Shavuot selected text study and songs
Discover amazing texts, along with proof that the humanistic interpretation of Tikkun Olam goes back centuries and is even older than the Kabbalistic interpretation. Multiple source sheets are available with different foci (e.g. Loving your neighbor, or Rambam).
If you want to go straight to the pdf of all 44 tikkun olam texts, click here.
Get all the verses in Tanakh about the stranger and refugee in a single doc – first created for Refugee Shabbat to support discussions about #DACA.
The Midrash and Kabbalah behind Leonard Cohen's
Hallelujah
To be open to all, available to everyone - that why the Torah was given in the wilderness, bamidbar, according to midrash, and that's how we are commanded to treat the produce that grows in the Shmitah year. Explore the deep connection between these two ideas through ancient midrash and medieval commentary.
"On Shavuot, when we celebrate receiving the Torah, we also celebrate the offering of the first fruits in the Temple, the bikurim. The offering was a supremely humble gesture. Yet without the small, perhaps wrinkled fruit of the bikurim, there could be no offering..."
"God of Secret Mystery". This old world
zemer goes through the Sefirot of the Tree of Life starting with Keter.
El Mistater also makes an appropriate song for Shavuot, when we finish our Omer journey through Sefirot.
The Torah's radical blueprint for sustainability. Download a pdf for text study to use on Shavuot!
Click here to go straight to the study sheets with commentary and study guide (5 pages).
Download Reb Duvid's (academic) article about Menachot 29b,
the amazing aggadah about the giving of the Torah to Moshe and Rabbi Akiva's death. It's titled "Akiva's Crown of Thorns: Divine Violence and the Inversion of Rabbinic Theodicy". This will blow your mind. (Feel free to skip over the academese. Note: this is not a happy subject. Read it in the right mood.)
Text study: "Jesters of the King"