Most Orthodox Jewish college students barely have time each week to review the weekly parsha. The dual curriculum of religious and secular studies means you’re either in class, doing homework, or in the beit midrash.
Somehow, one junior at Touro, Isaac Levin, isn’t just reviewing the parsha. Instead, he’s creating a daily aliyah podcast in which he provides entertaining and easily understood commentary on the aliyot, six days a week. The podcast is available on Spotify at open.spotify.com/show/0zobequzidokmryedhnmij.
Levin, enrolled in the ultra-demanding computer science major at Touro, figured he’d be reviewing the daily aliyah every week. So why not share with the world what he learned?
“I go through the aliyahs anyway,” he said, “and my goal was always to review an aliyah a day. With the podcast, I’ll take some extra time throughout the day to research questions that come up. So it’s really just another 10 minutes to record the podcast. No big deal.”
Levin’s goal is to take listeners at all levels of Jewish background through the text and core commentators with clarity, insight and above all, a light touch. “I want to make the weekly parsha accessible to Jews of any denomination,” Levin said. “The podcast is for anyone who wants an understanding of the basic text and an explanation of the constantly changing storyline. But you don’t have to be Orthodox or have a yeshiva background to enjoy and benefit from the podcast.”
Why a daily aliyah podcast? Why not just once a week?
“There’s so much going on in any given parsha,” Levin explained. “If you try to pack everything into a single talk, you can miss a lot of the really fascinating subplots along the way each week.
Today, people focus on very complex issues in the parashiyot that are often peripheral to the main story line. By going daily, I can get into the questions that might otherwise be neglected.”
Levin said he goes through each Rashi to get a framework of the aliyah. He’ll then turn to the Ramban for specific questions on the broader issues that arise in the aliyah. Additionally, he’ll look at the works of the Ibn Ezra, the Radak, and the Sifsei Chochemim, which is a super-commentator on Rashi.
Levin also reviews Rav Hirsch on the parsha for a more current perspective. “A lot of his ideas are relevant to modern day readers because he’s relatively recent. He provides a different angle than the Rishonim.”
The Daily Aliyah show has an international following, and Levin said it’s “pretty cool” to get responses from people in Great Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking Jewish world.
His goal is to complete the year of daily aliyah broadcasts and then start over with new podcasts on the parashiyot in the fall.
“I could just replay what I’ve already done,” Levin said. “But you learn more, or you go more deeply into a given parsha. So I’d be cheating myself and the audience if I just repeated the ones from this year. And you get better over time, at sharing the ideas.”
Levin also sees the podcast as filling a gap in the learning for college students (and everyone else). “You’ve got plenty of time to learn Talmud,” Levin noted, “but there’s really no slot in the day, in college or in most yeshivas, to review the parsha. This doesn’t make sense to me, because of course Chumash is foundational for us. So you can listen to the podcast — it’s always around 10 minutes — and be caught up.”
When asked whether anything he’s learned has surprised him, he spoke about the way Yosef treated his brothers when they came to Egypt to buy food.
“Yosef’s behavior was always perplexing to me,” Levin said. “I always wondered why was he just playing with his brothers this way? And then I saw Rav Hirsch’s explanation. If the brothers had to stand up for Binyamin, they would be essentially recreating the sale of Yosef, but with a better outcome. Yosef is hoping his brothers have changed and will step up to help Binyamin. To me, this is a very nice explanation for an otherwise confusing story. This is the kind of unusual approach to Chumash that I love to share on the podcast.”
