Tag Archives: Academia

I first fell in love with midrash…

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Here’s a little bit about my article:

“For the Sake of the Righteous:
Divine Love and Human Responsibility in Bereshit Rabba”

I first fell in love with midrash when I read a passage in Bereshit Rabba, describing the moment when God created the first human being. I was in my second year of graduate school, where I had come (or so I believed) to study Jewish theological responses to the problem of evil. My first year, while exhilarating, had also been challenging. I didn’t feel at home in abstract philosophical conversations, and my newly developing Hebrew skills made deep engagement with classical Jewish sources difficult. So when a professor decided to offer a course in midrash to students of all Hebrew levels, I jumped at the chance.

Struggling my way through the translation of each passage, Continue reading →

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Post-Modernity’s Footnote to Modernity

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I just had the immense privilege of watching Footnote (הערת שוליים) with some fellow Pardesniks followed by a discussion with faculty who have intimate personal knowledge of the culture being described in the film.  First, I highly recommend watching the trailer and, if you are even remotely interested, watching the movie before reading what I have to say (in other words: spoiler alert).

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Rodef Shalom course

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I first learned about this wonderful program through the Pardes newsletter.  I was in Brazil at the time and had already missed the first class, but I immediately wrote to see if it would still be possible for me to join the course.  I also invited my M.A. student, Joshua Barer, to enroll in the course as well.  I am a professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology at Drew University; at Drew I am also Associate Director of the Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict, and Hillel Director.  In all of my roles at Drew, and as a member of the local (and global?) community, I am deeply involved with peacebuilding and conflict resolution efforts.  Much of this work is focused on interfaith and inter-cultural endeavors.  And so when I saw an opportunity to learn more about what my own faith has to say about conflict resolution, I jumped at the opportunity. 
 
The course, led by Jonah Geffen, has not disappointed.  In fact, it has exceeded my expectations.  Since there were two of us – Josh and I – first joining the course on the second session, Continue reading →

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Learning Lishma

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[Cross-posted from my blog]

In Jewish culture, there is a high value placed not just on learning, but on learning lishma — learning for its own sake (a source for this would be much appreciated).  This is not a familiar concept for secular academics, where knowledge gained has a practical purpose, even if that purpose is only more refined theoretical knowledge that makes it harder to engage with anyone outside of the ivory tower.  When studying Jewish texts seriously, the goal often goes beyond any sort of practical knowledge and focuses instead on learning simply for its own sake coupled with learning how to learn.  This last is especially important in programs like Pardes because, while spending a year immersed in Jewish text study is fabulous, the hope is that such study continues throughout one’s life, and that requires a specific set of skills.  So what we learn often has less to do with content, and more with form, in order to help prepare us to feel confident in tackling these texts outside of a Pardes-like environment in the future.

However, with my recent decision to branch out from academia and enter the world of more direct action, with all the attendant stumbling blocks sure to come, a new wrinkle has been introduced for my learning lishma.  That is, namely: how can I justify spending time learning simply for the sake of learning when I see my purpose in life quickly transitioning to one of alleviating suffering in the world?  Learning lishma was once seen as a more lofty, laudable intellectual pursuit, as it was not concerned with career advancement, but simply with filling one’s desire to learn.  In my current mindset, however, it seems like the opposite, as learning with no specific purpose or goal is even more blind to the suffering all around us than learning with some goal would be, especially if that goal were a small step towards the alleviation of suffering.

Luckily, learning lishma, while not associated with gaining me academic credit or job prospects in a direct way, is not as divorced from the life I want to lead as it may seem.  One advantage of learning lishma, and not to write a test or a paper on a preconceived topic, is that I can approach the text with whatever lens I wish, often explicitly.  I have found myself able to draw out connections in Judaism’s most sacred texts that are only apparent to me because of my decision to switch focuses, and because of the lack of curriculum baked into my learning.  I have also noticed, in reading secondary literature, how much or little time is spent by academics in doing the same, which has helped me, at least so far, build confidence in my decision to leave that arena for now, and pursue social justice in a more direct way than most academics do.

