Orchard of Delights: A Beautiful Book, Inside and Out

                                                  
 While in Israel this past summer, I bought Rabbi Trugman's (of Ohr Chadash) new commentary on the Torah, Orchard of Delights, recently reviewed in the Baltimore Jewish Examiner.  I had already been listening with rapture during Shabbatot at my younger son's home to several divrei Torah, or Torah lessons (literally,"words" of Torah), which he gave over at his Shabbat table from Rabbi Trugman's book.  The manner in which RavTrugman interweves the spiritual and physical filled me with wonderment. His teachings lend credence to physicist and theologian Gerald Schroeder's philosophy manifested in his books (two of which I have read, and a third, God According to God, which I am currently reading), that not only does science not disprove the veracity of the Torah, but rather the opposite--and that the two, Torah and Science, are compatible and even interdependent.  From the introduction to Dr. Schroeder's book, God According to God:
Albert Einstein discovered that matter is actually pure congealed or condensed energy, energy in the form of solid matter. Everything from our bodies to boulders on a mountain is made of the energy of the big-bang creation. The scientific discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have gone a step farther in closing ranks with the creation, finding that matter and the energy from which matter formed are made of something totally ethereal. In physics we call it information or, more extreme, mind. In the words of the knighted mathematician James Jeans, the world looks more like a great thought than a great machine. Biblical theology agrees totally, telling us, as we will learn, that God used a substrate of wisdom with which to build the world. This Divine wisdom or mind is present in every iota of the world's being. It explains how the energy of the creation, essentially superpowerful light beams, could become alive and sentient, able to feel love and joy and wonder. Divine wisdom was and is present, guiding and forming the way.
So too, in the Rabbi's magnum opus, the physical and metaphysical are intertwined, shedding new light on the meaning of the Torah--the Old Testament--for our time.

For those of you who missed the live webcast (see my previous post), here it is in its entirety.  Sit down with a cup of coffee or cacao cham* (tea is good, too) and enjoy the depth of the Torah learning in the video below.  Especially pay attention to the mention of the revelations of quantum physics with regard to what we think of as the "real world," starting from around 35:00.
Happy learning. 




*cacao cham: hot cocoa

Comments

piety piet said…
literacy blinds and bi-polarizes a human being / culture when played as a trump in the dominance games.

case in point: the booktitle in this past visavis the orchards of the palestinians which are uprooted cause of course by the law of equivalence (everything for sale, it's all connected, hence pure ethics impossible) one can make them accountable and punish them for an izzy bus blown to bits or two.

Orchard of Delights indeed.
9:33 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Debate: Is it Itsy Bitsy, or Inky Dinky, of Spider Fame?

Image
For the better part of a year, I've had an on-again, off-again debate with my D.H. as to the "correct" adjective in the children's finger-play nursery rhyme, "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" (now you know which one I favor). My D. H. insists that the correct descriptive is "inky dinky," whereas I demur.  I vaguely recollect from my own childhood, either hearing " itsy-bitsy spider ," or even more familiar to me, the description "eency-weency," referring to said spider's miniscule size, yet plucky persistance, and how he (she?) braved the violent rainstorm which "washed it out" after the arduous climb up the water spout, yet doggedly climbed the spout again, after the sun came out and 'dried up all the rain.' Many, if not most of our American nursery rhymes originated on the other side of the pond, in England, for obvious reasons: the American colonists were British in origin, and brought with them the culture an...
Read more

The End. Is there a Beginning...?

This is my first post back on Tikkun Olam since April 23rd, 2015. It does not feel real. Why is it that we never think we will ever have a JOLT in our lives that will change the entire life course we have been traveling? We continue on, day by day, complacent, even in the face of serious illness--believing that what we are living is the only reality; that it is immutable, that it is PHYSICAL: you can touch it, feel it, and it will continue to be there for you tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow... But it isn't. And it won't.  Because the unthinkable can, and does, happen, in time. To everybody. As it happened to me, almost a year ago, on August 10, 2015, when my DH - Dear Husband, of 46 years, died. I am living in an Alternate Universe. Because the universe in which I was living all my life until now, is gone. I still want to slap myself in the face and wake myself up. It's a dream. A terrible nightmare.  It's a horror movie with a frightening ending, but I will...
Read more

Hijab for Jewish Women?

Image
Someone used this phrase in a comment on a post about the hijab wearing Jewish women in Ramat Bet Shemesh Alef: "modern Hareidi community;" this is an oxymoron. Just for the record, I rarely agree with a Hareidi interpretation of anything. This mode of dress is just a bad interpretation of a good concept ( tzniyut ) taken to extremes. Personally, I cover my hair because I feel it increases my humility by remembering that there is a G-d above me ( not because of the reason of less attraction to men). I chose many years ago to do so; but I have come to believe a woman can be Orthodox without covering her hair all the time; just while in shul, and where it shows respect for the Torah, such as at shiurim, or where it is the preferred mode of dress, such as at yeshiva dinners and the like. But to go to the grocery? Not necessarily . I think the whole message of tzniyut is lost in those hijab cases: where will they go next? Hiding in the home and not going out? Sitting behind a cur...
Read more