A face familiar to many members of the Denver Jewish community will be making numerous appearances here this month as he talks to groups about his eclectic perspectives on Judaism and Torah.
Rabbi Avraham Trugman
Rabbi Avraham Trugman, director of Denver’s NCSY branch from 1988 to 1995 and the founder of the Israel-based Ohr Chadash educational program, has scheduled a slate of public events at which he plans to speak later in April.
“I will be speaking about a wide gamut of topics, but all have a common theme of showing the depths of Torah and its eternal relevance to the individual and the world at large; a world in much need of moral clarity and spiritual direction,” Trugman told the Intermountain Jewish News from Israel.
Residing with his wife Rachel in Mevo Modi’im in central Israel, a moshav founded by the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Trugman says he has fond memories of his seven years in Denver during which he led this city’s first NCSY regional chapter and participated in a host of adult education programs.
Ohr Chadash has “reinvented itself” in the last few years in the wake of a devastating wildfire in 2019 that destroyed some 80% of the houses in Mevo Modi’im, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the end, he said, the fire and pandemic “turned out to be a real blessing, as it forced us to move our teaching and educational endeavors online, which opened up a whole new world of participants and possibilities.
“At present I am teaching a number of live classes every week which then are viewed by hundreds afterwards. We have thousands of subscribers on YouTube where our nearly 400 teaching videos have millions of views.
“Our podcasts are listened to by hundreds of people weekly, our nine music discs are on Spotify and many other platforms and also get hundreds of listeners weekly.”
“In Denver, we made lifelong friends and have visited most years since those days in order to maintain and build on those relationships,” he said. “We are happy to say many of these good friends have now joined us in Israel.”
Ohr Chadash, based in Mevo Modi’im, is a mystical educational program, incorporating such approaches as gematria, Kabbalah and reincarnation. The program operates on the moshav itself and has increasingly moved online, offering in-person classes, video and audio educational programs, musical recordings and published texts, including Trugman’s 20 books.
The most recent of his titles, Fruits of the Orchard, “blends the ancient wisdom of the Torah with our contemporary world,” the rabbi told the IJN.
“Weaving together a wide array of real world and spiritual perspectives with a wealth of traditional commentaries, Fruits of the Orchard offers a collection of innovative insights. I explain Torah concepts in a language that both clarifies and reveals the hidden meanings of the text.”
The book is a follow-up to Trugman’s Orchard of Delights, where he sought to help readers understand the five books of Moses, “by uniting mind and heart, body and soul, the material and spiritual realms.”
Trugman’s scheduled events in Denver in April include:
• Tuesday, April 18, at the Kabbalah Experience: New Perspectives on Consciousness and Soul: Creation, Kabbalah and Physics;
• Thursday, April 20, at Kohelet: Getting the Most out of Sefirat HaOmer: From the Practical to the Mystical;
• Friday, April 21, at The Jewish Experience: The Spiritual Riches of Shabbat;
• Shabbat, April 22, at Young Israel of Denver: “a third meal with singing and words of Torah”;
• Friday and Shabbat, April 28-29, at Aish of the Rockies: The rabbi will lead Friday night services and speak before Mincha and during the third meal.
Information: www.thetrugmans.com.
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