Dvar Torah Resources

Thank you for agreeing to give a Dvar Torah — a brief talk about the weekly Torah portion -- at DC Minyan! We look forward to hearing your insights. This page is meant to give you some guidelines and tips on how to effectively prepare and deliver a Dvar Torah. Do not hesitate to contact the Dvar Torah coordinator (dt@dcminyan.org) if you have any questions. Our Dvar Torah coordinator is available to help you prepare or match you with an appropriate tutor.

Guidelines

• Please keep your Dvar Torah to around 5 minutes total. 
• No politics. DC Minyan is a welcoming space for a diverse community. Part of our way of keeping the community welcome to all is to keep politics and policy advocacy off the pulpit. A Dvar Torah is an opportunity for people to connect to and reflect on our shared texts. If you have any questions about whether something is too political, please reach out to the Dvar Torah coordinator.
• Center your Dvar Torah on the parsha or on our liturgy. Identify a question, theme, difficulty, character, etc. in the text and use source material, commentary, and even contemporary writings to help the community understand, relate to, or struggle with the text. Resources including Sefaria.org and Hadar.org can provide a great starting point for your exploration of the text. If you’d like to be connected with someone who is experienced at building divrei torah who can help you through the process, please contact dt@dcminyan.org.
• Be prepared! We ask everyone to write out their thoughts beforehand and please practice out loud. 
• Be inclusive. If you use Hebrew terminology, please make sure you translate the words the first time you use them. If you refer to a scholar or commentator, please give a sentence of context on who they are.  
• To ensure that we maintain a high standard of quality and that speakers adhere to our guidelines, we ask that those giving a Dvar Torah email a copy to the Dvar Torah coordinator by Thursday of the week in which they are speaking. We also ask that young people in our community (under 18) have an adult in their household review their Dvar Torah well before it will be given and support our young adults in developing their words of Torah.

Strategies for Developing an Effective Dvar Torah

• Give yourself lots of time to prepare. Especially if it’s your first time, you may want to get started as much as 6-8 weeks in advance to allow time for reading, thinking and analyzing. Divrei Torah are often improved if the ideas have matured and percolated. 
• Start by reading through the whole parasha to see if anything hits you as a particularly interesting topic for further exploration. 
• Formulate some of your own questions. Are there strange stories? Missing words? Extra words? Parallels between the parasha and other stories you’ve heard? 
• Check out commentaries to see what others are saying on your topic of interest. You may want to review medieval commentaries, modern commentaries, other divrei torah, etc. 
• If you’re focused on a particularly strange or unusual word, check a concordance to see if that word is used elsewhere in Tanakh. That could yield some interesting results. 
• Identify the answer that you think is most compelling to the question you have posed, whether it comes from a classical source or your own mind.  If you cannot answer your question satisfactorily, that’s OK. Once you’ve presented your “best shot,” you can leave it open to the community to consider their own answers, and stimulate conversation.
• Consult with your friends and family. Ask them about your ideas and solicit their feedback. Is it interesting? Is it well thought out? They can help you to clarify your ideas. Also, ask them if you can practice your speech in front of them. 
• Write out the entire Dvar Torah and practice it out loud several times and time yourself to make sure you can stick to the 5 minute length.

On High Holidays

• Timing: On the High Holidays, aim for 10-15 minutes.  For the Dvar Torah before Neilah, please keep it under 10 minutes.
• Relevance: Please keep the Dvar Torah both grounded in the holiday and the moment within the services when you are speaking.
• The remaining guidelines listed above apply on High Holidays. DC Minyan is not the place for politics or political advocacy from the pulpit at any time of year.

If you have questions about the content of your talk, please speak with the Dvar Torah coordinator. Thanks again! We look forward to hearing your ideas!