Book Review: Table Talk, by Moshe Pinchas Weisblum

(I am very very late with many reviews of books I've read lately so it is about time to start the counting and do my writing job).

One of the most well prepared moment of Shabbes, besides setting up the menu, is reading and preparing the weekly Parasha.

I listen or read many variants: at the beginning of the week, I start searching for some related discussions on YU Torah or Chabad.org or while reading different interpretations in the Orthodox media.

On Shabbes, I usually read once the Chumash and shortly after the comments. I discuss one more the short version with the children. At shul, I am reading the Hebrew version by myself. Eventually, thereafter, I continue with another sum up the discussion with the children to be sure that we have a common understanding of the main benchmarks.

In addition, I listen to the shiurim of the rabbi delivered during the day. At the first sight, it might be more than enough,

but I always look for more interpretations and versions. The next level is to focus more on the home discussion and to spend more time around the Shabbes table discussing the weekly Parasha. For the moment, I am looking for suggestions of formats and ideas for brainstorming - mostly by connecting the ideas of the parasha to our daily life.

Thus I was more than happy to stumble upon a Moshe Pinchas Weisblum book dedicated to the Table Talk. For each parasha, there are a couple of simple questions with the suggested answer that could organize at a certain extent the discussion. The level of difficulty is easy to medium and it is not difficult to follow and participate at the discussion. For each Parasha I found new interesting angles of view and I think it is useful for many – like me – looking to establish a minimal level of the discussions held on Shabbes.

Lectures for Shabbat: Chumash

Image via Wikipedia//Sefer Torah scrolls

The word "chumash" (חומש) comes from the Hebrew word meaning five (Hamesh), and refers to the five books of the Torah. Sometimes, a chumash is simply refers to a collection of the five books of the Torah, but according to the daily practice, it contains the entire first five books, divided up by the weekly parshiyot, with the haftarah portion inserted after each week's parshah. A more formal term is Ḥamishah Ḥumshei Torah, "five fifths of the Law".

In early scribal practice there was a distinction between a Sefer Torah, containing the entire Pentateuch on a parchment scroll, and a copy of one of the five books on its own, which was generally bound in codex form, like a modern book, and had a lesser degree of sanctity.

In the legal codes, such as Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, it is laid down that any copy of the Pentateuch which does not comply with the strict rules for a Sefer Torah, for example because it is not a parchment scroll or contains vowel signs, has only the same sanctity as a copy of an individual book (ḥomesh). In this way, the word ḥomesh (or ḥumash) came to have the extended sense of any copy of the Pentateuch other than a Sefer Torah.

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