Background and Purpose
Hi, I am Chaim. I love learning Chumash, but for a variety of reasons I never developed much breadth or skill in learning Gemara. Each year I would see the footnotes citing so many different masechtos of Gemara and wish I knew more about them. My interest is, on the one hand, to gain the general familiarity that comes to those who learn Daf Yomi through a full cycle, but, even more, to squeeze out as much learning as possible from G-d's words, given through Moshe in the Chumash, as Chazal have preserved and illuminated them.
From this desire, I was advised to make use of all the citations in the Torah Temimah. When I had the opportunity to immerse myself in yeshiva as an older student, I tried to devote much of my night seder to this pursuit. Later, I found myself in a situation where I could learn regularly with a rabbi who was willing to study each derasha cited by the Torah Temimah with me. I chose to focus on the parsha that would be my son's Bar Mitzvah parsha.
I liked the Chumash-with-Rashi, single-volume-per-parsha format that my friend's son used, and I hoped to produce Derashos HaShavuos as an e-book through which a Bar Mitzvah student, in particular, could simultaneously learn more about his parsha and perhaps learn a little more about how to learn Gemara.
I did not end up completing the derashos for that first parsha. One particular citation stumped us for several days before I called out for help. By that time I already knew of Rav Shraga Silverstein and his work, Essential Torah Temimah, but it was an out-of-print book set. Since he surely had found the correct citation when he prepared his set, he was the person I asked for help.
It seemed like only minutes later that he got back to me with a corrected citation - backwards, when we had been looking only forwards. I asked him how he had found the correction so quickly, hoping that perhaps he still had his manuscripts and notes to consult, and that I might get permission to do something with them. Sadly, he had none of that. He explained that he had simply learned the subject again and found what I needed.
That experience set me on a new goal: to find a way to have his out-of-print books reprinted. B"H, I completed the reprinting during Rav Shraga's lifetime. He had moved, however, and was niftar shortly afterward, so I never managed to show him what had been accomplished. It nevertheless pleases me - and some of his descendants - that B"H new life has been breathed into his powerful work.
Once his works were available again, there was relatively little reason for me to continue Derashos HaShavuos in the way I had originally planned, so I tabled the project.
Lately, through this AI/LLM chat interface, I have come back to both the project and the method of learning that I myself still wish to pursue. The present static site is the result: every derasha of Chazal that the Torah Temima cites on the weekly parsha; only the source reference is taken from Torah Temima; the core words and the learning are those of Chazal. Navigable as a doubly linked list (PREV / NEXT) across the weekly parshiyos, with nikud when a reliable source supplies it, middah tagging where the method matches R' Yishmael's 13 or R' Eliezer's 32, and explicit SKIP pages so the continuous walk through the Chumash never silently jumps a gap.