On Absence

This week we are joined by Rabbi Dr. Michael Marmur, Vice-President for Academic Affairs for HUC-JIR. He sends us his thoughts on absence from our Jerusalem campus.

In Eduardo di Filippo’s 1948 play Grand Magic, a production of which is now running here in Jerusalem, a magician picks out a smart married woman from the audience. Her husband looks on incredulously.  He invites her to step into a mysterious-looking Egyptian-style sarcophagus, and after the usual pyrotechnics, hey presto! She has disappeared.

Grand Magic

Pretty regular stuff so far. Things are complicated by the decision of the woman in question to choose that precise moment to run off with her lover. The magician is left with the enraged husband demanding the return of his wife, and has to think of a way of wriggling out of a difficult situation.

The magician gives the husband a miniature box. He tells him that his wife has not left – she is in the box. If the husband believes wholeheartedly that he has done nothing which would have caused his wife to leave, he should open the box and she will reappear. If, on the other hand, he has even an inkling of a suspicion that his own behavior might have caused his wife to run off, when he opens the box he will lose any chance he ever had of seeing her again.

The rest of the play is ingenious and highly recommended, but we can leave it for another blog. For my purposes, what is relevant is how the plot deals with the dilemma of absence. How do we cope with the lack of presence?

For many of you reading these words, they may have personal or pastoral resonance. Learning to deal with the pain, guilt and longing which often accompanies the loss of someone close is an age-old challenge which never loses its sting, or its relevance.

But our tradition offers other dimensions to loss and absence. The festival of Purim is, among other things, a reflection on these themes. The fact that God is not mentioned explicitly in the Megillah has given rise to all manner of acrobatic attempts to find hints of the Divine in the text. But we might do better acknowledging this lack rather than denying it.

Pesach is also famous for an absence. God is certainly present in the traditional account of our Exodus and redemption, but Moses is not to be found in the Haggadah. Here again, our tradition forces us to reflect on the story without the main protagonist. And when we sing Dayyenu around the Seder table, we ask: what would our history have been like without this or that part of the story?

As nature abhors a vacuum, Jews often tend to abhor emptiness or lack. Or silence, for that matter. We don’t tend to be minimalists. Liberal Jews are sometimes accused of rejecting the trappings and accoutrements of tradition. Whatever you feel about this, I want to suggest that we have equally complicated feelings about loss and absence. We often try to deny and reject it. We often feel tempted to fill in every silence, explain every allusion, make literal every metaphor. But at the heart of our tradition there is a motif of loss and lack and silence and disappearance.

I believe that awareness of profound presence can emerge from absence. If we stop trying to deny it or cure it or explain it away, we might be able to learn and grow from it.

The 145^th Psalm is part of the daily liturgy. Following an acrostic form, it has a verse for every letter of the alphabet. Except for one. At the heart of the psalm the letter Nun is missing. All kinds of explanations have been offered, and some early versions of the psalm where the Nun verse does appear have come to light. But one way to appreciate the text is in its received form: at its very heart, something is missing. It’s that understanding which makes the humor of Purim possible and the redemption of Pesach possible.

Jews Responding to the Earthquake in Haiti

Cantor Tracey Scher, Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, Mrs. Lola Possion-Joseph, Ambassador Raymond Joseph, Rabbi Jeffrey Saxe, Cantor Michael Shochet

Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Virginia is looking beyond the headlines in thinking about how best to form their communal response to the recent earthquake in Haiti. This week, TRS’s senior rabbi, Amy Schwartzman share a guest post about the connection her congregation is building with Haiti. Rabbi Schwartzman currently serves the President of the Rabbinic Alumni Association of HUC-JIR  and has been recognized nationally for her social justice work.

When we arrived at the Haitian embassy to meet the Ambassador and his wife, there was little to indicate the devastation and loss of life that the earthquake had left in its wake.  Apparently weeks before hundreds of people stopped by the tiny embassy, trying to leave donations or find out if families and friends were known to be alive.  But now it was silent. No passers-by, just a sign on the door to say that they could not accept any goods in kind.   The building is dwarfed by the surrounding embassies.  They are grand and imposing. Perhaps this slim and modest building is appropriate for the poorest country in the Americas. Inside the furniture is classically European but the art is spectacularly Haitian – it left me a bit confused until I met the Ambassador and his wife.

