Dear Friends and Students,

I hope you are all enjoying the summer, whether you are lucky enough to be on vacation, or are in school or at work. I want to take a little time to recap our past year at Orach Mishor with you, and to discuss plans for the future.

This past year was a very exciting one for our program. In addition to continuing our regular learning, we had the milestone of 2 of our participants receiving semikha from Rav Zalman Nechemia Goldberg. It was also noteworthy to have one of our own participants prepare a carefully researched and thoughfully analyzed shiur on a topic of his own professional expertise. To me these represent two equally important goals of the program - to help train future rabbis and educators, and to help develop a more robust model of “layperson’s” Torah scholarship. As each of you follows your own unique path in your personal and Torah growth, I hope that we will be able to celebrate many more accomplishments in the future.

Last year we were very fortunate to begin a supportive and fruitful relationship with Machon Pardes in Jerusalem. Other Yeshivot have also expressed interest in collaborating with Orach Mishor in the future, and I am optimistic that this year more such relationships will develop.

Although we are all scattered around the world, we have also had the opportunity to share many personal interactions and occasions. It has been special for me to be up to date about each of your lives and share your simchas, and I hope you also see one another as friends and partners in learning and continue to stay in touch.

This coming year, after discussing with a number of you, I plan to teach the laws of Brachot, and those of the holidays. These halachot are glaringly absent from most semikha curricula, and I think they are very important knowledge for both leaders and individual Jews. They form the framework of our appreciation of Hashem within daily and annual cycles. I hope that many of you will continue participating, and that you will refer others to the program. As my (our) Brandeis heyday fades further into the distance, it becomes all the more critical to the program's ongoing success to involve new members from whatever background it may be. So please forward information about the program to anyone you think might be interested. Please also send me an email to confirm your own participation.

I would like to solicit your input as to possible improvements or adjustments to the shiurim. I believe that the format of written mekorot and a live Sunday-evening video conference has essentially been successful. However, I am thinking about other models such as asynchronous (watch at your convenience) video as a way to reach a larger audience. I also believe that we really should make an effort this year to have one shabbaton in Israel and one in the USA.

Alongside our ongoing shiurim, I am undertaking two new initiatives this coming year, which may be of interest to some of you.

A recurring theme in my conversations with many of you has been a frustration with the Orthodox community’s ambiguous stand and mixed record on extending ethical treatment to non-Jews. Both in Israel, on a national level, and in the US, on the individual and communal level, I believe this is one of the paramount religious tests we face today, and that our success or failure at rising to meet it can have serious implications for the future of our community and our religion. It is a subject that is very close to my heart, and one that I believe can no longer be ignored. As we live in increasingly multicultural local communities, and in a globalized world, the question of the scope of our morality is becoming ever more urgent. After procrastinating for many years, I have decided this year to write a book about it. It would be most helpful to me to discuss some of the ideas that I am refining with you, and to have your input as to how you understand this issue. Assuming there is interest, I would like to “beta-test” some of the material for the book in a few specialty shiurim during the course of the coming year.

Together with the Hillel at Ben Gurion University and the human resources staff at Soroka hospital in Be'er Sheva, I will be launching a bikur cholim project in which university students of will be visiting elderly patients who are alone in the hospital for extended stays. In particular, during the initial phase, we will be focusing on holocaust survivors who don't have any regular visitors. This program will hopefully benefit the patients, and also serve as an opportunity for the students to be Jewishly active. The university and hospital also serve a non-Jewish populations, and I hope the program will ultimately include them as well. While this initiative is not directly related to our shiurim, I would be happy to have any of you who are interested in doing so participate in it, in whatever capacity is possible.

I want to close by sharing with you a lesson from the life of my dear teacher Rav Yehuda Amital, who recently passed away. Rav Amital was well known for leading the song “Vetaher Libenu Le’ovdecha Be’emet” – purify our hearts to serve you truthfully, on holidays and special occasions. As I remember the many lessons and talks that I heard from him, that song really captures his essence. Rav Amital always held the belief that, deep in their hearts, people know what God would want them to do. They may get it wrong, but that is because their hearts are artificially “polluted”. The path to truly serving God, then, is to remove the pollution and be able to let the natural, pure good instinct that is intrinsic in every heart come through. In accordance with this approach, while Rav Amital was a great scholar of Torah, he often functioned more on instinct than on book knowledge. His greatest lessons were those that emanated from, and penetrated to, the heart. For this reason he was so well respected both within the Yeshiva world and also in the broader Israeli society – his lessons and leadership resonated at the level of the “pure heart”, so listeners did not need extensive Talmudic knowledge to appreciate them. Especially during the recent season of Bein Hametzarim, I found myself reflecting on how that purity of heart is the only real antidote for the petty factionalism that was responsible for the destruction of the temple, and that persists to our time with no sign of abating. As we all work to become more knowledgeable about the Torah, may we always retain the “pure heart”, the truthful instincts that run deeper than what can be learned from a book, and that guide us in everything we do.

Kol Tuv,

Aharon Frazer

raf@orachmishor.org