The Torah commands refraining from agricultural labor and letting the land rest every seventh year. The shemitah (sabbatical) year is observed to this day in the land of Israel. However, observing shemitah according to a literal reading of the Torah would pose practical challenges in a modern economy with Israel’s population density, and as a result, a number of competing solutions have been devised, reflecting the divisions in Israeli society and leading to a heated Supreme Court case.

There are about 200 root words needed to understand the siddur prayerbook. Improve your understanding of Hebrew and experience prayer in a new way by learning these words in sign language. This is a good way to reinforce meaning for ourselves and to use as a teaching tool for those who teach Hebrew and prayer to others. We will learn parts of the service in Sign and participate in the Shabbat davenning as a group

Hebron carries a rich history of Jewish associations from Sarah and Abraham to its present-day prominence as a turbulent hot spot in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We will explore the nature of Hebron in Biblical and rabbinic texts as a prologue to a multimedia inquiry into the consequences of the current Jewish presence in the city. We will use written testimonies, maps, still photographs, audio and video materials, government policies, and eyewitness accounts to uncover the present nature of the city, the processes involved in maintaining and expanding Jewish presence there, and their profound effects on the Palestinian population.

What does it mean to study religion (and Judaism in particular) from the perspective of material culture? How do objects inaugurate new Jewish rituals? What are the indications that a new Jewish ritual may endure? Is the introduction of new Jewish ritual top-down or bottom-up? Participants are encouraged to bring the “holy” objects of their own Jewish lives—the ones that are intrinsically and extrinsically Jewish (that is, more or less obviously Jewish)— to consider in our discussions. Finally, participants will construct written (or visual) narratives around the new ritual objects in their lives

Do Jewish theories of justice look beyond our own community? What, if any, is the philosophical basis for concern with those who aren’t part of our ethnic or religious group? We’ll look at classical concepts such as mipnei darchei shalom, tikkun olam, and tzedek umishpat, practical frameworks from the tzedakah system of the Geniza period and the contemporary Federation system, and theological perspectives articulated by thinkers such as Levinas and Buber. Most importantly, we’ll explore the theological framework that actually underpins our own conception of Judaism, and explore the implications of our beliefs on our political commitments.

The Hassidic Masters offered readings of the Torah very distant from the more evident and conventional understanding of that sacred text. Examining passages from the homily-texts of Hasidism’s classical period, we will explore together the nature of the revolutionary transformation in the way Hasidism approached and understood the Torah.

We will also probe what the explicit and implicit ideas underlying that transformation might suggest to us today as a resource for a renewed Jewish spirituality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”?

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