Morning Courses 2011

Morning Courses | Afternoon Courses | Course Browser

Courses for Institute 2011

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.

Download the complete list of courses. (PDF)

M01 - Building Singing Communities

Joey Weisenberg, Poretsky Artist-in-Residence

Musician, ba'al tfilah, and danceband captain Joey Weisenberg will teach new melodies and lay out practical strategies for bringing communities together in song. While studying Jewish rhythms and harmonies and creating spontaneous variations of a nign, we'll discuss the process of developing a core of singers, crossing the musical "tipping point," dealing with the musical politics of a shul or group, and leaving room for silence.

Joey Weisenberg is a mandolinist, guitarist, singer and percussionist based in New York City, who has performed and recorded internationally with dozens of bands in a wide variety of musical styles. Joey works as the Music Director at Brooklyn’s oldest synagogue, the Kane Street Synagogue, and is the music faculty at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York. He is an artist-fellow at the 14th Street Y's Laba program, and teaches Klezmer music as a faculty member at KlezKanada. He was recently named to "36 under 36" in The Jewish Week as one of 36 new and exciting innovators in Jewish life today. Joey visits shuls and communities around the country as a musician-in-residence, in which he teaches his popular 'Spontaneous Jewish Choir' workshops. For more information, please visit www.joeyweisenberg.com

M03 - The Spiritual Practice of Mussar

Shirah Bell

Mussar, a centuries-old Jewish practice of spiritual self-examination, provides guidance in identifying your uniquely personal path of spiritual growth as well as tools to help bring about that growth. Utilizing text study, meditation, visualization, and journaling, we will explore questions such as: Why do I keep making the same mistakes over and over? Why do I cause pain to myself and others? What steps can I take to bring my life closer to my spiritual potential? What lessons can I learn from the experiences of previous generations? We’ll focus on the fundamental soul trait of humility as a vehicle for developing a Mussar practice to be continued after the class.

Shirah Bell, a Certified Spiritual Director, serves on the board of The Mussar Institute (TMI). She directs TMI’s basic course offering, Everyday Holiness, and leads local Mussar classes, as well as mentoring individuals in Mussar and spirituality.

M05 - Ki Va Moed: Tell Your (Israel) Story

Sarah Beller

When it comes to your relationship with Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what story have you been waiting to tell? It may be tragic or funny, longing or exhilarating – or all of the above. In this course, we’ll dig for these personal true stories and then work creatively to express them through your choice of written, oral, or graphic storytelling. Along the way, we’ll engage with narratives from Israeli, Palestinian, and American poets, graphic novelists, and activists. This course is for you if you are genuinely curious and hungry to give expression to your convictions (and perhaps confusions) about Israel.

Sarah Beller is a longtime member of the NHC community and serves as Director of Programming and Education at J Street, the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans. While earning her master’s degree at American University in International Peace and Conflict Resolution, Sarah was trained in dialogue facilitation and adult experiential education.

M07 - Praying Naked: You and the Holy One with No Book Between

Mitchell Chefitz

The most profound, complete text concerning Jewish spirituality, Jewish mysticism, or the Kabbalah is . . . the siddur. The prayerbook. Within the siddur, the morning prayer service is the most complete. It contains both the reading of the Sh’ma and the Amidah. In it you will find a profound series of spiritual exercises to take you through the Four Worlds of Jewish spirituality.

But what happens when we put the prayer book down? Without the substance of the book to block our line of sight, we see the Holy One who is always visible. Much as the early rabbis built the prayer service upon the order of sacrificial offerings, we’ll review the order of prayer in the morning service and build . . . as deeply as we dare.

Mitch is the author of The Seventh Telling: The Kabbalah of Moshe Katan and its sequel, The Thirty-third Hour. His story collection, The Curse of Blessings, has been translated into German, Korean, and Mandarin. His most recent publication is a digitally formatted novella, White Fire. For twenty-two years beginning in 1980 he was the rabbi of the Havurah of South Florida. Mitch has served as chairperson of the National Havurah Committee, editor of a nationally syndicated weekly Torah column, and is a frequent teacher at Havurah institutes on topics related to Jewish spirituality, alternative religious community, and Jewish family education, and especially topics that challenge the boundaries of reason.

M09 - Through the Lens of Cinema: Borderlands As Testing Grounds

Ilana Lapid

What is the relationship between borders and identities, and how has this relationship been explored in cinema? How are borderlands also testing grounds - the sites of serious ethical dilemmas? By examining powerful selections from films, many by Jewish and Israeli filmmakers, we will explore ways in which personal and communal identities are defined and re-defined through the complex process of bordering. Participants will be led on creative exercises to reflect on ways in which bordering shapes their own lives.

