By Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan Rabbi Kaplan is one of the JLIC educators at UCLA. This past Monday and Tuesday, many congregations throughout the United States and around world finished the annual cycle of reading the Torah in its entirety. The…
Taste of Torah: The Ethical Side of Sukkot
It is fascinating that we can read the weekly Torah portion and find some point that resonates most with us. This week’s Torah reading, that of Sukkot, poses no exception. In the portion we read on Sukkot, found in Leviticus…
Attending class during the holiday
There is perhaps no decision more representative of the difficulties of being a practicing Jewish college student than the quintessential question of whether or not to attend class during Chag. To me, this is not a question of grades or…
Taste of Torah: Hope in the future
This week’s Torah portion is Bechokotai, a parshah that is full of both promises of rewards for obeying the commandments, and the punishments for not obeying them. One such punishment mentioned is exile. Looking at history, one can see that when the Torah…
Taste of Torah: Letting the land lull
By Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Co-Director of the Jewish Leaning Initiative on Campus at UCLA This week’s Torah portion, Behar, introduces us to a most fascinating commandment: Shemitah, the Sabbatical year. The mitzvah of Shemitah mandates that Jews in Israel cease and desist of all labor to fields for the entire seventh…
Taste of Torah: Not shying away
This week’s Taste of Torah is written by staff writer Daniel Levine. It would be very easy to write a nice Devar Torah about all of the nice things this week’s Torah portion teaches. The job of the Kohanim, the idea of Kidush Hashem,…
Taste of Torah: A lover’s eyes
This week’s Taste of Torah is written by Micah Hyman, a sophomore at Yeshiva University, studying computer science. Hyman spent two years at Yeshivat Sha’alvim in Nof Ayalon, Israel, studying Torah. One morning, as Rav Levi Yitzchak of Berdetchiv was…
Taste of Torah: Making it count
Written by Sharona Kaplan; Co-Director of Jewish Learning Initiative at UCLA “Teach us to count our days, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom” (Psalms 90:12) is a beautiful prayer acknowledging the art of counting time and the tremendous…
Taste of Torah: Make Passover meaningful
Written by Rabbi David Eliezrie of Chabad of Yorba Linda It’s Passover night, and we are wondering to ourselves, “Haven’t we heard this story already?” We all know the basic narrative. The Jews were enslaved in Egypt. Moses confronts Pharaoh,…
Taste of Torah: “So you think you understand what’s pure and impure?”
As we continue our trek through the book of Leviticus, we are continuously confronted with laws of tumah (purity) and tahara (impurity). These laws, which for some time in history made up the majority of Jewish practice, seem almost completely archaic and meaningless in…