A new year, a new blog, an old commentary

Welcome to my new blog!

Before being ordained in May, I knew that I would want to continue to study something regularly, but I didn't know what that would be.  I went back and forth.  Do I want to continue the study of Talmud that had been the hallmark of my thesis?  Do I want to pick up and start daf yomi, the Talmud page-a-day process?  Do I want to stick with Torah?  Do I want to find a tractate of Mishnah that could be something new for me?  What about Maimonides?  He's always interesting.

In the end, I thought about the fact that the Torah is always the same, though we change each time we come to it.  So, I picked the Torah and decided that I would spend this first year as a rabbi experiencing the Torah anew, reading the weekly portion and seeing what the Torah chooses to tell me this time around.

But, what to do alongside the Torah?  What commentator should I choose?  Thanks to a suggestion by my good friend Rabbi Marc Katz (see, I told you) I decided to delve into the world and commentary of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

A quick note or two about Rabbi Hirsch:

Often called the father of the Modern Orthodox Movement in Judaism, Rabbi Hirsch wrote and worked in 19th century Germany.  At odds with the Reformers of his day, Rabbi Hirsch created a secessionist community in Frankfurt in response to the Reform style of worship.  He coined the term and approach to Judaism called Torah im Derech Eretz. According to Dr. Meir Hildesheimer, this term means:

a synthesis of Judaism and modern culture, embracing art and literature to the extent compatible with Halakha (i.e. religious Jewish law). However, this synthesis is to be understood in a Hegelian sense: two contradictory forces contending with each other are reconciled and renewed on a higher level. In other words: Torah and life, Judaism and culture, do not just complement each other, but achieve complete identity.[1]

In short, Hirsch believed in tradition and in modernity, but modernity only to the extent that it worked within the bounds of tradition.

Interestingly, in my first year of Rabbinical School, Rabbi Hirsch’s commentary was among the most widely referenced in our class’s divrei Torah.  He was so popular, that one of my classmates (Rabbi Keren Gorban) called him “our class’s best friend” in exegesis.  What was it about his commentary that was so appealing?  I believe it was the combination of tradition and modernity, and a real ahead-of-his time ability to hold onto both elements of his life at one time. While the early Reformers were focused on Modernity and the traditionalists were focused on Tradition, Hirsch sought a middle ground, a way to be both traditional and modern.  This is what I seek, as well.

So, over the next year, I hope you will join me weekly for some insights from the Torah including Rabbi Hirsch’s commentary.  I look forward to getting back to a regular habit of study and sharing my learning with you.

Please feel free to comment, question or challenge.  Pirke Avot teaches us: “when two sit together and words of Torah pass between them, the Divine Presence rests between them.”  God might not have envisioned the internet, but I’m pretty sure it still counts.

Next time: Parshat Bereishit.

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[1] From a speech given by Hildesheimer in June of 2008 on the occasion of Rabbi Hirsch’s 200^th birthday: http://www.stevens.edu/golem/llevine/rsrh/historical_perspectives_rsrh_hilesheimer.pdf