Episodes
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Join Geoffrey Stern recorded live at the Conservative Synagogue of Westport, Connecticut with guest appearences of Madlik Faithful Henry Feuerstein, Martin Rosenfeld z'l, Martha Rosenfeld, Judy Shapiro and others.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/594972
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2016/10/01/whats-new-with-the-jewish-new-year/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience. God, so to speak, “joining the Jewish People in Exile”, is a radical Rabbinic concept that in the words of Rabbi Akiva would have been blasphemous had it not been supported by Scripture. We explore the source of “God in Exile” (Shechinta B’Galuta - שְׁכִינְתָּא בְּגָלוּתָא) in Rabbinic texts and ponder its ramifications for modern-day Jewish Thought.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/592663
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/09/25/god-in-exile/
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Missing episodes?
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on Clubhouse. Moses warns the Israelites that if they do not live up to God’s expectations, they will be vilified as a caricature of evil. The world will use the Jew to personify failure and depravity. We discuss the use of the Jew as metaphor in our texts and literature.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/591169
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/09/18/jew-as-metaphor/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse in front of a live audience. The Torah teaches that one must return a lost object to its rightful owner. The great sages Abaye and Rava use this as an opportunity to argue over the dynamics of loss and despair! We swim into this iconic Talmudic text to find what we have lost…
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/589057
Link to The Eli Fishman Podcast: Rabbi Adam Mintz: On the topic of Conversion (gerus).
Transcript on Episode Web Page: https://madlik.com/2024/09/11/lost-found/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse. הי״ד the Hebrew acronym הַשֵּׁם יִקּוֹם דָּמוֹ “May Hashem avenge his blood” has been carved after the names of too many victims of bloodshed in the past few months, and especially in the last few days. This week's parsha addresses tribalism, revenge killings and blood feuds which in the Ancient Near East, especially in the Sinai Peninsula, have a too rich history. Today we review the Biblical texts in light of pre-Islamic customs preserved by the Bedouin and we wonder …. when will it ever end.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/587623
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/09/04/may-god-avenge-his-blood/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse on August 25th 2022. The Torah prohibits us from adding or detracting to its directives and also against rewriting history. It even predicts that there might be a time where our leaders will try to reinvent our past. We discuss.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/426413
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2022/08/24/a-time-that-never-was/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on Clubhouse. The Book of Deuteronomy presents the Torah’s various rules and regulations as a corpus. It uses a unique expression; כׇּל־הַמִּצְוָ֗ה variously translated as “All the commandment” or “instruction”, the “entire mitzvah”. It is mitzvah in the singular … not in the plural as we would expect. So, we explore how the concept of a corpus of 613 commandments as well as the value of a single mitzvah developed in Rabbinic thought and Jewish practice.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/584896
Trancript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/08/21/the-whole-mitzvah/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on Clubhouse. The Torah proclaims that its laws are our wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations. The nations of the world will say of the Israelites that this is a wise and understanding people. We explore the traditional commentaries and then we discover Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner; born at the end of the 19th century and a radical thinker and early religious Zionist. Based on this verse, he taught that if our Torah does not match the most enlightened moral, ethical, cultural and aesthetic standards of the day…. It…. And we... need to evolve. So, join us for “What they say about us actually matters...”
Sefaria source sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/583652
Transcript on episode webpage: https://madlik.com/2024/08/14/what-they-say-about-us-actually-matters/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on Clubhouse. The book of Deuteronomy known as the Second Torah, is not only spoken in the first-person voice of Moses but is also a reworking and reinterpretation of earlier events. This is nowhere more apparent then in the retelling of the story of the spies where, in our disruptive reading, the spies and their generation are not blamed for being too meek, but rather…. for being too militaristic.
Sefaria source sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/582307
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/08/07/just-war/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz reorded in front of a live audience om clubhose. Moses accuses the tribes of Reuben and Gad of perpetuating the defeatist attitude of the generation of the Exodus. The word Moses uses; Tarbut, has come to mean culture and we explore how culture, in contradistinction to Torah, has evolved and continues to impact Jewish thought until today.
Seafaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/581130
Transcript on episode: website: https://madlik.com/2024/07/31/culture-wars/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded in front of a live audience on Clubhouse. The three week mourning period commemorating the fall of the first and second Jewish commonwealth reminds us of the divisive nature of zealotry. And it is zealotry that lies behind the story of Pinchas taking the law into his own impulsive hands. The Pinchas model was problematic to the Rabbis and has been used by zealots until today to justify vigilantism and extrajudicial activities. We discuss.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/580008
Transcript on episode web page.
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded live on Clubhouse. This week’s parsha includes a blessing about goodness, delivered by a prophet of the nations that is so inspiring it is used to initiate the morning prayers in Jewish houses of worship of every denomination and until today. This week another 20-something kid took a gun and killed and tried to kill. A NY Times editorialist wrote that: “Though details remain sparse, this appears to be a story less about fanatical partisanship than about the crisis of lonely and disconnected young men being radicalized into pure nihilism.” So we celebrate the simple good of pitching a tent and sitting with one’s fellow.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/578771
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/07/17/how-good-was-that/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded live on Clubhouse. This week’s parsha iis as much about water as it is about Chukim or challenging rules. It starts with the death of Miriam and her well, segues into Moses fatal sin in striking the water rock and concludes with the Red Heifer and its purifying water. Today we focus on the ability of sprinkled water or emersion into water to purify in Judaism and later Christianity and up onto today.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/577579
Transcript on episode website: https://madlik.com/2024/07/10/holy-water/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz, recorded on Clubhouse. Moses uses a title for God he uses in only one other place and which is not used again in all of Tanach: "God of the spirits of all flesh". This name for God strikes us as very universalist, even humanistic and we explore.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/576389
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/07/03/the-spirit-of-all-flesh/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse. The so-called Biblical Spies are actually not characterized as undercover agents but rather as tourists or in Hebrew; Turim. Broadcasting live from Venice, Italy, we take this opportunity to explore the significant impact that journey has played in defining the Jew.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/575122
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/06/26/wanderlust/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse. We’ve encountered age limits in the Torah with regard to reaching the age of majority, military age and the age required to serve as a priest, but there is a singular verse which provides a mandatory retirement age and this is the subject of our discussion.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/574152
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/06/19/retirement-ageism-and-age-limits/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse. This week we start the fourth Book of the Torah and it is also my grandson Ari’s Bar Mitzvah. As the Torah quantifies and qualifies its members, there is nothing new with the emphasis on the genetic lineage of the tribes. What is surprising, is a strategically placed Rabbinic comment that whoever teaches Torah to another, Scripture regards it as though he had given birth to him. So, what is Ari celebrating… his membership in the tribe or his choice to be reborn as a student of Moshe Rabenu and his teachings. In short, is it Nature or Nurture?
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/569859
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/06/05/jewish-identity-nature-or-nurture/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded live on Clubhouse. God threatens to scatter the Israelites among the nations. The Septuagint, in its Greek translation, coins a new word, maybe a new concept. A Greek word used, not for migrants but to reference a people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently reside elsewhere. The word is Diaspora, a seminal concept in Judaism and a word that has spawned such concepts as alienation, ethnicity, repatriation and redemption. Modern day Diaspora Studies may ignore the Jews but Disapora may lie at the heart of what is the enigma of the Jews…
Sefaria source sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/567783
Transcript on episdode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/05/29/diaspora/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse. This week’s parsha is Behar, which means “at the Mountain”. While Rabbi Mintz is not at the Mountain, he is in Israel and will share impressions of his recent visit to the only Haredi Hesder Yeshiva. The Talmud suggests that we set aside specific times for Torah study and we will use the Sabbatical year referenced in the parsha to focus on different ways that our tradition has offered for integrating study into civil society and military service.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/566480
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/05/22/times-for-torah/
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Join Geoffrey Stern and Rabbi Adam Mintz recorded on Clubhouse.
We usually think of Tishrei and the Fall as a marathon of Jewish holidays, but if you count Rabbinic and Israeli holidays, the seven weeks of Spring win the holiday race with ease. Pesach, Yom Hazikaron, Yom Ha’atzmut, Pesach Sheni, Lag ba’Omer, Yom Yerushalyim and Shavuot. We use Leviticus 23 which has the most complete summary of Biblical holidays to explore the dynamic of adding new holidays and adding meaning to existing holidays.
Sefaria Source Sheet: www.sefaria.org/sheets/564540
Transcript on episode web page: https://madlik.com/2024/05/14/ki-ba-moed-the-time-has-come/
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