So my daughter woke us up last night with what was, apparently, a bad acid trip. She screamed about bugs and how they were crawling all over her and we had to get them off her. She's three, so we're pretty sure it was just three-year-old brain farts rather than actual acid trip. (Seemed perfectly fine in the morning. Me, I'm tired! )Anyway, then I was awake, getting ideas. One of my ideas was that I'd like to write a d'var torah each week for a year and post them all on a blog.
I am not a Rabbi. I am a pretty ill-educated Jew. My d'vrei torah are unlikely to be at all illuminating to anyone except me. Also, I start a lot of projects that I don't have the time or inclination to finish. Oh, and I don't read Hebrew. You are better off getting your official Judaism from the wrapping on a box of Streit's Matzo than from me, that's for sure. I am busy and conflicted and I don't even think I've read the whole Torah before. And most of the people in my life are really not interested in religion at all, so it's not like anyone's going to be impressed or supportive of this particular weirdo project of mine.
Still, plenty of people devote a lot of energy to editing Lostpedia entries, and other people to memorizing baseball statistics or studying subway maps from around the world. Some people, and I say this without judgment, make time in their schedules for The Real Housewives of New York City. Reading and writing about the Hebrew bible has been a popular activity for a few thousand years. It may not be the word of god, good moral teaching, good literature; it may not make any sense; it may not be what it sometimes claims to be. But one thing it is: hella popular, historically speaking. So this is my halting attempt to join the conversation, and see what all the talk is about.
Two basic notes to start out with. I don't assume that anyone reading this knows anything about Judaism or has read the Bible in either its Jewish or Christian incarnations. So I'll try to explain myself when I use funny words I probably just learned (sorta) yesterday.
Parsha: Jewish tradition divides the Torah (aka The Pentateuch, aka the Five Books of Moses, aka the first five books listed in any bible, Christian or Hebrew, that you pick up) into different portions for a yearly reading plan. Each portion is called a parsha, which is short for something else I don't remember, look it up if you care. Actually there are 54 of them, because the Jewish calendar is both solar and lunar and super-confusing, so some years there are leap months added in. Or something. But I didn't find that out until I'd already settled on 52 parshas as a blog name. And everyone can figure out that 52 of something is either a card game or something split up weekly.
D'var Torah: A D'var Torah is a teaching about that week's parsha. (D'vrei is the plural). Maybe what I will do will turn out to be something other than D'vrei Torah, or already has some other more appropriate name that I don't know about. Maybe it'll be more like riffing on torah, or fanfic on torah or navel-gazing with torah as an excuse. Maybe lots of Jews will find it completely offensive and ridiculous that I thought for even a second that whatever I'm doing might be d'var torah, and call me horrible names in anonymous comments. I freely admit I'm not qualified to do teachings on anything. More like Learnings. Could devolve into rantings, evolve into poetry, go out with a whimper, end in a self-published book. We'll see...
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