Pardes In the Press
This is Only the Beginning
By Marissa Feinman, Jewish Community News
The beginning of the school year is a special time. It’s always a bit of a relief for me to get back to a schedule— some sort of structure that helps me to be productive and organized, as well as create a sense of stability. I began Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies on the second day of the months. It was both the second day of September and of Elul, the month which proceeds Rosh Hashanah on the Jewish calendar. Elul was particularly busy at Pardes since it is traditional to spend the entire month preparing for the high holidays by taking stock of ourselves and our deeds from the previous year. My full schedule included three classes that covered material relating to the holidays, as well as three more classes that took an in-depth look at Jewish texts, mostly in biblical Hebrew. Once the overwhelming feeling of settling in had subsided, I was able to take a deep breath and adjust.
Pardes is a fairly small institution with around a hundred students including a Jewish Educator’s Program. The student body is made up of a diverse and open crowd. We are people from all across the religious background spectrum, who express our Jewish practice in many ways. The thing that we all have in common, students and faculty alike, is our seriousness about learning Jewish text while being surrounded by a supportive community. Just to give you a clear picture of the intensity and depth of the program, I’ll describe my Chumash (Torah) class. Since we started Genesis a week and a half ago, we have sat in Chevruta (study partners) and translated Chapter 1 from the original Hebrew, along with 4 classic commentaries on this first creation story, which we previously thought we were so familiar with. Our teacher then explained all of this so we could make sense of our translating jobs. Now, just maybe, we will start talking about the creation of Humanity. To put it another way, 12 hours of class and we have not yet finished discussing the first 35 lines of the Torah.
I’ve never before read the Torah from the original text, and by the end of this year, I will have read the first four Torah portions. You might be thinking "How in the world are you going to spend two semesters on something we read in one month of Shabbat services?" And my answer to you would be this: in the grand scheme of Torah learning that I hope to accomplish in my life, this is only the beginning.
Marissa Feinman is studying at the Pardes Institute in Israel. She received a scholarship from your Jewish Federation for this program. She will be one of two guest Israel correspondents, reporting from Israel, both her experiences and what she sees going on there, until her return in Summer 2009.
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