His Excellency Raymond Joseph, Ambassador to the United States from the Republic of Haiti, is a joyful, intelligent, sharp amalgam of Haitian culture and the ways of the west.  Born and raised in Cayes, Haiti, he is mostly known as a journalist. In the 1960’s he was a radio personality. In the 70’s and 80’s he was at the Wall Street Journal in New York as a financial writer and co-founded the Haiti-Observateur, the first crusading commercial Haitian weekly.  In 1990 Mr. Joseph was called to be Haiti’s Charge d’Affaires in Washington and his own country’s representative at the Organization of American States.  After helping with the first democratic elections in December of 1990, he returned to the Haiti Observateur where he remained until he was called to Washington in 2004 as the Ambassador.

You can imagine what a wealth of experiences this man brings to a meeting. Members of the Temple Rodef Shalom clergy sat down with the Ambassador and his equally engaging and articulate wife, Lola Poisson-Joseph, to discuss how we might embark on a joint venture to help repair Haiti.  While the weight of his nation and its deep tragedy sat on his shoulders, the Ambassador regaled us with stories that connect Haiti with the Jewish people. He talked about Haiti’s vote to support the creation of the State of Israel. He told stories about welcoming Jewish refugees after WWII. He shared his knowledge of Torah and his love of Hebrew!  Finally, we spoke about creating a project to restore a community in his country.

Lola Posson-Joseph, a social activist and artist, has a relationship with a town outside of Port-au-Prince called Petit-Guave. She had been working on building a shelter there for the poor members of the community.  She painted a splendid picture of this town, its history and its citizens. It is filled with a rich culture and teaming with human potential.  We agreed that our goal would be to rebuild at least one central institution of Petit-Guave – the shelter, the only school or the 300 year old church, which also functions as a community center.

Church in Petite Goave before the earthquake

On February 16th the Ambassador and his wife came to Temple Rodef Shalom to participate in a service of solidarity and hope for Haiti. The Ambassador updated the congregation about the relief efforts. Mrs. Poisson-Joseph talked about Petit-Guave and helped us to imagine how we might help. The day of our service, there were no pictures in the paper about Haiti.  Support efforts by doctors and builders and emergency workers were still under way but for many, in our safe and comfortable homes, the story of the earthquake has passed.  Some have moved onto other issues in the world.  Those who came to our service affirmed that Haiti, and its need for our support, is still very much alive.  As former President Bill Clinton recently wrote: “Haiti can surely move beyond its troubled history and this lethal earthquake to emerge a stronger, more secure nation.  But that can’t be done with government support alone. Ordinary citizens must fill the gaps.”

We are those ordinary citizens and our Jewish tradition and commitment to tikkun olam calls us to not only offer comfort to the people of Haiti but to offer our resources, our creativity, our time and our energy to restore this nation.  As our rabbis taught – “it is not for us to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from engaging with it.” (Pirke Avot 2:21)

What Do We Know About Jewish Education? Not as Much as You May Think.

The form is there, the facts are fuzzier

We all believe in the importance of Jewish education, but creating and maintaining  experiencew, opportunities and institutions of Jewish learning is not always simple.  This week, Rabbi Scott Aaron, Community Scholar at the Agency for Jewish Learning of Greater Pittsburgh and a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy of Education at Loyola University Chicago, raises some questions about how much we know about Jewish learning and the reasons we need to know more.

“Given the importance of religious and ethnic identity and the specific concerns of the Jewish community, it is surprising how little systematic information exists about Jewish college students.  Much of the extant data were gathered in the 1960s and early 1970s and lack contemporary relevance.”[i]

I was surprised by this point when I first came across it a few years ago as I began my doctoral studies in Jewish education and identity development.  The Jewish community really had so little data on such an important segment of the community?  My own area of interest is the 18-26 year olds, but as I expanded my research to look at data on Jewish education overall, I saw that there has indeed been a paucity of identity information before the 1990s.  Much of what has been generated since then has been focused on pediatric education and Jewish identity.  Moreover, much of what had been done involving Jewish identity (adult or child) was evaluating it from the perspective of sociology rather than education.  Simply put, and with apologies to all of my sociologist colleagues for the generalization, what little was out there was mostly measuring what Jewish adults did or did not do, not what they did or did not know or believe.  This has always perplexed me given the broad spectrum of credible data across the various fields of secular education that I was encountering as part of my studies.  How could the most educated ethnic identity group in American history make such massive investments in Jewish education and identity development with so little reliable data to show for it?  However, some recent perspectives from academics in the community have gone a long way to explaining this discrepancy for me.  It all seems to boil down to a need for reflection.

