Birkat Hatorah Pdf

[Casimiro Lurten]

Womenalso say birkat hatorah every day because they're chayav to learn the laws that apply to them, for example hilchot Shabbat, tefillah, berachot, hilchot niddah and challah, and other halachot of issur and heter. In any event, they're not required to say birkat hatorah -- it's simply that if they want to, then they're permitted to.

Even though the position of the Shulchan Aruch is that women may not make berachos when performing mitzvahs they are not obligated in [like time bound mitzvahs], the Shulchan Aruch stills requires women to make the bracha.

The Brisker Rav (Hil. Berachos) quotes his father, R' Chaim Solovetchik, that Birchas Hatorah is not a Birchas HaMitzvos, but actually a Beracha on the 'cheftza of Torah' (more similar in classification to Birchas Hashvach).

I met Erich Segal in 1959, in a Harvard University graduate-school dorm. It was in Richards Hall, designed in the early fifties by Walter Gropius, which Erich said only proved that "great men" could do desultory work. He was a Ph.D. candidate in Classics, and I in Government. Of course, he knew more, much more about my field than I did about his. In fact, he was rapacious in his pursuit of knowledge. And cheerfully intent about music and song. He was a man of traditional culture ... but--no, with him, it is "and"--he wrote the screenplay for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, as well as for several books he had written: Love Story; Man, Woman and Child; Oliver's Story. No one who has read Love Story will ever forget it; it is more memorable than the film. And, if you are of a certain age, please don't deny reading it. If you didn't, you were a cultural freak.

Erich wrote several books of classical scholarship (on Plautus, Roman comedy, Caesar Augustus, Greek tragedy, others) while he was at Yale and, intermittently, at Princeton and Harvard, Oxford and Tel Aviv. I once asked someone I knew (quite well) in his Yale department why Erich had not received tenure. "We were jealous, all of us jealous, including me." I despised that man for his righteous and unashamed admission of envy. By the way, Erich was a brilliant teacher. I know; I half-audited one of his Harvard classes. And I sat at his dinner table, riveted and pondering.

We were sitting in a London lunch spot, a restaurant Erich had specially chosen--near Brown's Hotel, as I recall. The menu was mainly sandwiches, a strange choice for Erich, who was rather indulgent, self-indulgent with fine food. He was having trouble simply holding his sandwich. Then, still not explaining, we walked across Piccadilly to Turnbull & Asser on Jermyn Street, "by appointment to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, haberdashers." I remember Erich taking out of a briefcase five shirts. "Will you please substitute snaps for buttons? Like before. Thank you, thank you." And he turned to me saying, "I'm afraid I have Parkinson's."

I thought back to 1959, when, in the early hours, I would see him leave Richards Hall for one of his runs. Not occasional runs. Every morning. Ten miles. He was a small man but a lithe man, with muscled legs. I did not ask about his racing against himself. Maybe I am mixing up time and telling. But I think he told me then that he was coming to Cambridge for his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, the class of '58. And that he was nervous. He was bringing his sixth novel, The Class, with him. Was he nervous about the book? About the judgments it made? Or about his nascent experience with physically debilitating disease?

When I was in London, I saw him and his wife Karen in their gorgeous Hampstead Heath house. He was in decline. But sometimes also up and sometimes, inevitably, down. Trying this experimental drug and then that experimental drug. When I saw Erich at the bat mitzvah of one of his beautiful (and so rewarding) daughters, he could barely drag his legs together. But when he was called to recite the birkat hatorah (the blessing on the Torah), his voice was strong, both stentorian and sweet. What strength it must have robbed from him.

I did not see him as often as I wanted. I was nervous, afraid, and I am ashamed. We communicated through intermediaries--people closer to him than I, I reassured myself, although I'm not sure this was true (even though it certainly became true).

Erich knew many languages. He had a love affair with Latin and Greek, maybe also with French. He had a historical connection to Hebrew that goes back 3,000 years. It, too, was a love affair. And he had a love affair with his people, the Jewish people, and with their incarnation in modern history, the State of Israel. Through the vapors of pain, he saw clearly the promise and the perils.

And this is what his daughter Francesca said at his funeral: "That he fought to breathe, fought to live every second of the last thirty years of illness with such mind-blowing obduracy, is a testament to the core of who he was--a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running, and my mother with just the same tenacity. He was the most dogged man any of us will ever know."

Baroukh ata Ado-nay lo-hnou mlkh ha'olam achr kidchanou bmitsvotav vtsivanou 'al divr torah.

Vha'arv na Ado-nay lo-hnou te divr toratkha bfinou ouvfifiot 'amkha bt Isral vniy ana'hnou vetstsanou vetstsa tstsanou vetstsa 'amkha bt Israel koulanou yod' chemkha velomd toratkha lichma. Baroukh ata Ado-nay hamlamd torah l'amo Isral.

Baroukh ata Ado-nay lo-hnou mlkh ha'olam achr ba'har banou mikol ha'amim vnatane lanou te torato. Baroukh ata Ado-nay notn hatorah.

Vaydabr Ado-nay l moch lmor dabr l aharon vel banav lmor ko tvarkhou te bn Isral amor lahm yvarkhkha Ado-nay vyichmrkha yar Ado-nay panav lkha vi'hounka yissa Ado-nay panav lkha vyasm lkha chalom vssamou te chmi 'al bn Isral vaani avarkhm.

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