About Aaron Asher
Aaron Asher is a longtime member of Temple Beth Am and has taught in a variety of settings within the community. His past sessions have included workshops on traditional practices such as making soft matzah, explorations of embodied prayer including prostration, and serving as Torah coordinator for one of the synagogue’s minyanim.
A dedicated student of Torah, Aaron approaches the text with intellectual rigor and deep respect for its internal coherence. His teaching reflects a sustained engagement with close reading and narrative structure, inviting participants to encounter familiar passages with renewed seriousness and clarity.
What the Bible Is Not Confused About is a learning series built on a simple but demanding premise: when the Torah appears unclear, inconsistent, or morally difficult, the difficulty may not lie in confusion within the text, but in the assumptions we bring to it.
Each session approaches the Torah on its own terms, paying close attention to structure, sequence, language, and narrative cues. Rather than correcting the text or smoothing over tensions, we ask: What questions does the Torah want us to ask? What kind of world is it building?
By reading carefully and patiently, we begin to see that many of the Bible’s most debated passages are not accidents or contradictions, but deliberate features of a deeply coherent vision
July 18 — What the Bible is Not Confused About: The Earth Is Not Just Dirt
Readers often assume the Torah is speaking metaphorically when the earth opens its mouth, receives blood, bears witness, vomits out its inhabitants, or keeps Shabbat. But metaphor depends on a stable literal meaning first. If the Torah repeatedly presents the earth as morally responsive, where does it ever establish that the earth is merely dirt? As we approach Tish’a B’Av, this class asks whether the Torah’s land is a figure of speech, or a feature of the Torah’s world.