Ilana Lapid, filmmaker and educator, grew up in the US, Israel, and Canada and is fascinated by borders. She has an M.F.A. in Film Production from USC and was the first Artist in Residence at Slifka Center at Yale. Her short film, “Red Mesa,” finished its international festival run (www .redmesamovie .com) and she is currently in development on her first feature.

M11 - Divine Self-Limitation in Jewish Theology

Ethan Merlin

Since Biblical times, Jewish thinkers have struggled to reconcile their conception of divine goodness with their experience of undeserved human suffering. Jewish mystics have imagined God initially “contracting” to make room for agents with free will, and in our post-Holocaust era, some have taken solace in this concept of a self-limiting God. But is a self-limiting God truly “off the hook” for suffering caused by other agents? If not, then what are the theological alternatives to self-limitation, and what are their implications for our Jewish religious life? We will explore these questions through readings and conversation. No prior theological experience needed!

Ethan Merlin is a high school math teacher in Washington, DC. He first attended the NHC Summer Institute in 2000, and he taught a course at the 2008 Institute about the thought of William James and Mordecai Kaplan. Along with his partner Joelle Novey and many others, Ethan helps sustain independent Jewish communities in the DC area, including Tikkun Leil Shabbat and Segulah.

M13 - Hebrew Calligraphy as a Meditative Practice

Linda Motzkin

The most sacred texts of Judaism have been produced, from antiquity to the present day, by sofrim – scribes – who handwrite each letter using quills or reeds on specially prepared parchment. The writing must be done with kavana - spiritual consciousness and meditative focus - in order for the final text to be kosher. This course will introduce the basic techniques and materials of Hebrew scribal arts, from the cutting of quills to the shaping of individual letters to the uttering of statements of kavana, while exploring how doing Hebrew calligraphy can serve as a meditative practice.

Linda Motzkin is co-rabbi, together with her husband Rabbi Jonathan Rubenstein, at Temple Sinai in Saratoga Springs, New York, and part-time Jewish Chaplain at Skidmore College. She is also a soferet(Hebrew scribe), currently engaged in writing a Torah scroll using parchment she is producing from locally donated deer hides.

M15 - A Taste of Talmud

Joe Rosenstein

Is the Talmud a mystery to you? Here’s your chance to get a taste of how the Talmud works. In this course, we will study a few pages of the Talmud on topics ranging from returning lost objects to martyrdom, from reciting the sh’ma to conducting the seder. We will focus on the flavor of the discussion as much as on its content, so that participants will get an appreciation for how each page records debates involving people with different perspectives and conversations reaching across many generations. Translations and transliterations will be used to convey the meaning and sound of the text.

Joe Rosenstein is a founder and former chair of the NHC. He is the author of Siddur Eit Ratzon and Machzor Eit Ratzon and a member of the Highland Park (NJ) Minyan. In real life, he is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University whose focus is K-12 mathematics education. He and his wife Judy are blessed with five daughters, three sons-in-law, and four grandchildren.

M17 - Giving Songs in the Night: The Art of Singing for Consolation

Regina Sandler-Phillips

Within the “containing wall” of the Nine Days before Tisha b’Av, we will practice the art of consolation through the power of community singing. We will turn our voices toward the ancient Jewish wisdom of the m’konenot, singers skilled in lamentation, as reflected in our sacred texts. We will share accessible rounds, chants, lullabies, and love songs in Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish, and Aramaic that offer comfort as well as deepen mindfulness of the precious gift of life during happier times. And we will discover how singing through these days anticipates the “new song” of redemption promised in prophecy and psalm.

Regina Sandler-Phillips is a rabbi, chaplain, cantorial soloist, and “singer provocateur” trained in both classical and folk traditions. She has taught Jewish singing to all age groups in a range of Jewish and general community settings. As the founding chair of a 70-member hevra kadisha (burial fellowship), Regina is a leading innovator in reclaiming the sacred uses of Jewish song for healing through loss. Selections from her forthcoming CD, “MA’AVAR: Jewish Melodies, Chants and Songs of Passage and Transition” will be shared with participants.

