Why didn’t God simply command Avraham to “Go to the land that I will show you”? Why preface with so many details – “from your land,” “from your birthplace,” and “from your father’s house”? The Kli Yakar suggests the command was phrased this way “because it might have been difficult for Avraham to accept everything…
One way to help students stay actively engaged with text is to provide specific tasks that help draw focus to the details. And online learning offers a lot of tools for that! For example, after a preliminary conversation about lists and headings (e.g. “These are the things to buy at the store: Milk, eggs,…
Today’s TorahTutors Tidbit relates to this week’s Torah portion, where we learn about the beginnings of the world and of human history, and about development beyond those beginnings. When one TorahTutors student began her partial study of the Book of Bereishit, it was with a specific eye towards gaining a sense of the world’s…
It is traditional to read Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) on the Shabbos of Chol Hamoed Sukkot – or this year, since there is no Shabbos Chol Hamoed, on Shemini Atzeret. The book of Kohelet is so difficult to understand that the Talmud (Shabbos 30b) says the Sages considered excluding it from the biblical canon because of…