musings on writing divrei torah, of all things

In general, I think divrei torah are based on the idea that every single person has a slightly different relationship to Torah and Judaism; a dvar torah is when you highlight some interesting aspect of that relationship - yours or someone else's - and share it with others. Someone ought to go away from a dvar torah thinking about how what you've said compares to their own relationship to Torah and Judaism.

Any dvar torah writer, even someone who doesn't have much text learning, has a relationship with Torah and Judaism with something about it that not everyone would think of, something worth sharing. If you can find it and convey it, you're good; you don't need text learning to look within yourself.

That connection between you and Torah is the ikar, the most important thing; if it's not there at all you've got a problem, and if your words have obscured it, you probably need to change the words so that the ikar is ikarrific.

I find there are three ways of doing a dvar torah: mediocre, scholarly, and personal.

Mediocre is easy. Most divrei torah are mediocre. This is why I don't do divrei torah very often; too easy to fall into mediocrity.

Scholarly goes like this: pick up clever nuance in parsha, quote several mefarshim, including the really obscure ones, make a parallel with some gemara, dive back into the parsha, slap on some academic stuff, compare to a midrash on Prophets or Writings, dance about with some philosophy or humour, and tie it all up neatly.

Scholarly requires an awful lot of time and reading, and is rather easy to do poorly. I almost never attempt Scholarly, because I'm a reasonable scholar, and Reasonable Scholar = Mediocre Dvar Torah. Amazing Scholar = Decent Dvar Torah, and I'm not an Amazing Scholar except in certain very restricted areas.

If one's set on Scholarly, one can do Raiding the Rav, which goes like this: if you have any online or real-world resources from your rav (e.g. mine are mostly at mechonhadar.org), cruise them and the parsha and see if you can cook up any remotely promising topic links. Then you go through the relevant resource thorougly and see how much you can use in the framework of the parsha, appropriately credited.

Personal is where you use the parsha to bounce straight into an issue that genuinely means something to you. Sometimes the mefarshim are useful in bringing up issues; for instance if you thought this parsha was just about leprosy and Rashi tells you it's actually about gossip, you might get inspired. You connect your issue to some real-life stories, and some of your general life interests if you can, and thus use the parsha as a tool to convey something that truly means something to you, preferably something referencing the transcendental or the fundamentals of humanity. This can work exceptionally well.

Personal can also slide horribly into Mediocre - if you are sharing something rather trite, or if you are being tragically uninteresting, it will be painfully and boringly obvious. This is to be avoided.

On timing - if someone says "about eight minutes," that's nearly always a maximum, not a minimum. If you've got five minutes' worth of dvar torah, inventing three minutes of witter for the sake of padding is a Bad Idea; it will turn "heartfelt and touching" into "dull." People don't mind getting out three minutes early. "Eight minutes" means "not twenty minutes."