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
September 19 — What the Bible is Not Confused About: Why Didn’t Abraham Receive the Torah?
God says Abraham is chosen so that he will teach his descendants righteousness and justice. But the Torah never shows Abraham giving Torah to his children, and after the binding of Isaac, Abraham and Isaac never speak again in the text. This Shabbat Shuvah class asks why Genesis plants the expectation of Abraham as teacher, investigates how that project seems to fracture inside Abraham’s own family, and why the thread of instruction only fully returns with Moses.