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To Be Both a Traveler and at Home: Receiving the Torah
Description
What does it mean to be both a stranger and at home in your Judaism? To be deeply connected to your faith and still feel othered from a piece of your own practice?
This week, in honor of Shavuos, we sit with a Talmudic dispute between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael about how the Jewish people received the Torah at Sinai, and the much bigger question underneath it.
What does it mean to be completely at home in your Judaism, swept up in it like one unifying truth? And what does it mean to be a traveler in it, seeing each piece of it on its own terms?
A conversation about Sinai, sight and sound, the hedgehog and the fox, receiving the Torah as both a homecoming and an invitation to the road, and what to do when you feel like a stranger within your own Jewish self.
This episode is dedicated in honor of Reuven Morrison hy"d, killed in the Bondi terror attack on Chanukah. May his memory be a blessing, and may his life continue to inspire Jews to live openly and proudly as themselves.
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TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Welcome, and a Shavuos teaching on receiving the Torah
1:30 Preview: next Sunday's roundtable on women's Torah study
2:45 Dedication: Reuven Morrison hy"d
5:00 A joke the Lubavitcher Rebbe told: what is Judaism?
6:30 The question underneath the joke: general vs. particular
7:30 The first luchos vs. the second
8:30 Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishmael on how the Oral Torah was given
10:00 "They saw the thunder, they heard the lightning" — the verse at Sinai
11:00 Synesthesia, Beethoven, and scrambled senses
12:30 Sight vs. sound: the whole first, or the details first?
14:30 The Alter Rebbe and his grandson — who is Zaideh?
17:00 Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox
18:30 Two temperaments, two ways of meeting the world
20:00 Returning to R' Akiva and R' Yishmael through this frame
21:30 Why they each had a different orientation
23:00 Back to the joke: Shabbos within Judaism vs. Shabbos as itself
24:00 A relationship has a story, but it also has its moments
25:30 Home vs. traveling, and why we see the details when we travel
27:00 Areas of our Judaism where we feel at home, and areas where we feel like strangers
28:30 Allow yourself to be a stranger in your own life
29:30 Receiving both the panorama and the particulars
30:30 What I'm taking with me into Shavuos