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[Student Profile] Michael Rutenberg Schoenberg

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Michael (pronounced Mee-kha-el) originally hails from Portland, Oregon, where he was the only person in the whole city who had shoulder-length payos (sidecurls), and he was often mistaken for a girl until the age of eight or nine because many people did not know what payos were. His parents, two Reform rabbis, had followed a Chassidic custom, and did not cut Michael’s hair until he turned three years old, leaving his payos to grow.

The reason that my payos became so important to me lies in the manner in which my Ima explained my payos to me.  She made a connection to another mitzvah… that is also called pe’ah.  In Leviticus 19:9 it says:

“…ובקוצרכם את קציר ארצכם לא תכלה פאת שדך”
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap the corners of your field…”

These parts of the field are to be left for the poor, and this explanation was very salient to me.  In fact, when I was five or six and my barber asked me why I had payos, I once replied. “To feed the poor.”

Wordplays aside, as I got older, it became very meaningful that a physical part of me could represent two things that I viewed as so important: Judaism and the quest to help those in need.

Michael’s parents ran a Jewish outreach program out of their home, inviting dozens of people to their house every Shabbat, and as a child he “didn’t have a concept of not having guests for Shabbat dinner.” Michael recalls complaining to his parents on those very rare occasions when they weren’t hosting, and as a college student he continued to host Shabbat guests himself through a like-minded organization called ‘Heart to Heart’, which a friend of his founded at UPenn.

While his parents are Reform rabbis, Michael found his Jewish home in the ‘Orthodox Community at Penn’, as it was the dominant Jewish community at his university. “It was the community for whom Jewish living was central to their lifestyles, which is what [he] was used to from [his] childhood.” Now having graduated from UPenn, Michael continues to feel that he’s most likely to find the intensity of Jewish living that he is most comfortable with in the Orthodox community; although he doesn’t “have a fixed religious philosophy, and intend[s] to spend [his] whole life answering theological questions.”

Unfortunately for us, Michael will be leaving Pardes next semester to travel around southeastern Asian before he begins his doctoral work in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale, but his kind smile and easy manner will be remembered. In fact, many of Michael’s teachers also remember his sister Avital (2009-10) with great fondness, and we’re all very thankful that she recommended Pardes to her younger brother :)

I knew I would be comfortable at Pardes. It’s a wonderful community – a very comfortable community for me – and the learning at Pardes is exciting! Leah Rosenthal’s Gemara class is very intersting – she’s a clear communicator – and she’s really helping me understand the details – not just conceptually – of how things are working mechanistically. It’s really fundamental to ultimately being able to learn on my own!

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[Student Profile] Deborah Galaski

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Deborah grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her family was active in a local chavura, as well as a Conservative shul. When Deborah was eight years old, her mother decided to attend the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), and her family moved to the Philadelphia area. While studying at RRC, her mother also became very involved with Rabbis for Humans Rights (RHR) and specifically in protesting the genocide happening in Bosnia at the time. Although Deborah was somewhat resistant to active participation in the Jewish community, viewing Judaism more as her mother’s religion than as her own, her mother’s involvement with RHR had a lasting moral impact on her.

When Deborah was in tenth grade, her mother accepted a position as a congregational rabbi in Westfield, Massachusetts (which she still holds), and her family moved back to Amherst. Deborah found moving again quite difficult, and the fact that she perceived the upheaval as due largely to her mother’s position as a rabbi did not ease her already tense relationship with Judaism. Although she continued to be marginally involved in Jewish life during high school, she did so largely out of a sense of familial obligation, and intended to disassociate completely from Judaism once she went to college. And yet, despite this sense of disconnection, Deborah was consciously looking for meaning in life; her belief in God, and a need to understand how God could be operative in the world, drove her to continue exploring what role, if any, religion could play in her life.

In college, Deborah found a meaningful way to connect to religion: academia.  Due to an interest in environmental studies, she enrolled in a course on religion and the environment and found herself drawn towards the field of religious philosophy, although she avoided courses focused specifically on Judaism.  It was only during her final year of college, in a course on feminist interpretations of evil, that she began to explicitly engage with Jewish perspectives on the religious questions that motivated her.  Through that course of study, Deborah realized that her point of entry into the tradition was academic. Academia offered her a way to make the tradition her own, while maintaining enough distance that she did not have to accept all the traditional doctrines of the religion.  Her interest in Jewish perspectives on the problem of evil sparked a need to study further, this time with a Jewish focus in graduate school. It was at the University of Virginia, where Deborah is currently completing her PhD in Religious Sudies, that she stumbled upon Midrash as the perfect conduit.

