Morning Courses 2009
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Courses
At the center of the Institute are a wide array of courses offered in morning and afternoon sessions. Each course has a maximum of 20 students and is led by a teacher who is also an Institute participant, presenting material that she or he loves in an inclusive style that encourages everyone to participate. Choose from classes in traditional texts, Jewish politics, poetry, Jewish ethics, dance and singing, Judaism and world religions, and contemporary topics.
Extended Format courses meet during the regularly scheduled course time and the adjacent workshop time.
M01 - Finding Your Voice: Singing the Divine
Aviva Chernick, Poretsky Artist in Residence
Ozi Vezimrat Yah - God is my strength and my song. How do I know God further? How do I find my song? Will finding my voice, my song, bring me closer to that which is divine within and without? The very first songs of praise came out of people’s mouths from their hearts and were inspired by the moment. It is this moment of instinct, of creative revelation that we will be exploring together. Sessions will include breathing, sounding and vocal technique, learning and singing of established melodies and texts, as well as improvising melodies, texts, and rhythms of our own. We will be taking inspiration from Moshe and Miriam and the People of Israel as they sang Shirat Hayam (The Song of the Sea). Come prepared for delight.
Parts of the course you will stand in order to keep rhythms with your feet and bodies, while other times you will lay on your back on the floor. Accommodations will be made for participants who are unable to lie on the ground or to stand and move. Comfortable clothing is encouraged. Translations will be provided as necessary. No prerequisites are necessary. Singing skills as well as musical training are absolutely not required. Participants in this workshop should have a desire to engage in an adventure of breath and sound.
Aviva Chernick is a versatile and passionate singer working within the Jewish community and performing beyond. She is a cantorial soloist and has been a guest teacher, guest soloist and shlichat tzibur at several congregations and Hebrew day schools around Toronto and at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Aviva’s recordings include the debut album with the global fusion band Jaffa Road and Under the Canopy, a collection of Jewish love songs, released by The Huppah Project at the 2008 Ashkenaz Festival. Aviva co-leads a Kabbalat Shabbat service, Shabbat Fusion, which features some of Canada’s foremost world musicians playing traditional and contemporary compositions for tefilah from around the Jewish world. Aviva can be heard on Mitch Smolkin’s Yiddish music project, A Song is Born, with Klezmer Buenos Aires. Upcoming endeavors include a new Latino music project inspired by the music of Flory Jagoda and a continued collaborative project inspired by the Song of Songs with Arabic music master, George Sawa.
Categories
- Arts and Literature
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- Extended Format
- Morning Course
M03 - Dancing With the Tree of Life
Simona Aronow
The Sephirot on the Tree of Life are metaphors for how we live and relate every day, as well as the aspects of God’s light that are reflected in our every action. We will explore each of the Sephirot and their dynamic relationships utilizing movement and meditation, chanting, text study, discussion, and journaling. Some of the meditations are from traditional sources, others more modern. Experience abstract Kabbalistic concepts in a more embodied way to integrate them into your life!
Simona Aronow is a dance therapist, movement educator, and student of Kabbalah. She teaches and is on the Board of Directors for Gesher Center for Jewish Spirituality, Meditation and Healing, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Categories
- Arts and Literature
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- Morning Course
M05 - What’s So Jewish about Jewish Folktales?
Ellen Frankel
For centuries, Jews have told stories to one another, many of them adapted from the folktale traditions of their neighbors. And the reverse is also true: As they traveled and traded, Jewish storytellers transmitted Persian, Indian, and Arabian folktales throughout Europe. What was gained and lost in this process of translation? How do Jewish stories differ from their counterparts in other nations’ lore? In this course, we will read Jewish folktales from various Jewish communities, compare them with tales familiar to many of us from childhood, and explore what makes them different—and universal.
Ellen Frankel is a storyteller and author of The Classic Tales: Four Thousand Years of Jewish Lore. She is CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Jewish Publication Society. For 18 years, she has directed the JPS project, Folktales of the Jews, a six-volume collection of Jewish folktales culled from the Israel Folktale Archives.
