Meaningful Judaism Aleph Beta

The Book of Esther has no Divine instructions, no prophecies, no outright miracles. God doesn’t even get mentioned. We all love hearing how Mordechai and Esther saved their people in a time of crisis – but does this story have any moral message for us? As we’re listening to the Megillah on Purim, what can we learn about coming close to God in our everyday lives?Join Imu Shalev and Rabbi David Fohrman as they dive deeply into Megillat Esther to find an answer to this question. They start off w...

A Book Like No Other is a chance to learn alongside Aleph Beta Founder and Lead Scholar, Rabbi David Fohrman, a master close reader of Torah, as he embarks on his most far-reaching and in-depth explorations. Each season is a stand-alone journey into a different Torah text. Our only goal: reading the Torah carefully, on its own terms, and following wherever that leads. Together, we'll unwrap remarkable patterns and surprising connections that lie just beneath the Torah's surface, revealing the...

Rabbi David Fohrman and Imu Shalev study the tale of the blasphemer, a dark and puzzling episode buried deep in Leviticus. The details of this story are scarce: an anonymous man provokes a fight in the Israelite camp, curses God, and ultimately is stoned to death as punishment. But a close read of these few short verses sends Rabbi Fohrman and Imu on a surprising journey, raising provocative moral questions about God’s judgment and uncovering an unlikely connection between the condemned blasp...

Support Meaningful Judaism today and gain access to tons of meaningful Tisha B'av content on the Aleph Beta website. Visit www.alephbeta.org and use the coupon code MJ2023. Meaningful Judaism is a project of Aleph Beta Labs. Aleph Beta is a Torah media company dedicated to spreading the joy and love of meaningful Torah learning worldwide. For our full library of over 1,000 videos and podcasts, please visit www.alephbeta.org.To support this podcast, subscribe to Aleph Beta.

Season 1 of Meaningful Judaism is ending, but before we go, we just have to share some extra Torah that didn’t make it into earlier episodes. There’s the beautiful idea about angels that got cut from our episode on tzitzit – but we’ve found some amazing new evidence, so we’re bringing it back! And then there’s the problem of fish and birds. They got left out of the episode on kosher animals, so how do they fit into our theory of why some animals are kosher and not others? Join Imu Shalev and ...

It’s one of the most famous of the Torah's laws: no eating bacon! But is there any particular reason for this restriction? Why does God permit us to eat cow but forbid pig? In this episode, Imu Shalev and Beth Lesch look for clues in the Torah’s language and zoom in on something that’s easy to miss: The Torah never actually says "Pigs aren't kosher." Actually, the word “kosher” doesn't appear at all in the Chumash (the Five Books of Moses). The Torah uses an entirely different word to describ...