CAJE Blog

If you were making a movie version of the Torah, you wouldn’t have a Parshas Vayakhel. You would have last week’s Golden Calf episode; you might have Moshe “on the mountain” getting instructions for the Mishkan. You certainly would include the splitting of the sea in your movie. You might even have a scene where we hear Hashem say, “build Me a mishkan and I will dwell among them,” from Parshas Trumah and some jump-cut edits to building the various mishkan components. But you certainly would not have Moshe telling all the details of the build to the Jewish people and then the actual item by item description of the build like in Parshas Vayakhel. Instead, you would have a montage.

The above was the title of the interactive workshop offered two weeks ago by Dara Horn at the Holocaust Teacher’s Institute of the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development. Most of the attendees were public school teachers from all across Miami-Dade. This was a full-day workshop, so I divided my description of what we learned into two parts. Part one explored how Dara Horn laid out the seminal foundations of Jewish civilization and what made its ideas so radical. Part two laid out the Dynamics of Antisemitism.