Latest News

2012 Summer Beit Midrash

The Center for Modern Torah Leadership, led by Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, has completed its recruitment of 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 will center on the theme "Psak, Ethics, and Industrial Kashrut: The Case of Bishul Nokhri". For more about the fellows, go here.

Yeshivat HaKayitz

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.

Weekly Dvar Torah--Parshat Emor

Ramban famously approaches Torah with the fourfold methodology acronymized “PaRDeS”, for Pshat Remez Drash Sod, and equally famously his Sod, or mystical interpretation, are deliberately unintelligible to nonkabbalists.  And I am a nonkabbalist.  So this dvar Torah is necessarily an amateur attempt to describe an architecture rather than a building.

Parshat Bechukotai begins with a description of the rewards that can be expected for walking in G-d’s chukim and preserving and performing His mitzvoth.  Among these rewards is a promise of peace in the land, along with the ceasing-to-be of dangerous beasts.

Now a promise of a benevolent animal kingdom cannot help make us think of Prophetic verses describing amiable lions cavorting with lambs, grazing bears, and harmless poisonous snakes.  In other words, it is a Messianic vision, and here interpretation immediately becomes a function of one’s broad Messianic sensibility; does one conceive of the Messianic Era as fundamentally continuous, or rather discontinuous, with the natural and psychological world we inhabit?  

Continue reading here.  

To sign up to receive the weekly Dvar Torah, email us at moderntorahleadership@gmail.com. 

Shabbat Shalom,
Aryeh Klapper

Now on the Website

The Moral Costs of Jewish Day School. This article is also featured at Jewish Ideas Daily here.

Three articles about the nature of Holiness:

Reclaiming Holiness

Amalek and Eden: Some Thoughts on the Relationship between the Sacred and the Good

Holiness and Sexuality

The audio from the conversation about "the Role of Halakhic Judaism in the Modern State of Israel" with Rav Yehudah Gilad from Yeshivat Maale Gilboa can be found here.

Uriel Heilman's talk on "The Battle for Beit Shemesh--In the fight in Israel between Zionists and zealots, is the soul of Judaism at stake?" can be found here.

Elsewhere on the web

Rabbi Klapper's article "Taking Responsibility for Torah (Why study Talmud?)" can be found in the latest edition of Milin Havivin, available for download here.

Rabbi Klapper's special essay on Tzeniut and Beit Shemesh can also be found here on Text & Texture, and here on the New Israel Fund.

Find all of Rabbi Klapper's articles on the Jewish Values Online website here.

Find all of Rabbi Klapper's articles on Text & Texture website here.

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Alumni News

Mazal tov to Roy Feldman ('10) on his engagement to Lauren Steinberg!

If you have any news to share with the SBM alumni, please let us know at moderntorahleadership@gmail.com.