Many observant Jews believe in the primacy of Torah and the necessity to never stop learning and growing. However, it’s often hard to find the right class at the right time by the right teacher. If you’re looking to learn the Parsha, your problem is solved. You can find yourself an Internet Parsha Rebbe.
I’ve been listening to Rabbi Ari Kahn for over a year. I love his breadth of sources, his choice of topics, his development of the shiur and the fact that his New York sense of humor is still intact many years after leaving the American shores for Eretz Yisroel. I also really appreciate that he makes his shiurim easily accessible for free on his web site.
Even though I don’t commute to work, I get to listen to 2-3 of Rabbi Kahn’s shiurim a week on the way to and from Shul and while stretching and getting dressed in the morning and evening. I’ve also added Rabbi Daniel Feldman and Rabbi Herschel Schacter who have many free shiurim available on that treasure house, known as YUTorah.org. There are 10s of speakers there, each with their own style, delivery and approach to teaching parsha.
If you like a fast paced, Chassidish sourced shiur, you might want to try Rabbi Sitorsky. Another good free source with a variety of speakers is Torah Anytime. Google will direct you to many other free Torah mp3 sites, as well as sites that still charge.
Hearing a parsha shiur from a teacher is a fantastic way to learn and with the great availability and affordability of audio on phones and other portable devices, why not sample a few shiurim to find your personal Parsha Rebbe.
Brad– try this site:
http://www.vbm-torah.org/
They have e mail shiurim one can subscribe to and also an archive of shiurim, all on a variety of topics. Not sure if they have anything daf yomi-related, but they might.
Brad:
At dafdigest.org you can subscribe to receive articles about the Daf Yomi. About every three days an email is sent with three PDF attachments.
There are various daily lessons to which you can subscribe here:
http://www.chabad.org/dailystudy/default_cdo/jewish/Daily-Study.htm
Do you know of an email that has in text shiurim on either a masechta, daf yomi, daf hashavua, parsha, or halacha? I find myself on the train more and more, but am not a fan of listening to mp3’s and would like a daily high level email on any or all of those topics. Who has suggestions? id prefer to not have to deal with downloads or links while im on the train–ie I like it when it’s intext
I think it is so amazing that we live in an age in which any of us, living anywhere, can listen to the voices of legitimate Torah giants ruminating on virtually any Torah concept that we want to learn about, at any time that we feel like listening to them.
Sometimes it’s worth taking a step back and just acknowledging that we live in an extraordinary time. To anyone living a hundred or a thousand years ago, things like this would be all the proof necessary that G-d is continuing to work miracles day after day.
On a more halachic point, just an open-ended question: Given that the Talmud was assembled in its written form because of the ongoing decline in availability of Torah sages in person for oral transmission of the oral law, are we reaching a point in time at which, due to the omnipresent availability of Torah audio (including audio of the entire Talmud), it will (or already has, whether we acknowledge it or not?) become halachically incumbent upon us to revert to auditory transmission of the Oral Law rather than written transmission of it?
This is an important post because there is a lot of excellent material available and it is a good way to use one’s time while commuting, jogging, etc.
I think it is important that the majority of one’s Talmud Torah be active rather than passive. One can set up one’s learning so that the active and passive components complement one another.