1. Academic Reflection – As Dr. Adam Gamoran pointed out in a recent webinar through the Berman Jewish Policy Archives of New York University (http://www.bjpa.org), the Jewish community is spending a lot of time seeking a cure for our communal education problems without actually doing valid measurement and diagnosis of them.  Many of our studies and evaluations of Jewish identity are not truly objective experiments that result in clear and unbiased data and extrapolation.  The problems related to this flaw are often rooted in the tension between deeply held personal and communal assumptions and truly objective evaluation, not to mention a sense of communal crisis needing to be assuaged.  (Dr. Gamoran’s critique of the recent much-heralded Birthright Israel study – http://ir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/23380 – is worth hearing if you want to listen to the webinar yourself.
2. Theoretical Reflection – In a very interesting recent article in the Journal of Jewish Education[ii], four authors presented important ideas to elaborate on this problem.  Two in particular struck me as powerful.  First, Dr. Stuart Charme of Rutgers University observed that educational philosophies in the Jewish community could be metaphorically understood as a Drink-Your-Milk model.

Jewish identity is likened to the human body and Jewish education is likened to milk.  What one consumes strengthens one’s being.  The more “nutrition” i.e. Jewish education, the stronger the body i.e. Jewish self.  The stronger the body, the less susceptible it is to threats like assimilation and intermarriage in adulthood.  Stronger = more Jewish, weaker = less Jewish.

Charme points out that the community has tended to structure Jewish education on this binary philosophical model and conducted evaluative outcomes in this vein.  The result, he points out, is that “[t]o a great extent, research on Jewish identity has been a byproduct of the communal concerns of a minority living in a pluralistic, open society where ethnic survival as a coherent group is not guaranteed”.

The problem with this byproduct is twofold.  First, as Charme points out, it sets Jewish identity up as a goal, as something that can be reached and once achieved is assumed to be stable.  Second, it does not easily allow for alternate measurements of success.  To extend Charme’s metaphor, it negates the nutritional value of skim, 1%, Lactaid or soy milk, not to mention cheese, yogurt, etc, i.e. a multiplicity of dynamic contemporary Jewish experiences that may not easily fit in to a normative or traditional model of Jewish education.

3. Personal Reflection – Additionally, in the same article, Dr. Tali Hyman of HUC-JIR LA also makes the very cogent observation that almost all those who have studied Jewish education and identity in the last two decades are themselves Jews.  Dr. Hyman correctly asks how well Jewish researchers of Jews filter out their own biases based on their own personal Jewish life experience and identity.  Are they self-reflective enough to see any personal bias?  Are we truly getting reliably objective data from our research efforts?

So where does this leave us?  Now we know why we do not have enough reliable data, but knowing highlights for the need for that information.  My own confusion at the lack of significant and reliable data that can be built upon to develop testable new theories for Jewish education and identity is explainable by the ideas offered by these three commentators.  Their own reflective observations can assist all of us in better serving our community as both practitioners and students of education.  I share with them the hope and belief that as the community continues its recent efforts to engage in extensive academic research in to Jewish education and identity, it will be able to rely on those findings to develop new and meaningful paradigms of Jewish education.

[ii] Charme, S., Horowitz, B., Kress, J., & Hyman, T. (2008). Jewish Identities in Action: An Exploration of Models, Metaphors, and Methods . Journal of Jewish Education , 78 (2), 115-143.

Learning the Language of OpEd

What is shared on the opinion pages of the news organizations has the potential and power to influence the world of ideas and policy in important and meaningful ways. This is the philosophy behind the OpEd Project, “an initiative to expand the range of voices we hear from in the world.” The project, which was started by journalist and author Katie Orenstein, runs workshops and classes around the US which teach people how to turn their passions and expertise into pieces that can be shared in the op-ed format.

Catherine (Katie) Orenstein

The OpEd Project was founded with the direct intention of increasing the number of submissions by women to the opinion pages, however, participating in a day long workshop on behalf of Jewish Milestones, I was struck by how much of what was being discussed could apply to those working in the Jewish community as well.