Categories
- Arts and Literature
- History and Culture
- Morning Course
M07 - Sefer HaBloggadah: An Introduction to Sefer HaAggada
Richard Friedman
Sefer HaAggada (The Book of Legends) is the classic Bialik-Ravnitzky collection of aggadic (non-legal) material from Talmud and Midrash. Its contents are diverse — midrashim (comments supplementing Bible stories); stories about the Rabbis themselves; and stories and ideas about the Land and People of Israel, Torah, Shabbat, etc. The Sefer HaBloggadah project started at last year’s Institute uses a blog to facilitate study of this text, one page per day. The course will study sample pages covered by the project so far, and will introduce people to the variety of Rabbinic aggada. Participants may volunteer to present one of these texts in the Shabbat afternoon siyyum on part one of the book.
Richard Friedman has taught text classes at several Institutes. He also teaches Talmud and Rashi’s Torah commentary at his shul and at the Jewish Study Center in Washington. He is a lawyer with the federal government.
Categories
- Intermediate Text
- Morning Course
M09 - A Jewish View of Jesus
Harold Gorvine
We will read selections from the four Gospels and excerpts from contemporary scholarly interpretations of Jesus. Both as a class and in hevruta, our focus will be twofold. First, who was Jesus the Jew, and what did he stand for? Second, to what extent can we as 21st-century Jews adopt the message of the historical Jesus and use it to enhance our Judaism?
Harold Gorvine is a lifelong, passionate teacher of history and Jewish studies. The Alumni Association of Akiba Hebrew Academy (suburban Philadelphia) honored him in 2001 for 35 years as an outstanding teacher.
Categories
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- Text for Everyone
- Morning Course
M11 - Deviant Judges, Foul Factories, and Bio-medical Marvels: Turning Points in Jewish Law
Hillel Gray
In our naïve imaginings, Jewish law is merely a cumulative code of conduct that unfolds logically from Biblical and Talmudic rules. Within the raw data of Jewish legal discourse, we can discern a 2,000-year-old discontinuity of politicized contestations, personal innovations, and curious adjustments to evolving cultural and technological conditions. We will read rabbinic texts through which Jewish communities overrode old laws, set precedents, hardened schisms, and otherwise carried the drama of Jewish law into new territory. Our studies will explore the gamut from Talmudic case law through Reform responsa, and also peer into the future of Jewish law.
Hillel Gray is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago. He is former policy director of the National Environmental Law Center and has served on the boards of minyanim from both the left and right ends of Jewish life.
Categories
- History and Culture
- Intermediate Text
- Morning Course
M13 - Walking into the Tangled Woods of the Zohar
Mitch Chefitz
Change in Course:
With its arcane terminology, numinous insights, and recondite intimations of supernal connections, the Zohar – the profound mystical compendium of oblique commentary to veiled passages of Torah – is, well, nearly incomprehensible. On the other hand, if you managed your way through that last sentence, you’ll likely find this examination of several discourses from the prologue a worthy challenge, maybe even interesting. We’ll visit the Zohar in English, with the help of a commentary in the style of Adin Steinsaltz, though not written by Steinsaltz. You are invited to traipse among the tangled, gnarled roots that lead into the Zohar. Who knows? We might emerge thinking we actually know where we’ve been, with a hint of where we might be going.
Mitchell Chefitz is the author of a novel, The Seventh Telling: The Kabbalah of Moshe Katan, a Los Angeles Times best-seller, and a collection of spiritual fables, The Curse of Blessings, which has been translated into German, Korean, and Mandarin.
Categories
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- Intermediate Text
- Morning Course
M15 - Almost Famous: Books that Didn’t Make the Biblical Cut
Aaron Kachuck
Gaining admission to the Bible was a hard-fought, tooth-and-nail process in antiquity, and many fine, upstanding, and spirited candidates were unfortunately forced to take their business elsewhere. This course will laugh and cry with books that didn’t get the Jewish canonical stamp of approval. We will be looking in particular at Judith, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, III Maccabees, and Tobit. Discussion ranging from the transcendentally existential to the humorously mundane will focus on the texts themselves and on a range of issues they bring up, particularly the process of canonization, and the nature of heroism, especially female heroism.
Aaron Kachuck studies Classics as the Mellon Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, where he meditates on bards in ancient epic, funny Jews in Roman satire, speaking divinatory oak trees in northern Greece, and the crazy contradictions of the Dionysiac cult.
