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The Center for Modern Torah Leadership, led by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, is recruiting outstanding men and women for this year's group of Summer Beit Midrash Fellows, June 25 through August 3, 2012. The Summer Beit Midrash is an intense and exhilarating learning program that allows advanced students to pursue compelling questions with intellectual rigor and ethical integrity in the framework of a warm and challenging Orthodox community, and to experience themselves as active contributors to the halakhic conversation. This year's seminar is expected to center on the theme "Psak, Ethics, and Industrial Kashrut: The Case of Bishul Nokhri".
The Summer Beit Midrash will be held in picturesque Sharon, Massachusetts and will provide food and housing for all fellows. Stipends and transportation subsidies are available for qualified participants on a rolling admissions basis. The application can be found here and the brochure is here.
The Center for Modern Torah Leadership is pleased that the program Yeshivat Hakayitz is returning this summer. This program is ideal for high school and middle school students who wish to learn Rabbinic Literature over the summer in an Orthodox environment in the Boston area. Mrs. Deborah Klapper serves as the director for this program. The dates for this summer's program are June 25--July 27. You may attend for any or all of the weeks of the program. The program will take place at Young Israel of Sharon.
For a taste of what gets presented, take a look here.
If you are interested in learning more about the program, please go here or contact us at moderntorahleadership@gmail.com.
The unconscionable physical and verbal violence against women in Beit Shemesh and elsewhere have degraded the religious concept of tzeniut by associating it with misogyny and oppression. Some Orthodox condemnations of that violence, by objecting to means while acknowledging shared ends, have added to that degradation. My purpose here is to directly reject the ends, in other words to offer a vigorously Orthodox and rigorously halakhic understanding of the purposes and parameters of tzeniut that opposes the goals and not just the means of those who seek to use tzeniut as a weapon to subordinate women or intimidate them out of the public square.
Continue reading here.
In the current issue of the Jewish Week, Yedidyah Gorsetman and Gary Rosenblatt report on both the profound admiration many of Rav Aharon Bina’s alumni feel toward him, and the persistent allegations by some of his alumni that they experienced his behavior toward them as emotionally abusive. The Modern Orthodox community owes Mr. Gorsetman, Mr. Rosenblatt, and the Jewish Week tremendous gratitude for their courage in publishing this. While the article raises many issues of educational philosophy and judgment about which reasonable halakhic people may disagree, there can be no doubt that it conveys information that the public has a right and even obligation to know. How can anyone argue that educational institutions should not be accountable for their educational failures, or that parents should not know the risks involved in sending their children to specific institutions? There is no issue of lashon hara here – rather, the question is whether those of us, myself included, who knew these stories for years and didn’t publish were in violation of halakhah, perhaps under “Do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood”, perhaps under other rubrics.
I hope to address many of the properly controversial issues next week, but thought myself obligated to make this statement of support immediately. Here, though, are some very preliminary perhaps tangential musings in the guise of a fragment of a dvar Torah.
To read the rest of this Dvar Torah, go here.
Summer Beit Midrash 2011
To read the complete shaylah and the summary, go here.To see photos of the group in action, go to the Center for Modern Torah Leadership's page on Facebook.
