writing

Writing A D’var Torah

/ Leiah Moser / 1 Comment

One thing I’ve always liked about being a congregational rabbi is the way this role mixes the tachlit with the tachlis. To risk ruining the joke by explaining it, tachlit is a Hebrew word which means “end” or “ultimate.” In Jewish philosophical and mystical texts it sometimes refers to the ultimate, highest, most fully-developed form or purpose of something. In its Yiddish pronunciation, however, tachlis is generally used to mean the basic, practical work of earning a living and taking care of business. I think it’s important to spend time contemplating the tachlit (ultimate things), but it’s also important not to neglect the tachlis (practical matters).

The practical matter I’m going to attend to today is the matter of writing a d’var Torah. I’ve been thinking about this lately because we have a number of b’nei mitzvah students right now who are getting ready for their big day, and it occurred to me that there might be others out there who could use a little advice on practical homiletics (the art of sermon writing).

What is a d’var Torah?

In Hebrew, “d’var Torah” simply means “a word of Torah,” or alternately, “a matter of Torah.” In basic terms it is a short lesson about values and morals typically connected in some way with the Torah portion for that week. Part of what it means to be Jewish is that the Torah belongs to all of us, not simply the clergy. Everybody has something to teach!

Coming up with an idea

If you’ve agreed to give a d’var Torah, it may be because you’ve already got an idea for something you want to teach. If so, then great! But sometimes (and this is particularly the case for rabbis as well as for b’nei mitzvah students) the obligation comes before the idea, and it is going to be necessary to come up with something to say. Here’s a simple procedure that often works for me:

  • Read and reread the text you’re going to teach about (generally the Torah portion for the week you’re going to be speaking). The first time you read through, do it with the goal of getting a general sense of what the text is saying. Then, go back through it again, this time paying attention to specific details that catch your eye. If there are parts that are difficult to understand, make a note of them so you can do some research or ask a teacher about it.
  • Pick out one or two things that you want to focus on. You can’t write a good d’var Torah about the whole Torah portion, there’s just too much there! It’s better to find one or two things to focus on, something you find interesting or challenging.
  • Ask yourself what lesson is this particular text coming to teach you? Why does it feel particularly relevant right now? When it comes to teaching a particular text, I think of it in terms of two roads:
    • The positive road is when the text is saying something I need to learn from and emulate, when it’s expressing a value we need to incorporate into our lives.
    • The negative road is when the text is saying something that feels particularly challenging, problematic, or out-of-date, and and I need to wrestle with it a little, to see how what it’s saying may be flawed or incomplete and to acknowledge that our beliefs and values may have grown and changed over time.
    • Both of these roads are perfectly good ways to learn from Jewish text! Judaism has grown and evolved over time precisely through wrestling with challenging texts and filling in the gaps in the tradition as we have inherited it.
  • Figure out how this lesson is relevant to the current moment. I genuinely don’t think that a d’var Torah has to be topical, but I’m enough of a philosophical pragmatist to believe it definitely ought to connect in a meaningful way with the needs and lived experience of you and the people you are speaking to. Ask yourself: What does this teaching mean for me, and for us?

Writing your d’var Torah

Now that you’ve got a basic idea of what you want to teach, it’s time to sit down and actually write the thing. In my opinion, a d’var Torah ought to be around ten minutes long, maybe longer or shorter depending on the situation. One way to approach it is to follow a basic structure:

  • Introduction — Give a brief explanation of what your text is about and the piece you’re going to be focusing on. If you are teaching about the Torah portion for that week, don’t fall into the trap of recapping the entire Torah portion. Generally, a given parsha contains a number of different segments that may be more or less unrelated to each other. Focus on the part that is going to be relevant to what you have to say.
  • Response — Help your listeners understand what you find interesting, important, or challenging about the text you are focusing on. This might involve talking a little about your personal emotional response to the text and where that came from, or perhaps it will involve talking about what has been going on lately that makes this a relevant piece of text to explore.
  • Teaching — What lesson do you think we ought to learn from what the text has to say here? Should it motivate us to treat other people differently, or to take action to help fix some problem (tikkun olam), or to look at the world in a different way? How do you interpret this text, and what is the basis for that interpretation? This is also a good point to bring in other, related sources that may help to shape our perspective.
  • Reflection — How does this teaching directly relate to our lives, or the situation in the world around us? Why is it important in this moment?
  • Questions for discussion (optional) — As a Reconstructionist rabbi I tend to want to finish a teaching with an opportunity for my listeners to respond in some way, with questions or reflections of their own. In order to facilitate this, I try to keep my teaching reasonably brief and focused, and give one or two questions for reflection at the end to get the conversation going.

