Madlik Podcast – Disruptive Torah Thoughts on Judaism

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/ 

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/ 

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/ 

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/ 

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/ 

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/ 

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/ 

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/ 

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.

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/