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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.
The midrash famously describes the Torah as being given under threat, with a mountain literally hanging over Bnei Yisroel. I believe Rabbi David Silber has pointed out that this is a dramatic metaphor for the reality that the Jews are in the desert and incapable of surviving without Divine intervention.
The war with Amalek that concludes this week’s Parashah is often seen as a step toward weaning the Jews away from that extreme dependence; G-d insists that Mosheh send Yehoshua to fight, rather than disposing of the Amalekites Himself, as He had done to the Egyptians.
But that reading is difficult to square with the great Mannah experiment, in which the Jews are consigned to absolute dependence for food throughout their desert sojourn. If independence is the goal, why didn’t Hashem “teach them to fish”?
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.