So there you have it, some very basic advice for writing a serviceable d’var Torah. Of course this isn’t the only way to do it — it certainly isn’t how I do it every time — but if you’ve been asked to give a teaching in a Jewish space, or maybe just want to stretch yourself a little and try being a teacher (because as I said, everyone has something to teach), then I hope this will help you get started. If anyone reading this happens to make use of this advice, I’d love to hear about it sometime!

Announcing the Magical Princess Harriet Kickstarter!

/ Leiah Moser / Leave a comment

Kickstarter Banner

I am proud to announce that the Kickstarter campaign for Magical Princess Harriet is finally underway!

If you haven’t been following this saga as it has developed, MPH is a Young Adult Fantasy novel about a Jewish middle school student named Harriet (neé Harris) Baumgartner who is charged with dealing with a family of Nephilim who are trying to take over her town, all while having to deal with her growing awareness that she was never meant to be a boy. Yes, that’s right – I wrote a novel that is basically a queer, Jewish version of a magical girl anime. So there.

You can find out more by visiting the Kickstarter page here. Watch the video, check out the characters, and please consider donating if you can!

My Trouble With Shabbat

/ Leiah Moser / 1 Comment

My problem with Shabbat sometimes (and this isn’t going to make a lot of sense at first, so bear with me) is that I like to have rules — clear, unambiguous rules. I don’t like to have to fall back on feelings, on “I’ll know it when I see it.” On the contrary, I like to have a concrete understanding of what I am doing or not doing in a given situation.

On the other hand, I am starting (slowly) to come to terms with the fact that some aspects of the traditional set of rules for Shabbat really don’t work that well for me, at least not if we accept the notion that the overarching purpose of Shabbat is to give us a chance to recharge, reconnect and deepen our spiritual lives.

To take just one example, I personally have a lot of trouble with the traditional injunction against writing on Shabbat. I am by nature a writer. I always have been, ever since I learned to read and write. Writing comes easily to me — much more easily than speaking, actually — and it’s one of the primary ways in which I relax, process the world around me, and connect with myself and others. It therefore comes as a natural impulse to me that on a day in which I’m supposed to be resting and recharging my batteries, I would want to spend some part of that day scribbling in one of the notebooks that serve me more or less as a second brain. This is something that I do throughout the week in the little snippets of time between other things I have to do, but I never feel like I get “enough” time to write, and several hours of uninterrupted writing time without any pressing concerns is about the closest thing I can imagine to heaven.

All the same, I can definitely sympathize with the tradition that includes writing in the category of “work” prohibited on Shabbat. Writing is a creative endeavor, and it can certainly be a labor-intensive activity. Whether there is a difference between writing that would be “work” and writing that would be “not work,” and how we would distinguish between the two, is an open question. The same thing goes, I suppose, for any kind of creative activity that falls within the 39 kinds of forbidden labor but which might be either relaxing or tiring, depending on when one is doing it and how it is being approached. 

Because of this, the rabbinic approach — to avoid the issue altogether by focusing on the type of labor and prohibiting them categorically — makes a certain kind of sense. What I worry about sometimes is that the way in which they identified the list of activities to be prohibited was deeply embedded in the social, economic and technological conditions of their own times and makes less sense in our own.

As for myself, I must admit that during this summer I have developed the habit (I won’t dignify it with the term practice) of writing in my notebook on Shabbat. This probably has as much to do with where I am at the moment than anything deeper — spending the summer by myself in Chicago has made it rather difficult to fill up the long summer Shabbats in ways that feel enriching and spiritually rewarding. All the same, I am somewhat bothered sometimes by how disconnected my Shabbat practice sometimes seems. A large part of this feeling must be because any Jewish practice cannot be completely personal. Ours is a tradition that thrives off of community, and what seems to be missing much of the time in my Shabbat practice , whatever it may be, is the sense that it is developing in relation to others besides myself.

The idea that has been floating around in my head lately in response to these feelings is the development of small, discrete “circles of practice” –groups of three or four individuals, or a few families — that would come together to work toward the development of shared approaches to Jewish practice. This need not be oriented toward any traditionalist understanding of halachah (though it certainly could be, and halachah would probably form one of the sources of inspiration for any such group in some way), and the goal of the group need not be a uniform set of practices. The idea, rather, would be to have a small community in which people could work out their approach toward various aspects of living Jewishly together, get feedback, share ideas. Such a group might exist within a synagogue community, or consist of members of different synagogues, or outside the developed communal structure of institutional Judaism altogether. The important part would be the indiviudal members’ commitment to work together to help expand their collective understanding of practical Judaism, in whatever form that might take.