Those working in the Jewish community often have expertise and insights into larger communal and national concerns, yet those voices are rarely part of the public media conversation. Recently, a Conservative colleague, Rabbi Rebecca Sirbu, attended one of the OpEd classes and was inspired to write a piece for the JTA that was then picked up and discussed broadly in the Jewish community. Not only does the general media provide the means by which we can reach both affiliated and unaffiliated Jews but there is also much to be gained in terms of credibility and influence by having your ideas validated on the pages of the local newspaper, the regional magazines or a popular e-newspaper. Our Jewish tradition has given us much to say about debt relief, global warming, immigration or human trafficking. Those visions can and should be a light unto the nations.

Often we think about learning as deepening our own knowledge, this week I want to encourage you to add to your knowledge insight into how to share what you already know. While the OpEd project primarily works with women, their website offers a great deal of advice and information about writing op-ed pieces and men can apply to be part of the many programs.

Katie Orenstein speaking about the OpEd Project:

A Yankee Master’s Vision of Excellence in Jewish Education

What does Judaism offer as a vision of education? What does excellence in education look like? Is it possible to achieve excellence in education in the realm of supplemental schools? Day schools? Camps? These were some of the substantive questions be posed, last week, to a diverse group of Jewish educators by Ron Berger.

Berger, a veteran educator and the author of An Ethic of Excellence, believes that all children can achieve excellence in education. Moreover, he does not distinguish between excellence in academic achievement and excellence in character building and moral development. Indeed it is the integration of ethics and learning that Berger, himself not Jewish, sees as a model for educators of all religious backgrounds and institutional affiliations.

Berger’s vision of excellence comes from his years teaching in the small school in Shutesbury, MA. He taught children of all ages and abilities to strive towards excellence by employing a projects based approach that stressed individual contributions, critique and revision, and the creation of products that were of value in the world.  Now working with Expeditionary Learning Schools Berger has brought this approach to school across the US, many of them with limited resources, and achieved amazing results both in terms of academics but also broader community engagement. On display were high quality educationally significant posters, books, calendars, field guides, trading cards, greeting cards and other final products made by children as young as 5 years old.

Some in the room drew a parallel between inner city schools who struggle with limited resources and synagogue schools, where commitment of students and parents as well as money is in short supply. Parents, for example, could be drawn in to donate skills with computers or design to create the means for producing calendars that a class learning about the holiday cycle might create. Such engagement would both involve parents and help add to the financial and classroom resources available to teachers.

Berger’s insistence that the final product of projects be of value to people in the community means that the students can see the importance of their contributions. Rabbi Shoshana King-Tornberg walked away from the workshop dreaming of having her students write a guide to the service at their temple. Not only would it help the children learn more about the customs and culture of their community, but the final product would be of great use in building a sense of openness to newcomers. Others were dreaming of famous Jews trading cards. Still others of Hebrew language books written, illustrated and produced by students in higher grades for those in the lower grades

Feedback is a key element of Berger’s philosophy. In order for work to be excellent, it needs to go through drafts, to receive critique not from adults but from peers. The process, which teaches children to give kind, specific, and helpful feedback is an opportunity to think about how to be in community with each other, a model if you will of responsible and effective tokhekha.

By the end of the afternoon, we were all inspired towards a vision of excellence that focused on the engagement of children and their ability to produce materials

The program was presented by HUC-JIR in conjunction with DeLeT, the BJE and the Union for Reform Judaism.

To get a sense of how the process works, I would recommend the following two YouTube videos of Berger, explaining his approach:

Ron Berger 1 of 2

Ron Berger 2 of 2

Trees as models for spiritual growth

What is the difference between trees and vegetation more broadly that they have separate and distinct new years on the Jewish calendar?

In the first mishna of masekhet Rosh Hashana, we are told that new year of vegetation falls on the same date as that from which we count years, the shmita and the yovel –the 1^st of Tishrei. The new year of the trees, which is under debate in this mishna, eventually settled its date as the 15^th of Shvat. This calendar is primarily administrative, based on the ebb and flow of the political-agrarian systems of ancient Jewish life in the land of Israel. So perhaps the distinction between trees and other plants was based in growing cycles. After all, anyone who has been in Israel during Shvat has been witness to the beauty of the blooming shkediyot, the almond trees which are the first deciduous tree to return to life after the darkness of winter.

As the next mishna moves our discussion of the calendar from worldly to heavenly concerns, Tu B’shvat looses its place of importance.

בארבעה פרקים העולם נידון:

בפסח, על התבואה.

בעצרת, על פירות האילן.

בראש השנה, כל באי עולם עוברין לפניו כבני מרון, שנאמר

“היוצר יחד, ליבם; המבין, אל כל מעשיהם” (תהילים לג,טו).