M19 - Kiddushin meets 21st-century Egalitarianism

Talya Weisbard Shalem

In recent years, there has been an explosion of creativity amongst contemporary Jewish couples seeking to contract marriages based on principles of equality, mutual commitment, and deep connection to Jewish ritual. This class will look closely at texts from the Talmudic tractate Kiddushin and the Torah, to learn more about the origins of Jewish marriage, and the range of ways women were seen during the biblical and rabbinic time periods. After wrestling with these classic texts, we will look at several Havurah couples’ specific ceremonial choices, to deepen our understanding of how to create new rituals (including queer ceremonies) while maintaining a solid grounding in tradition.

Talya grew up attending the NHC with the rest of the Weisbard family, and it is where she decided to become a rabbi based on enjoying spending time with rabbis-on-vacation. She last taught a class on “The Dark Side of Jewish Holidays” at NHC in 2003. For years before that, she served as the sole teen/young adult rep on the NHC board, and taught in kids’ camp. Since then, she has served on the Everett and Hollander committees. She lives in the Boston area with her partner Josh (with whom she created one of the ceremonies which will be explored in class) and their son Noam Yaron, and davens at Havurat Shalom. One of her favorite things to do is to work with couples to fashion their own unique marriage ceremonies.

M21 - Radicals and Robber Barons: How Jews Both Perpetuate and Fight Inequality in America

Brent Spodek and Zach Teutsch

We will look at the roles Jews have played fighting and intensifying inequality in America -- focusing on our becoming white, building unions, becoming CEOs, and joining the American elite. At the same time that we went from being a discriminated minority to being disproportionately represented in business, politics, law, and medicine, we also became disproportionately represented as environmentalists, unionists, and progressives of all kinds. We’ll discuss how that happened, what was gained and what was lost in the process.

Brent Chaim Spodek is a rabbi in Beacon, NY. In recent years, he’s been the Rabbi in Residence at American Jewish World Service and the Marshall T. Meyer Fellow at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York. Brent has taught extensively about spiritual approaches to justice work, Judaism and human rights, and other topics in a wide variety of settings.

Zach Teutsch directs the National Labor College/AFL-CIO’s financial literacy project. Previously he worked as a union educator, campaigner, and strategic researcher at AFSCME, Change to Win, and SEIU. He graduated from Brown University where he received degrees in Economic Sociology and Organizational Behavior.

M23 - Yom Kippur: Law and Lore

Miriam-Simma Walfish

What, if anything, is the relationship between Yom Kippur’s prohibitions and its ethical focus on repentance? In this advanced course, we will study sugyot (discussions) from the eighth chapter of Yoma, which deals with the abstentions of Yom Kippur, as well as the exceptions to those rules. In particular, we will pay attention to the interplay of halakhah (law) and aggadah (lore) to see how each helps us understand better the other. The text will be studied solely in the original language so the ability to read and understand Hebrew is a prerequisite, though previous Talmud study is not.

Miriam-Simma Walfish teaches at Yeshivat Hadar, where she has taught courses in Talmud, Bible, and contemporary Jewish thought. A graduate of the Pardes Educators’ Program, through which she studied in the Advanced Talmud track at Pardes and received an M.A. in Jewish Education at Hebrew University, she has also studied at Drisha, the Northwoods Kollel, and Midreshet Ein ha-Netziv. She has taught in a variety of settings, including the Hadar Beit Midrash, the Northwoods Kollel, and here at the Havurah Institute.

M25 - Tales by Shai Agnon

Aryeh Wineman

Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who died a little over forty years ago after sharing the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an eminent Hebrew writer who often drew from Jewish tradition and folklore, creatively re-crafting traditional materials for his own purposes and effects. We plan to read in translation (or in the original for advanced Hebrew readers), discuss and analyze a number of his short stories, situated often between realistic fiction and the world of Jewish folklore, and, above all, to allow ourselves to delight in reading some of the examples of his literary genius.

Aryeh Wineman has written many works in the fields of Hebrew literature and Jewish Mysticism, including Agada and Art (in Hebrew, published in Israel),a collection of his studies on Agnon’s works.

Morning Courses 2011

Courses for Institute 2011

Joey Weisenberg, Poretsky Artist-in-Residence

Categories

Shirah Bell

Categories

Sarah Beller

Categories

Mitchell Chefitz

Categories

Ilana Lapid

Categories

Ethan Merlin

Categories

Linda Motzkin

Categories

Joe Rosenstein

Categories

Regina Sandler-Phillips

Categories

Talya Weisbard Shalem

Categories

Brent Spodek and Zach Teutsch

Categories

Miriam-Simma Walfish

Categories

Aryeh Wineman

Categories