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The Center for Modern Torah Leadership awards 2009 Summer Beit Midrash Fellowships
2009 SBM will focus on the theme “Toward a Jewish Ethic for Journalism”
The Center for Modern Torah Leadership, the intellectual catalyst of Modern Orthodoxy, is proud to introduce the Fellows for its 2009 Summer Beit Midrash. Fellows include men and women from leading universities, yeshivot, and seminaries with advanced textual skills and a passionate commitment to learning Torah in an environment that welcomes the moral challenges of modernity as spiritual opportunities and sees recognition of each human beings as a Divine Image as a fundamental assumption and telos of Torah study.
The Summer Beit Midrash is an intense and exhilarating learning program that allows Fellows 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, our thirteenth, will center on the theme "Toward an Orthodox Ethic for Journalism." It will run from July 6 – August 10 at Young Israel of Sharon, 100 Ames Street.
SBM is headed by CMTL Dean Rabbi Aryeh Klapper, with an array of distinguished guest lecturers including Rabbi Howard Jachter, author of Gray Matters Volumes 1-3 and a member of the Elizabeth Beit Din and of the RCA Halakhah Commission; Binyamin Appelbaum, reporter on national economic issues for the Washington Post, who, while at the Charlotte Observer, was among the first to spot the emerging foreclosure crisis; and Mark Jurkowitz, Associate Director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and former Boston Globe Ombudsman and Media Critic.
SBM Fellows will lead a variety of public learning opportunities during the seminar, including one-on-one study, thematic text-study groups, and formal classes. For more information, please contact Anne Sendor at ModernTorahleadership@gmail.com.
For further information, continue here.
"Authenticity and Authority"
The Center for Modern Torah Leadership is pleased to announce that registration for our 3rd annual conference, "Authenticity and Authority", to be held in Boston on August 17-18, 2009, is now open.
The conference will be held at the Florence Chefetz Hillel House at Boston University, 213 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts. Food and housing will be provided, and stipends up to $200 are available for transportation, if required. The registration fee is $100. The first twenty-five participants will receive the transportation stipends, so please register as soon as possible to hold your place.
To register, please utilize our online account here.
Weekly Dvar Torah
Shabbat Shalom – I apologize for the hastiness of this week’s translation and brevity of the commentary , but look forward with tremendous excitement to the start of SBM next week, and hope that I’ll be able to send these out earlier in the week during SBM.
Netziv’s concept of aveirah lishmah, with the prooftext cited here) shows up repeatedly in his commentary on Tanakh, although I first met it in a commentary on the side of the standard Pirkei Avot, at the reference of Rav Herschel Schachter in a superb article on Chatei Bisvil SheTizkeh Chaverkha. His notion that right and wrong actions cannot be judged purely on their intrinsic objective halakhic status, but also by their pragmatic situational consequences, deserves full analysis on some other occasion. This week, though, I want to focus on a detail.
Continue here.
Now on the website, the edited record of an e-mail dialogue between Shani Offen, then a Harvard graduate student in the natural sciences, and Aryeh Klapper, then Rabbinic Adviser to the Orthodox Minyan at Harvard Hillel, with off-screen participation by Deborah Klapper. A version of this dialogue was published in Mosaic Summer 2001, a publication of Harvard Hillel. Read it here.
