Sharing the Sacred - The Torah Cycle

The Torah Cycle Podcast Series

Our Sunday School class embarked on a first and historic year long study of the Torah Cycle beginning in October of 2014 and ending in October of 2015. Led by Sandy Kress who agreed to come to our church for a full year of Sundays (along with his wife Camille). The entire experience was a huge success (playing to a packed classroom week after week), and quite frankly its success was entirely due to Sandy's outstanding leadership, his teaching style, and his clear love of this sacred scripture.

But now we are approaching 5 years since that experience and learning. And since, as you know, my hypothesis, backed by a lot of data, is that the average adult has forgotten 98% of anything they learned in a class after 5 years, I propose it may be time for members of this class to repeat this experience on their own

We now have a superior way to do that. Sandy has been creating a podcast series of that experience by taking our class audios and adding his introduction to each of our class audios, creating a podcast series of our classes. I have been listening to them regularly and I assure you that Sandy's podcasts are a major upgrade to our class audios because of his excellent introductions.

So for anyone who missed that experience of studying the Torah Cycle (all of the first five books of our bible) as well as those who want to repeat it you can now enjoy it in a new way. To study on your own schedule you can simply click below on the first Torah portion (Bereshit) and listen to that podcast and continue all the way through, either weekly as we did before or more quickly if you wish.

And if you want to work your way through the Torah Cycle in conjunction with The Jewish faith calendar for the cycle the first Podcast (Bereshit) can be enjoyed in the fourth week of October of 2019.

And for an even richer experience you can click on this link:

https://www.thirdwell.org/Torah-Portions.html

And you will find complete list of these Torah portions. And importantly it provides you with all you need to investigate any or all of the portions as taught in our class.The listing shows you first the name of the Torah portion (followed by the name written in Hebrew), then the English equivalent of the Hebrew word and then the scripture listing for that Torah portion. This is followed by the Lesson notes from Sandy Kress, our class handouts, and an audio of the class as taught by Sandy. One additional bonus is some of the Haftarah portions associated with Torah portion.

Important note: If you click on any of the Torah portions Hebrew names on the left it will link you directly to the Wikipedia page for that portion. There you will find a comprehensive discussion of that portion as well as some beautiful artist renderings of key scenes from that portion. This page can thus be an excellent place to deepen your investigation of each portion as you study it.

A big thank you to Sandy for putting all of this effort into creating this podcast series.

Mike