Pesach Audio Shiurim

For the really bored, I offer two shiurim on Pesach for download. The first was given last Thursday evening as part of a three part series at Cong. Kehilas Yaakov in LA, with a different speaker each week focusing on one mechaber’s Torah on the Haggadah. I led off with an hour on Maharal. The crowd of men and women was a knowledgeable one, and I mixed in lots of Yeshivish, Aramaic, etc, as well as leaving many terms untranslated.

On Tuesday at noon, BEH, I hope to give my annual machshava shiur for women, and will post the results if I remember to turn the recorder on.

UPDATE: I just received word from Dropbox that they suspended my public links for “generating excessive traffic.” I am open to suggestions for workarounds or alternatives.

2nd Update: Thanks to LaCosta’s suggestion, I tried Box.com and have a new link to the Maharal shiur.

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2 Responses

  1. Raymond says:

    I attended this past Thursday night’s lecture, and have a question regarding it. Bear in mind that I ask this according to my admittedly limited understanding of what was said.

    The first idea expressed in the lecture, was the topic of miracles. How can G-d perform miracles? Obviously G-d can because He is, after all, G-d, and G-d can do anything. But the question asked in the lecture was not G-d’s ability to perform miracles, but rather why He would do so, for in performing miracles, He is, so to speak, changing His mind over His original order of creation. As all this was being said, part of what went on in my mind, was how one of the refutations that we Jews give toward Christianity, is that G-d does not indeed change His mind. That is, He did not give us 613 commandments, only to show us how we cannot keep them, and then changed His mind, replacing it with unconditional forgiveness.

    Good question, but one already approached by the Rambam, who said that miracles themselves were built into G-d’s original creation. This seems to abrogate our notion of free will, but the subject of free will vs predestination is such a complicated one unsolvable to our limited human minds, that I am hardly one to continue on that line of thought.

    What the Maharal did with all this, is what to my mind at least, sounds like an elaboration of what the Rambam originally said. According to my understanding of that part of the lecture, the Maharal says that miracles themselves are not a violation of Divine rules, but rather have their own set of rules in and of themselves. It is a kind of meta-reality. To use a television metaphor for simpletons like me, it takes us beyond the dimensions of space and time, and into the dimension of the Twilight Zone.

    So far, I have merely summarized my understanding of that aspect of the lecture. But now my question is, what are those rules involved in miracles that the Maharal talks about? Somehow I get the feeling that only the truly spiritually advanced, would know or even understand the answer to that question. But in the parsha book on the Nesivos Shalom by the same Rabbi Adlerstein, I just read how even common people like me, can gain spirituality by clinging to Torah scholars, by riding on their coattails, so to speak. So I wonder if somehow I can understand after all what the Maharal means on a deeper level in what he said.

    [YA – Maharal clearly agrees with you! He didn’t write his sefer to take up space on a shelf. He wrote it for the people, whom he expected would understand. He did not write it for an handful of cognoscenti, as evidenced from the many times that he writes that he has much more to say, but is holding back.

    What are the rules? They take up a good part of his Gevuros Hashem. I can’t think of anyway to learn about them short of studying the sefer.]

  2. Shmuel says:

    When is the second shiur?

    [YA – I gave it last Wednesday. I am technologically stymied. Apparently, both Dropbox and Box have limits not only on free storage, but on bandwidth used. They are not letting me place the file there for public access. I need an aitzah!]

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