nigun Hannah, to dig into the prayers of our own hearts. Recorded at Hadar's Manger Winter Learning Seminar, 2023. Source Sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/MWLS2023WalfishSacksMintzNigunHannah.pdf
Jan 8, 2025 · 10 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Vayehi: “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?”
It is easy to forget that the end of Bereishit is a surprise ending. So used to the fact that all twelve sons and their descendants are included in the Jewish nation, we forget that that wasn’t always necessarily part of the plan, that the inclusion of all children is something new and unexpected.
Jan 8, 2025 · 8 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Vayigash: Learning to Re-Read Our Dreams
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, most beloved sons—the family they tried desperately to create the day they sold Yosef, and that, as they saw Ya’akov cry for years over Rahel’s beloved son and refuse to be comforted, they must have understood they would never have.
Jan 7, 2025 · 7 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg on 10 Tevet: The Road to Destruction
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 period of time.
Dec 30, 2024 · 7 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg: The True Story of Hanukkah
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 criticized. The earliest depictions we have of Hanukkah, in 1 and 2 Maccabees (composed within a century of the Maccabean revolt), focus on a military victory. A miracle on the battlefield is also the focus of our liturgical texts about Hanukkah; both the Al ha-Nissim insertion for the Amidah, and the ha-Neirot Hallalu recitation after candlelighting are fundamentally about “the wars that you performed for our ancestors in those days at this time.”
Dec 25, 2024 · 5 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Mikeitz: Bringing Dinah Home
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.
Dec 23, 2024 · 1 hr 11 min
Rabbis Yitz Greenberg, Shai Held and Tali Adler: The Triumph of Life, and of Love
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 between those two ideas. Moderated by Hadar's Rabbi Tali Adler. Recorded in November 2024.
Dec 18, 2024 · 10 min
R. Tali Adler on Parashat Vayeishev: Despair Meets Hope
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.
Dec 16, 2024 · 42 min
R. Micha'el Rosenberg: Righteous Anger Part 3
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 moral? Recorded in Fall 2024. Source sheet: https://mechonhadar.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/FallLS2024RosenbergRighteousAngerPart3.pdf