I view the generous people who support our work at TORCH as our partners and investors in our spiritual enterprise. In this final email newsletter of 2020, I want to present you with your Investor Report so you know that your charity investment dollars are being well spent.
If you have yet to join the world’s most lucrative spiritual investment club, think of this email as a prospectus. To update your investor status, visit https://www.torchweb.org/support.php
This email will focus exclusively on my podcasts, and the reader is encouraged to visit our website to see all the other amazing projects that TORCH does.
At a Glance
Over the course of 2020 I have been fortunate to have released 162 podcast episodes across six podcast channels (The Parsha Podcast, The Jewish History Podcast, TORAH 101, This Jewish Life, The Ethics Podcast, The Mitzvah Podcast).
With the help of the Almighty, the response from the audience has been incredible. Several of the shows have perennially ranked on the top ten on iTunes in the category of Judaism, and the download numbers have seen consistent growth.
And the numbers are truly staggering.
In the 12 months from January 1, 2020, until December 30, 2020, the podcasts have been downloaded 437,927 times, a more than 60% increase over the 273,280 downloads in 2019.
In addition, in 2020 the podcasts have been added to Spotify and have accumulated 45,387 “starts” (the metric that Spotify tracks) on that platform. It should be noted that “starts” on Spotify are not aggregated as server-side downloads, but downloads and streams from all other podcast apps (Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, etc.) are included.
This is a long way of saying that the people who have supported TORCH on this initiative have partnered with us in spreading Torah and Jewish knowledge on a scale never before seen in history.
Impact of the Pandemic
The pandemic had a mixed effect on our podcasting efforts. In the immediate months following the pandemic our numbers dipped (see the graph below) as people’s commutes and routines were disrupted. But as people began to adjust to the new realities the growth that we have experienced over the past couple of years resumed.
The full impact of the pandemic on the world of Jewish outreach, education, and learning is still unknown. Many believe that when the pandemic ends everything will go back to the way they always were.
I disagree. In my opinion, the impact of the pandemic on our industry will be far-reaching and permanent as the epicenter of Jewish education and outreach transitions from brick-and-mortar to digital. This transition was already afoot and the pandemic accelerated and amplified it.
Thankfully, TORCH is well positioned to be at the vanguard of the new world of Jewish outreach and education thanks to our expertise in creating unique digital products in this space and to our robust catalog of evergreen content (more than 1,000 podcast episodes and 1,000 YouTube videos).
Many of the people in the Jewish education and outreach space decry the proliferation of smartphones and Internet devices, saying that it shortens people’s attention span and makes them focus on more ephemeral pursuits in lieu of immersion in Torah and the wisdom of our glorious heritage.
Of course there is legitimacy to that claim, but history teaches us that every curse is accompanied with opportunity. What we can accomplish today thanks to the internet and smartphones exceeds anything we could have possibly done in Jewish outreach and education in a brick and mortar world. Instead of shunning technology, at TORCH we seek to harness it to its fullest extent. Our success in podcasting is a reflection of this perspective. If you want to partner with us on this mission we’d love to have your support.
Highlights of 2020
Beyond the big picture, I want to share some of the highlights of this past year in podcasting and some of my favorite episodes.
A&Q
When we began the fifth year of The Parsha Podcast after Simchat Torah, we launched a new segment called A&Q: at the end of every episode I present the audience with a question on the parsha for them to mull over and if they like, email me responses. The best answers are revealed in the following week’s episode. We are now 12 weeks into the new cycle and the audience has responded very enthusiastically.
Moreover it is a step in the direction that we hope to take the entire ecosystem towards. Podcasts are consumed passively. With A&Q, the audience is encouraged to become active: to think about the questions on their own, to discuss it around the Shabbat table, and to submit answers. Activating the audience is something that we’re thinking about a lot at TORCH and we hope to continue moving in that direction.
