Rabbinic Perspectives: Conversations for Our TimeS
Rabbi Robert Levy
Emeritus Temple Beth Emeth, Ann Arbor MI
As Passover approaches, Jewish life turns to one of the festival’s most pervasive practices: the prohibition against chametz, foods produced through leavening. While most commonly associated with bread, this category includes other familiar and valued products as well, such as beer. The common element is yeast, an agent of transformation that human beings have long prized.
Yet the Torah treats leaven quite differently.
Taking the deliberately provocative question, “Why does God hate yeast?” as our point of departure, this session will explore the biblical and rabbinic foundations of the Passover prohibition. Our discussion will focus on Exodus 12, which introduces the laws of Pesach and which Rashi famously identifies as the true beginning of the Torah.
What vision of the world emerges from this text? And what might the prohibition of yeast reveal about the kind of world the Torah seeks to imagine and sustain?
Join us for a thoughtful conversation as we prepare for Pesach.
Registration is no longer open. You can now watch his program on our Recording Archive.
Thank you to our generous sponsor, Nancy Siegel, who dedicates this talk in memory of her husband Mark A Siegel.
Rabbi Robert Levy is a New Yorker by birth and upbringing, a Midwesterner by career and a Washingtonian in retirement. He presently stays active through service to the American rabbinic and cantorial communities managing a nonprofit clergy retirement plan and teaching practical rabbinics to rabbinic students and managing the cycling program and serving on faculty at a World Union for Progressive Judaism summer camp.