ובחג, נידונים על המים.

Animals, people and even water are all subject to divine judgment. Trees, however, disappear. Only their fruit remains to pass before God. Again, what are we to make of this distinction? Moreover, in Midrash Bereshit Rabba  13:2, we learn that trees have a special relationship to people. The trees “converse with mortals; all trees—created, as trees were, to provide fellowship for mortals.”

Most plants do not die at the end of one season waiting quietly until either they are replanted for the next cycle or they reemerge from hibernation. This ability to start again completely reflects the vision of human judgment and rebirth associated with Rosh Hashana. It seems only natural then to associate plants with the 1^st of Tishei.

Trees by contrast, grow year to year. Each year adds another layer of protection and growth. Dry difficult years leave their mark in the form of thin rings of growth while years of rain and sun leave their mark in the form of larger more robust rings. Year to year, the fruit of a given tree can flourish or fall short but the core of the tree remains and continues to grow.

Spiritual rebirth, like that of plants, is possible and even desirable. It is wonderful to believe that we can be replanted each year and regain our full potential. But it is also important to honor who we are and where we have been on our personal journeys. Like trees our experiences build one on the other, adding layers of meaning and strength. The difficult times add to our core just as the good times do.

If trees are to be our companions, then their place in the year can provide us a model of loving kindness and continued growth. As Jews, there is a time to be harsh and introspective, to focus on our need for change. But on Tu B’shvat we can celebrate our growth, the rings that we have added to our lives in the last year. We can do so with love, with prayer, and praise –even in lean times. There is a time to judge the fruits of our labors, but we need to remember that the trees themselves have no day of judgment. People, like trees, have a holy core, one that does not die out year to year but rather builds on itself in an organic fashion.

Our tradition distinguishes between plants and trees. Their different natural cycles and offer us different models for self understanding and growth. Just as we are encouraged to feel the burden of our actions and celebrate the power of rebirth, we must also embrace the core of who we are and rejoice without judgment.

Jews and the Civil Rights Movement: There’s more to it than you might think

photo from SNCC

Ahead of next week’s celebration of Martin Luther King and his legacy, guest blogger Julia Philips Berger pushes us to reconsider how we think about and teach the history of civil rights.   Julia has been working with the Jewish Women’s Archive to develop new approaches for teaching the history of civil rights. A graduate of the Rhea Hirsch School of Education, Julia is an education consultant residing in Orlando, FL.

Today, when most Reform synagogues have a social action committee and when legal segregation is a thing of the past, it may be hard for us to understand how some American Jews could not support and participate in the Civil Rights Movement. Over the last seven months, as I’ve worked on a high school curriculum about Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement for the Jewish Women’s Archive, I have been examining this issue and many others that highlight the complexities of Civil Rights history. Part of what I’ve learned is that only when we are fortunate enough to hold a position of power and privilege can we support the fights of others. While many Northern Jews felt safe enough and powerful enough to help African Americans in the South, many Southerners did not. Equally important is the fact that many Northern Jews felt differently when the Civil Rights Movement came to the North. In their own communities, Northern Jews did not always support bussing to integrate schools or Affirmative Action to help African Americans enter college and new business fields. These events were more immediate and more threatening to Northern Jews. The lives of American Jews in the 1950s and 1960s were complicated, so are our lives today. If we want our young people to feel connected to Judaism and continue our legacy of social justice, we need to share with them a more nuanced history that resonates with them, not a nostalgic picture of larger than life heroes who always do the right thing and make the right choices.

Carol Ruth Carol Ruth Silver, Civil Rights activist, in Birmingham, Alabama, May 2000. From the Jewish Women's Archive.

As Reform Jews, we are proud of our legacy of social justice. The many Jews who participated in the pivotal events of the Civil Rights Movement are an example of this. In addition to the general Jewish participation and the work of individual Reform activists, there was official Reform involvement in this social movement. Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who escaped Nazi Germany, gave a speech at the March on Washington. Members of the CCAR and NFTY participated in this March as well, under banners proclaiming their Jewish affiliation. These are the people and events that we generally point to at this time of year or in our religious school classes. But the history of Jewish participation during the Civil Rights Movement is much more complex. And that complexity has much to teach us.