The Shabbat Gift
In August, I released an episode on the This Jewish Life Podcast titled, “The Shabbat Gift”. This episode has an interesting backstory: In the previous Yom Kippur I made, as is customary, a resolution to God in order to lobby Him to give me a favorable judgment. At the conclusion of the Neilah services I promised God to record a podcast over the course of the upcoming Jewish calendar year where I would share with the audience the transformative power and meaning of Shabbat. I had optimistically assumed that by Chanukah it would be done. But Chanukah came and went, and Purim came and went and I had not yet produced this episode. Then the pandemic hit and my children were home from school and everyone’s lives were upended. During our family’s annual drive back from Canada at the end of the summer I resolved to fulfill my pledge pronto, and in August, barely a month before the end of the Jewish year, I finally recorded and released this episode. I’m very happy with how it came out, and I hope the Almighty believes that I kept my part if the deal.
Pandemic Podcasts
When the pandemic hit, everyone was scrambling to deal with this new terrifying virus. In three episodes (this, this, and that) I shared what I thought was a Torah perspective on the pandemic. Afterwards I felt that there was so much discussion about COVID in the news and it was dominating people’s lives so completely that it would be more helpful for me to make the podcast a refuge from all the COVID stuff, and therefore I stopped making it a focus of the podcasts.
Other Noteworthy Podcasts of 2020
I am very proud of all the episodes of 2020, but here are a few that I am particularly fond of:
Thanks a Million – When my podcasts cumulatively reached a million downloads, I recorded a special episode in which I told some of my personal story and outlined the surprising twists and turns in the journey to accomplishing this feat.
600,000 Letters of the Torah – Our Sages tell us that the Torah contains 600k letters, matching the number of Jewish souls. There is only one problem: It doesn’t. In this podcast I proposed a novel reconciliation that results in the total vindication of our Sages.
Age of the Universe: Reconciling Torah and Science – Science reports that the universe is ~13.8-15.4 billion years old. Our tradition teaches that we are in the year 5781. That is more than a slight rounding error. In this podcast I shared a mind-blowing answer.
A Grandson Remembers – Longtime podcast listeners know how much I revere my late grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe zt”l. In this episode I share personal stories and reflections about the life and legacy of my grandfather.
Esau’s Fatal Flaw – Choosing which Parsha Podcast episode to appear on this list is hard because I am so fond of all of them. But this one is unique because it was conceived in a miraculous fashion. It was the night before I needed to record a new podcast on Parshas Toldos and I had nothing to say. I had read the Parsha and tried to gain an insight but I had nothing. I sat down by my desk at 11 PM and I started thinking about the Parsha. Within 20 minutes I had a complete podcast. What was so strange about it was that I felt like the Almighty deposited an entire podcast with a novel insight and a valuable lesson into my head like manna from Heaven. It popped into my head, fully formed, and ready for prime time. My takeaway from this story is that the Almighty is pleased with our work at TORCH and every once in a while He will wink at us and remind us that He’s got our back.
Chazon Ish, R’ Avraham Grozinsky, and Chacham Ovadia – On the Jewish History Podcast, I spent much of the year telling the stories of Torah giants of the 20th Century. Listening to the stories of these veritable giants inspires us to seek greatness ourselves.
A History of Oral Torah – The Jewish bookshelf is bursting with volumes ostensibly from the “Oral” Torah. In a series of episodes on the TORAH 101 Podcast channel, I traced the history of Oral Torah from Moses to Modernity. This series shatters the fiction of “Rabbinic Judaism”.
Akiva and Yehoshua Wolbe interview – This is a podcast that I did not record, but one that appears on my colleague Dan Kullman, President of the Board of TORCH’s, excellent podcast, The Shema Podcast. He interviewed my two oldest sons, Akiva and Yehoshua, about what it’s like to be a young boy in a Jewish community. It’s fair to say that if I have any podcasting ability, it was transmitted to my sons.
The Bottom Line
Our organization, TORCH, subsists solely thanks to the generosity of our friends and donors – our partners and investors. When you invest in TORCH, you can be confident that you will be partnering with an organization that is working tirelessly to produce the highest quality Torah education to the Jewish masses.
In 2020, 192 different people whose connection with TORCH was created over podcasts chose to donate to support the cause. These are the people who were personally impacted by our organization and chose to partner with us. Were you impacted by TORCH? Do you want to invest in our organization? If yes, please visit https://www.torchweb.org/