Welcome to the Limmud Festival Sefaria group! And for those of you joining us from Birmingham, welcome to Festival!
Here you can find source sheets from sessions happening across Festival. Please feel free to use them to follow along in sessions - or alternatively, you can use them to learn at your leisure if you weren't able to catch the session in person.
The Limmud Beit Midrash will be open from 13:30 - 15:30 from Monday - Wednesday for open learning, which would be a great time to use this group. Come and learn!
A supplementary sourcesheet for an examination of the various issues surrounding the common practice of Jews praying at the graves of righteous people. The relevance of some sources may obviously not be clear by themselves.
2 Kings 2. Sometimes it's the sort of day that starts with a lovely walk with your mentor in the Jordan Valley and ends with you getting bears to maul forty-two little kids to death. We'll be performing a close reading of 2 Kings 2, thinking about how we cope with loss and what it means to demonstrate competency.
Jewish tradition is clear: when the Torah says to physically punish someone who injured another, it means to pay them money. How can we, then, also claim to be following the Torah’s law? We will look at the Talmud’s attempt to explain this discrepancy, and in the process reevaluate our assumptions about the biblical texts.
Two key areas of Jewish law about firstborns: redemption from a priest (pidyon ha-ben), and the double portion of the inheritance. How do these two kinds of firstborn interact? And what does that tell us about a parent’s relationship with their children? (Full disclosure: the teacher, a 3rd child, has exactly 1 child of his own!)
Who deserves our respect and how should we show it? The Torah tells us that we have to stand before an elder, but gives no guidance who is included in “elder”. Our rabbis in the Talmud Yerushalmi, the mysterious and older Talmud, discuss this question with regard to a live issue of their times: what they saw as their corrupt synagogue leadership.
What do we mean when we read in the Torah, over and over: “God spoke”? How does God speak? Does God speak today like the Torah describes? How would we know? We will explore some models of what this might look like in the Bible and in our lives today.
From where are the Limmud values of diversity and arguments for the sake of heaven derived? This source sheet explores some of our traditional texts on these themes.