For my mother’s 75th birthday, we surprised her by taking her to visit her mother’s childhood home. I knew my grandmother had grown up in Los Angeles, but I didn’t know exactly where, and there were no living relatives whom I could ask. So I did what anyone seeking information does these days: I Googled my grandmother’s name, hoping something would pop up. That modern technology led me to an ancient one: the census. I found online copies of the first two censuses taken in my grandmother’s lifetime, one when she was 4½ and the next one when she was 15. The second one was the jackpot: I found an address.

But I also noticed that something had changed between the two records. There was one fewer member of the house. My grandmother’s father was no longer listed. He hadn’t died—I could Google that information too—he was simply gone. This confirmed a family story I’d overheard but never spoken about with my grandmother: that her father had run out on the family when she was 11 and she had never spoken to him again. There it was, in black and white, a tragic tale between the lines. It’s amazing what you can learn from reading a census, if you know what to look for.

Tomorrow, we arrive at the second of the four annual fasts commemorating the destruction of the Temple. According to the Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:6), 17 Tammuz marks the end of the offering of the tamid, the daily sacrifice, as well as the breaching of the city walls. Until this point, despite the siege, the routine of Temple life had continued with the tamid as the daily offering before God. But from this point forward, as a result of the siege, there were no longer lambs left to bring to the altar and the tamid went unoffered. This break in Temple life, along with the breaching of the Temple walls, must have been heartbreaking for those living in Jerusalem.

Balak, King of Moab, has been made uneasy by Israel’s recent string of victories over enemy nations, and has begun to worry that he will be the next to fall before them. He decides to seek the advantage with a preemptive strike, hoping to weaken the Israelite forces before they have a chance to advance against him. His first plan of attack, however, is not military, but magical: he will hire Bilaam, a local prophet, to curse Israel, and thus doom them to defeat. Bilaam seems open to the task and, after several stops and starts—including an incident with a talking donkey—he heads out to perform the curse. But when he opens his mouth to unleash the curse, the spirit of God takes over and, instead of cursing Israel, he blesses them.

Halakhic works are often a dizzying compendium of multiple perspectives on a given issue, often making it difficult to determine how to behave in a given situation. In this lecture, R. Ethan Tucker argues this is a feature rather than a bug. Critical values that are meant to guide our lives are rarely fully manifest in any given time, place, or situation. It is our job to discern the wisdom of each voice and allow that wisdom to make a claim on us, rather than submitting ourselves to one path. Recorded at the Halakhah Intensive, May 2024.

There is probably no more playful instance of wordplay in all the Torah than the nehash nehoshet, the copper snake described in Parashat Hukkat. With its string of repeated consonants, it sounds like it could be another of Dr Seuss’ whimsical creations, living in the same strange zoo with “the Cat in the Hat,” “Yertle the Turtle,” and “the Fox in Socks.” Yet the nehash nehoshet appears in the midst of a story that is anything but whimsical. In chapter 21 of the Book of Numbers, the Children of Israel have once again questioned the decision to leave Egypt. God, once again outraged by their ingratitude, sends a den of deadly snakes to attack. The people ask Moshe to pray on their behalf, he does, and God responds with a strange solution.

Rav Dena explores a Hassidic teaching from the Me'or Einayim which discusses a dimension of physicality that we rarely pay attention to: given that taste is not necessary to sustain us, why is food delicious? More perplexingly, why does some food taste good to some, but not to others? What is the relationship between what is physically nutritious and what is spiritually nourishing? Recorded at the Winter Learning Seminar, 2024.

From the very beginning of Parashat Korah, the Torah places unusually strong emphasis on his lineage. He is introduced not just with the standard patronym, but with three generations of ancestors, tracing him back to the tribal founder, Levi. A midrash in Bemidbar Rabbah picks up on this extended chain of forebears and suggests that it is there to alert us to the underlying motivation for Korah’s confrontation with Moshe.

The genre of midrash has a reputation for taking creative license. In midrash, we come across the wildest stories our Rabbis ever told, and it sometimes feels like they can say anything. Yet the midrashic method was guided by precise rules of interpretation as well as general norms of discourse. But who keeps track of the rules and who monitors the discourse? Can a midrashic interpretation ever be deemed beyond the limits?

Recorded at the Rabbinic Yeshiva Intensive in March 2024.