“Midrash is fascinating because it does not have a need to be systematic.  It is just people talking about their texts, about their lives and about God, though stories that often appear to be wildly inconsistent. And the fact that this apparent inconsistency is not a problem is what draws me to it, because I think it reflects something important about how we experience and engage with the world.”

Deborah was advised to come to Pardes by her faculty at UVA, because they thought it would provide the best environment to enhance her skills to enrich her PhD research.  While apprehensive about coming to live in Israel, Deborah was interested to see what kind of life traditional Jewish texts have outside of themselves, and their impact on different individuals who hold them to be centrally important.

Two classes have stood out as highlights of Deborah’s time at Pardes so far: Judy Kilstner’s Chummash class, which she likes because it walks a good line between being critical and analyzing the text closely and being open to bigger questions and personal engagement; and Levi Cooper’s Chassidut class, which has created for her the rare opportunity to really engage with and challenge her personal connection to Judaism, instead of retreating behind an academic lens.

Deborah also really loves the community Pardes creates. She finds the other students to be fascinating people worthy of respect both for how they live their lives and how they think. “Pardes would not be what it is if it were not for the other people who choose to come study here.”

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[Student Profile] Nadya & Ethan Bair

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The Bairs

His parents raised Ethan with a deep awareness that Hashem is in all religions; that no single faith community could have a monopoly on religious truth. Every Shabbat, they would light Shabbat candles, and they celebrated the Jewish holidays, but Ethan, raised by two teachers of Universal Sufism, never felt connected to a Jewish community.

In 1991 Nadya and her family immigrated from Moscow to New York City as Jewish refugees. Despite their refugee status, Nadya’s parents did not have a strong sense of Jewish identity, and they were suspicious of affiliating with Jewish organizations. She was raised with no Jewish practice, and she did not receive a childhood Jewish education.

As a student at Oberlin College, Ethan became a leader of the Jewish student organization, and led High Holiday services at Hillel for four years.

“Central to Universal Sufisim is the idea of ‘spiritual lineage’ … and as I became increasingly involved in the Jewish community at Oberlin, I began to wonder about my own.”

His wonder led him to major in Religion, Jewish studies, and German, and Ethan also learned Torah regularly with his rabbi at Hillel. Eventually, the young man graduated, and moved to Germany as a Fulbright Scholar, interviewing German Jews of Russian descent as a case study of Jewish identity.

At Barnard, Nadya majored in in Russian regional studies, while traveling to Russia every Summer as an employee of the UJA-Federation of NY. She worked in the Commission on Jewish Identity & Renewal on the task force on Russian speaking Jewry, and eventually she also started assessing major UJA-Federation grant recipients.

“I started learning about Judaism through my work. I simply didn’t have the connection to Jewish culture, religion, and peoplehood that my colleagues and the UJA board members had.”

Through her work, Nadya first learned of Pardes, and studied here during the summer of 2006 before moving to Russia for a year to open the Moscow branch of UJA-Federation of NY.  Nadya would return to Pardes in the Summer of 2008 and once again in the Summer of 2011 with her future husband.

Ethan and Nadya met while living in Los Angeles after their great international adventures, and they were married in 2010. Ethan had moved to California to study at HUC as a rabbinical student, and Nadya had begun her Ph.D. program in Art History at USC. They both joined the ‘Shtibl Minyan’ community, and Nadya celebrated her bat mitzvah there… marking the special event by teaching four other women in her community to leyn Torah.

Eventually, Ethan completed his rabbincal studies, and felt that he wanted an opportunity to nurture his own neshama before beginning his work as the USC Hillel rabbi in the Fall of 2011. Together with Nadya, Ethan came to Pardes in the Summer of 2011 to learn with her in Jerusalem, feeling that it would be an opportunity for him to struggle with his relationship to Israel.

“I hope to encourage my students to invest in their own relationships with Israel – and to add to the various, nuanced ways that we can hold conversations about this sensitive issue.”

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