an unexpected conversation
Many years ago, when I was starting to become religious, I asked Micha Berger (who would later become a rabbi) how one made sense of the mitzvot -- why were we doing these particular things, how should we understand the purpose of individual mitzvot? He said something to the effect that understanding is over-rated and that if you do something
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"That would have to be enough." sounds like an odd parallel to "Dayeinu."
My favorite interpretation of that song is that each gift from God on the way to Redemption "would have been enough" to warrant our appreciative praise. (Or, with a darker spin, considering much of the Book of Numbers, "*should* have been enough.") God could have taken us from Egypt to the Temple in one shot, but He chose to do it step by step, in part, I guess, to give us a chance to appreciate each aspect properly.
Perhaps these opportunities for piecemeal appreciation are also giving us an opportunity to earn - measure for measure - similar treatment from God. "If you had kept My Sabbath and not taught My Torah, it would have been enough to earn My approval," He'll say, giving us credit for each minuscule step we take toward Him. IF we internalize the lesson of Dayeinu and make sure to give Him due credit for all he's done for us.
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OK, side comments:
- Reading the Torah isn't enough for one person to prepare - you also have to write a speech?
- People (myself emphatically included) need to do more reading and comprehension of Isaiah and the other Prophets. Look what has come of just reading the Haftara in public, in the vernacular.
- You know R' Micha Berger? He is quite the busy guy on the Jewish Internet. The rebooted TorahMusings.com journal has him on the editorial committee. Less prominently, he has popped up a few times on Mi Yodeya. :)
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By the way, can you recommend a commentary on prophets (or, to focus it a little more, Isaiah) for the, well, maybe not beginner, but not very advanced? It's sad, but I have yet to make the kind of study of prophets that I've made of the torah. I should fix that, and I can start by just reading them through (not just the haftarah excerpts) but I should probably have something on hand to review in parallel. (Err, should I be asking this elsewhere? :-) )
Reading the Torah isn't enough for one person to prepare - you also have to write a speech?
We do not read the entire parsha. That's pre-existing culture, long before I joined the congregation, but I also note that if we did then we wouldn't have been able to cultivate lay readers as easily. (I suppose we could have by having a lay reader do, say, one aliyah while the ba'al kri'ah does the rest, or something.) My own practical limit is somewhere around a column and a half.
As for the speech, target is 4-5 minutes, not the big fully-developed-and-expounded divrei torah I've occasionally encountered elsewhere. You can see some of mine on this tag. (Sigh. I have really been negligent about writing these up and posting them.)
Oh, and "subcontracting" is allowed -- when you sign up for a week you are responsible for the stuff I listed (plus closing prayers), but asking other people to participate is fine. From the point of minyan management we want one name, but we've had divrei torah from people who don't also read, and occasionally we have somebody who wants to lead the service and give a d'var who recruits a torah reader.
You know R' Micha Berger?
"Know" may be too strong a word. A long time ago when I was starting to try to figure things out, religiously speaking, we had a long correspondence that started on soc.culture.jewish (Usenet) and moved to email, culminating in my visiting him and his family for a Shabbat. It was a very intense and enlightening experience and I'm grateful for it.
He's been on Mi Yodeya? I hope I notice next time.
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You might like The Living Nach. It's in the style of The Living Torah by R. Aryeh Kaplan, in English, and pulls from a bunch of standard commentaries so while you don't get the full text of any of them, you also aren't stuck with just one commentary when things get interesting.
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My plan for basic Nach knowledge, "when I get around to it" (tm), is to go through the OU's Nach Yomi recorded classes properly, as if I was sitting in class, with the Scripture open in front of me. I listened to a few books' worth in the car a few years ago and found them to be very high-quality, but I could tell that they would be even more valuable paired with actually seeing the text. http://www.ou.org/torah/index#/nach
> He's been on Mi Yodeya?
http://judaism.stackexchange.com/users/1570/micha-berger
http://judaism.stackexchange.com/users/1558/micha
(Oh yeah, merge alert!)
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