Pardes Parsha Podcast

Reading the five books of the Torah in one year, every week a new section, is a way to build a personal relation to one of the most important classic texts around - irrespective if your Jewish or not. When read together with the traditional midrashic commentary, the effect is double: You learn to read the text with the appropriate attention, but you also get insights into the otherwise hardly accessible works of the sages - the most brilliant Jewish scholars through the centuries. While a podcast lecture can not really subsitute a real-life discussion with a steady study-partner, for me it works as inspiration and as a good supplement to the weekly reading (an other highly recommendable supplement I use is Nehama Leibowitz multi-volume ”Studies”). Not seldom, I disagree with certain points - yet, the very point of this kind of study is to expose yourself to a voice different than your own – an intelligent and respectful disagreement is a sine qua non in the process of working through the text in relation to your own life-experience. The Pardes podcast on the Parasha is by far the best I have found on iTunes.