Dave's Torah Talk: Recent Episodes

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For me, one of the most fascinating lessons of the Torah and the Tanak is the way that the imperfections of the great people of these books are not covered up or ignored. As an historian, one of the things I constantly find myself running into is the need of "new" research to uncover some hitherto unknown flaw or trait that somehow or another causes the researcher to look at a given character in "a new light," which seem little more than an attempt to cause others to downgrade the person in question in their own minds. The Torah and the Tanak don't do that. We are given word pictures of men who are clearly imperfect. To be human is to be imperfect. It is impossible to be human and not be. I take comfort in that. I'm not very perfect either. But they are not always taught to us that way. Noah is a story we all learn as kids. Even Ben has heard the tale via Multiplication Rock's "Elementary, My Dear." As kids we are amazed by the idea of animals boarding a giant ship two by two. Later, as a teen I was intensely interested in the search for the Ark when I met Astronaut Jim Irwin who has spoken at one our churches. It turned out that he was also obsessed with finding the Ark. It never really occurred to me to ask why he needed to find it. The story is amazing, but Noah himself... well.. he's a bit flawed... but so am I...

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This is the very first episode of Dave Talking about Torah. It is introductory to who I am, and why I am doing this. It is about my journey from Christianity to Judaism and my comments on the Torah Portion.

This week we start… at the beginning. Bereshit is the weeks Torah Parsha, and it is a great time to start sharing my own story and thoughts.

So we start with those simple yet elegant and magnificent words, “In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the Earth…”