This repository contains my summaries of various Shiurim/lectures delivered by the Rav ZT"L over the course of approximately 3o years. Some of the Shiurim were delivered as part of the Rav's well attended Yahrtzeit Shiurim as well as his weekly Blatt Shiur delivered at Moriah, on the upper West Side of Manhattan. Also included are transcripts of Shiurim delivered at Maimonides and at Yeshiva University. The writing of these summaries was driven by my interest in the Rav's unique approach to interpreting Chumash. While many have focused on the Rav's erudition in Talmud, I was intrigued by the Hashkafa and messages conveyed by the Rav in his various shiurim and lectures that spoke to the Jewish community regardless of label and group affiliation. When I began this effort, no one had undertaken the task to present the Rav's ideas on Chumash to the public that was thirsting for them.
Some of the summaries are based on Chumash lectures presented by the Rav at the end of his Thursday shiur at RIETS. The Rav began to present these around 1980, after he stopped giving his weekly Moriah Shiur. I take special satisfaction in those summaries as it was my persistent asking the Rav to add a Chumash dimension to the Thursday Shiur that finally paid off. Some of the summaries include material from Talmud Shiurim that incorporated themes from a Parsha. Some of the summaries are new and appear here for the first time. Some derive from summaries I posted to mj-ravtorah in the 1990's or that I published in a weekly column in the Jewish Press that ran for approximately 2 years. As some of those submissions were edited without my verification or explicit approval, I include them here in original or corrected format.
While I was fortunate to personally attend some of these lectures, the vast majority were recorded and provided to me by, among others, my father in law, Rabbi Chaim Zev Bomzer ZT"L, a decades long Talmid of the Rav from the early 1950s, Dr. Israel Rivkin as well as taped lectures made available by Mr. Milton Nordlicht.
The preparation and writing of these summaries required many hours of listening to recorded Shiurim and lectures, filtering out the static and noise in many of those recordings, and writing and reviewing. Every word in these summaries is written by me and no other written sources were consulted or used. All errors in understanding or transcription are my responsibility.
The files under the JrTorah directory (with Jr in their hyper-links) are my own thoughts on the Parsha and other topics. Often they are influenced by ideas I heard from the Rav ZT"L.
Every time I listen to a Shiur by the Rav ZT"L, I hear something new or find some additional interesting nuance. Releasing these summaries through github allows me to update them over time with minimal effort and without the need to update purchased printed copies. Interested people can be notified of updates by subscribing to github and this repository or by checking timestamps of the files in the repository for updated files. One can easily check for updates by examining the timestamp and comment in the line item for each Chumash by scrolling to the top of this README file. The files are available in .pdf and .md (markdown) form.
The section on Articles on Orthodoxy contains a collection of translated articles written by the Rav ZT"L for the Tag Morning Journal in the 1950's on the challenges facing Orthodox Judaism at that time. They provide insights that are relevant today to approaching the problems faced by the Orthodox Jewish Community.
All articles are Copyright by Rabbi Joshua Rapps. All rights reserved. Permission granted to print for personal reading/use. May not be incorporated in printed or electronic publications without explicit permission from the author.