Rabbi Joachim Prinz speaking on behalf of civil rights in Washington

While we are proud of the large percentage of white civil rights activists who were Jewish, the actual percentage of Jews who participated in the Civil Rights Movement is relatively small and the majority of these lived in the North. Many Southern Jews did not actively support the Civil Rights Movement. It was not that they didn’t believe that segregation was wrong, but that they knew that actively supporting desegregation could be dangerous. It could mean the loss of jobs or customers and clients that they could ill afford. It could mean having crosses burned on their front lawns or the bombing of their temples. Northern Jews would eventually leave the South. Southern Jews needed to live within the white Southern community, and they had done so for years by keeping a low profile. The Civil Rights Movement was not low profile, and the actions of Northern Jews reflected upon Southern Jews, exposing them to the wrath of Southern whites.

Tensions also developed between Southern Jews and some Jewish organizations. For example, in 1956, a congregation in Mississippi wrote to the President of the UAHC expressing its feelings that segregation was neither a religious issue nor a Jewish issue, and asked the UAHC not to make statements about segregation which might be understood by others as being the views of all Jews.

As I read these documents, I was reminded of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which explains that we need to fulfill our basic needs like food, housing, and safety before we can aspire to ideals such as tolerance. As Jews, we often think of our people, in more or less homogenous ways, despite our experience to the contrary. A number of years ago when I was a congregational educator, I learned about a child in my religious school who, upon  seeing the temple food chest full of soups, pastas, cereals, etc., wanted to know if she could bring home some of the food for her family. Her classmates and teacher were aghast and reminded her that this was where we brought food for those less fortunate than us. As her mother later told me, they were in want and truly needed the food. Sometimes, we forget that not all American Jews are middle or upper middle class.

This month, as we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, I hope we can have pride in the fact that our people could be found in the Civil Rights Movement. We should also feel gratitude that many of us today have the power and privilege to be able to help others, and the perception to remember that just as we don’t like it when non-Jews make simplistic statements that begin “all Jews…,” we too must remember that all Jews are not the same, and bring that varied tapestry into our teaching of the past.

[For more information about the JWA’s new Civil Rights Curriculum and their summer institute which will teach teachers how to use these materials, go to http://jwa.org/teach/profdev/institute10/ .]

Photo credits: http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/, http://www.joachimprinz.com/index.htm, <http://jwa.org/discover/infocus/civilrights/silver/index.html> (January 12, 2010).

Visual Midrash

Torah Ark (Ernakulam, India), 1870-1910; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo credit: Ben Blackwell

For the most part I engage with Torah through intellectual interpretation; Rashi, Rambam, Zorenberg are my go to sources of explanation, insight and inspiration. Generally, my adventure artistic interpretations of biblical stories have been limited to the Tot Shabbat set but recently I have been pushed from two different sources to consider the power of visual midrash.

Soferet Julie Seltzer, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo credit: Bruce Damonte.

The first was As It Is Written: Project 304,805, the current exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Soferet Julie Seltzer literally sits in the center of the show writing a Torah. In addition to explanations about the technicalities of writing a Torah, she is surrounded by the artifacts of Torah and artistic interpretations of Torah. The impact is profound. Seen side by side, Torah arks are not just beautiful objects but commentaries on the contents held within. Different artists have been commissioned to create works that speak to each of the weekly parshiyot. They are not all easy to understand, but do added much to my interaction with the text. Artist Jordan Kantor created a color coded representation of the transition from Avram to Avraham where a white space in the former stands in for the potential that awaits the man and is only filled in when the heh is added to his name. Talking about his piece Kantor compared art to Talmud, explaining that both are complex textual documents that can be read on many levels but to dig beyond the surface, one needs to learn and be schooled in reading the text. Illustrating Joseph’s dreams of plenty and famine, artist Paul Madonna created an abstract work that suggests the nature of cycles leaving the details to our imagination and pushing us to step away from the words to see a bigger meaning in the text.

Feast and Famine by Paul Madonna

The second was the discovery of the Visual Midrash site from the Tali Education Funds in Israel. This impressive archive of art works puts visual interpretation of Torah at it’s center. Working together, Dr. Jo Milgrom, an scholar with a specialty in art and Torah, and Dr. Yoel Duman a Jewish arts educator, have organized historic works of art by themes. There are dozens of representations of the biblical Davidu, from the well known work by Michelangelo to those less familiar. Articles describe the meanings of the works, giving viewers access to the Talmudic depth that Kantor alluded to. A painting of Moses by Michael Sgan-Cohen shows the great sage’s back as he looks out from har Navo with words painted his cloak describing what he saw as he peered into the land. With the help of the explanation, we learn that the shape of the back is reminiscent of a tomb stone and foreshadows that this view will be Moses’ final place of rest. The collection can be viewed both for beauty and for deep insight into our text.