Categories
- Arts and Literature
- Intermediate Text
- Morning Course
M17 - Walking and Resting With God After the Seven Days of Creation: Sustaining the Order of the World with Jewish Ritual Practices
Stuart Mangel
This course provides a look at how the rituals of Shabbat and Kashrut are based on the creation story of Genesis 1. We will discuss how this creation story was transformed from earlier pre-Biblical creation stories and came to represent a new understanding of God, the world, and the relationship between God and humanity. We will also explore how the covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish people and Jewish ritual practices such as Shabbat and Kashrut evoke and sustain the order of the world that God created, as described in Genesis 1.
Stuart Mangel is a professor at The Ohio State University, where he teaches and does brain research. He is a veteran of many NHC Summer Institutes and has previously taught at the Institute.
Categories
- History and Culture
- Intermediate Text
- Morning Course
M19 - What Would Mordecai Kaplan Do? Study William James!
Ethan Merlin
In 1915, Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, gathered a group of rabbinical students in his home on Saturday nights to study the writings of American psychologist and philosopher William James. Almost 100 years later, we’ll carry on this tradition by reading James in a Jewish context at the Summer Institute. James redefined religious belief in an age of science by focusing on the practical consequences of what we choose to believe. How did Kaplan and his early twentieth-century “havurah” apply James’s ideas in their reconstruction of Judaism? And what do we have to learn today from James’s “Torah”?
Ethan Merlin is a co-founder of Tikkun Leil Shabbat in Washington, DC. He studied Comparative Religion in college and wrote his senior thesis about the thought of William James and Mordecai Kaplan. He teaches middle and high school math (and minyan!) at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD.
Categories
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- History and Culture
- Morning Course
M21 - The Mitzvah of Challah: Bread Making and Sacred Eating
Jonathan Rubenstein
When preparing challah, traditional bakers separate a small piece of dough and say a b’racha (blessing) in commemoration of the biblical challah offering. In this class, while learning to bake a different bread each day, we will also look at the mitzvah of separating the challah and related practices and texts, and explore their meaning in terms of what we eat and how we eat it. On Friday we will bake the challot for the Institute’s Shabbat meals. No prior baking experience is necessary.
Jonathan Rubenstein serves as co-rabbi with his wife, Linda Motzkin, of Temple Sinai in Saratoga Springs, NY, and is a grief counselor and Director of Pastoral Care at Four Winds – Saratoga, a private psychiatric hospital. He is also a baker and baking teacher and the founder of Slice of Heaven Breads, a non-profit, volunteer, charitable bakery operated out of Temple Sinai.
Categories
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- History and Culture
- Extended Format
- Contemporary Issues
- Suitable for Families
- Morning Course
M23 - The Ever-Renewing Literal Sense: Alternatives in the Literal Interpretation of Scripture
Devorah Schoenfeld
Is there a literal approach to biblical interpretation in Jewish tradition? Or are there, conversely, different kinds of interpretation called literal? This course will examine four Jewish Bible commentaries that have been termed “literal”, Targum Onkelos, Rashi, Rashbam, and Ibn Ezra, on three key biblical passages: the parting of the Red Sea, Song of Songs, and the Akedah. We will also look at different theories of pshat and drash in the Talmud and Midrash. In these texts we will see alternative approaches to literal interpretation that exist in Jewish tradition and ask what, if anything, they share
Devorah Schoenfeld is the Ike Weiner Chair of Judaic Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and has previously taught at University of California, Davis and at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Her doctorate is in medieval Jewish and Christian biblical interpretation and she is currently writing a book on the history of the literal sense of scripture.
Categories
- Advanced Text
- Morning Course
M25 - Become Divine
Jonah Steinberg
The idea that humankind might somehow take part in the identity of God sounds so foreign that Jews may shy away from it. And there are certainly hazards in thoughts of divine humanity. Yet the idea is deeply rooted in our own tradition, and perhaps the challenges we face (and cause) in this world demand such a grand conception of humanity’s potential. This Beit Midrash, satisfying for advanced learners and supportive of newcomers, will study texts from Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, Midrash, Zohar, and Hasidut, with glances to non-Jewish traditions also.
Jonah Chanan Steinberg is an Associate Dean of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College. He has taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He is co-founder of Hebrew College’s Open Bet Midrash.
Categories
- Arts and Literature
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- Text for Everyone
- Extended Format
- Morning Course
