Academics!

This past week was our first week of classes. I like them a lot. I have class approximately 8 hours a day, five days a week (with breaks in between). It’s the most class I’ve had, perhaps ever. It’s incredibly intense and rigorous, but not particularly intellectually difficult. Everything thus far has (more or less) been fascinating – I know I’m learning and I’m learning very useful and practical information: how Hebrew vowels are patterned, the typology of stories that exist within the Tanakh, a basic framework for discussing Jewish education, and the liturgical origins of Birchot HaShacar, the morning blessings. It’s all building a basic structure for a seasoned and qualified Jewish educator. Or so I’m led to believe.

For you nerds out there (no judgment; I love biblical grammar), here is a listing of my courses:

Hebrew – I have 5 periods a week of modern Hebrew: reading, writing, grammar, talking, understanding. Four periods are with one teacher on a rounded experience, and one period is with a different teacher, exclusively on modern Hebrew literature. That patter is just for our class (I guess they assume we’re “advanced” and can read modern Hebrew lit).

Tankah – A basic introduction to the Tankah. We’re not starting at the beginning and just reading; it’s a class looking at patterns of genre and various examples. The class is entirely in Hebrew, and we read verse by verse, and then translate – except not into English, but into modern Hebrew. It’s a doozy, but really awesome.

Biblical Grammar – Pretty self-explanatory. It sounds boring, but since it’s with Yossi Leshem (also our Tanakh professor), it’s incredibly fascinating. It makes so much Hebrew make so much sense. It’s also in Hebrew.

Liturgy – An introduction to the classical weekday morning service (and how/why Reform liturgy differs), and then we’ll explore other liturgy as the year progresses. It’s an analytical class, not a theological one. The class is half in Hebrew (the readings are in English, so we can’t really discuss those in Hebrew).

Zionist history – For this semester, my modern history class is on the origins of the Zionist movement. The professor, David Mendelssohn, was one of my professors at Rothberg. He was awesome then, and even awesomer now.

Second Temple History – The second part of our ancient History module (we had Biblical history over the summer), a broad overview of the Second Temple period. Since I’ve taken versions of this course, oh, 5 or 6 times at UCLA, this is my Sunday afternoon nap (or blogging) time.

Education Seminar – We three Ed students have a weekly class with Sally Klein-Katz, our amazing Ed instructor here. It’s a yearlong foundation on the position of Jewish education and our role as educators in it.

Israel Seminar – We have our normal classes Sunday-Tuesday, and Thursday. Wednesday is our Israel Seminar Day. We’re broken into 3 groups (roughly based on the amount/length of time we’ve spent in Israel) and look at various social and historical elements of Israel, with a lot of out of the classroom activities.

Tanakh only is in the Fall, and in the Spring I have a Rabbinics class instead. In the Fall, I’m also taking an enrichment class taught by the dean of the Jerusalem campus, Michael Marmur (who’s pretty much a Rabbinic rock star), during which we read Marmur’s Greatest Hits of Rabbinic stories and look at them through a Reform lens. I like this class a lot for 2 reasons: 1) the chance to learn directly from Rabbi Marmur is fabulous; 2) it’s helping me ground my own sense of the Reform movement’s relationship to Halacha and classical Jewish source.

It’s an incredibly full load, but a very rewarding one. I certainly see myself keeping busy this year.