Moses by Michael Sgan-Cohen

Parshat Vayigash by Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder

I am not really an artist but after viewing the extensive collection of works that highlight the Hebrew alphabet, I was inspired to try my hand at creating a Wordle of this week’s parsha Vayigash, creating a visual map of the words. I like the way this computer program allows me to visually see the relative values of the words in the parsha. A simple step in moving me from Tot Shabbat literalism to the sophistication of enlightenment through visual interpretation.

President’s Forum: A New Way Forward Webinar

For those HUC-JIR Alumni who weren’t able to attend the URJ Biennial Alumni Study Session or missed the latest in our series of President’s Forum Webinars, you’ll find both the webinar recording and study documents below.  As always, we welcome your comments, feedback and suggestions – please use the appropriate email links on the “Contact Us” page (near the top) on the Tzeh u’Limad Blog.  Since we were only able to get to a few of the Alumni questions, we encourage you to send those in as well.  Please send your questions on the New Way Forward to Joy Wasserman, Director of Alumni Affairs.

Text study and discussion with

Rabbi David Ellenson
President

Rabbi Michael Marmur
Vice President for Academic Affairs

Rabbi Aaron Panken
Vice President for Strategic Initiatives

Click here for Text Study Materials

Reach Out and Study with Someone: Using Computers in Hevrutah

Hevrutah is at the core of our ability to study and learn; to opportunity to engage with another in looking into the meanings of texts and Torah in our lives. This week we hear from Rabbi Jason Rosenberg about his experiences using technology to improve his ongoing learning. Jason who was ordained from HUC-JIR NY in 2001, now lives in Tampa, FL, in 2007. He lives there with his wife, Hillary and children Benjamin and Talia.

Several years ago, one of my closest friends from Rabbinical School and I decided that we missed studying together, so we set up a weekly phone-chevruta – a chance to study some text together, even if it was only via the phone. The truth is, it worked surprisingly well. I say “surprisingly,” because a big part of chevruta study isn’t just the exchange of information, of course, but the encounter with the other person. And, even though some of that sense of connection was possible on the phone, it certainly wasn’t the same as sitting across from someone while we studied together. The sages teach that, when two people sit and study, the shechina dwells among them. They never made it clear if the shechina has a long-distance plan, though!

A few months ago, he and I made a change in our study, which has led to a big improvement – we’ve stopped using the phone, and we’ve started using Skype. For those of you who don’t know, Skype is an Internet-based, free service which lets you call other Skype users, including conference calls, and even do 1-on-1 video calling – all for free. If you’ve got a webcam and an Internet connection, then you can easily connect to friends and family, even if they’re thousands of miles away. The sound quality is (usually) much better than the phone, but it’s the video which really makes a difference.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved talking to my friend every week. But, seeing him is much better. We all make gestures when we talk – now we can see them! Our facial expressions, our body language – all of it (well, most of it) is once again part of our interaction. And so, our study, and our conversations are more natural, and more powerful. There have been a few times when we’ve been unable to use Skype (one of its biggest limitations is that the technology is not quite as reliable as the phones), and we’ve always noticed that something is missing when we default back to the phones.

So, what do our study sessions look like? Pretty simple, really. We always have a text that we’re working on – right now it’s Moshe Chaim Luzzato’s  Meshilat Yesharim [The text can be found online in Hebrew]. We usually start with a couple of minutes of checking in and schmoozing, and then just open up our books (we made sure we each had the same edition, so the page numbers line up), and take turns reading from where we left off last time. We never get very far – we always get caught up in some philosophical point, or some tangential discussion. But, eventually we’ll make it through. Do we ever get caught up in the chitchat, and forget to study at all? Of course! See – it really is just like it was in Rabbinical School!

So, with the standard disclaimer that I don’t work for Skype, nor do I get any payment or compensation for this, I heartily recommend that you go to www.skype.com and download the software. Find a friend or family member to do the same, and you’ll be amazed at how nice it can be to see someone whom you haven’t seen in a while. And, to even share a sacred moment of learning with them.

Editors’ note: Skype works well for phone calls with or without a video camera attached to the computer, however, if you want to video chat, you will need a video camera.