Intensive Academic Learning (Formerly "Me'ah Select") Archives

Who Shall I Say is Calling?: Insights about the Name of God in Jewish Tradition

Program: Hebrew College Tamid
Instructor: Rabbi Neal Gold (Read Bio)
Dates: Tuesdays, Winter 2025: 1/7, 1/14, 1/21 & 1/28
Time: 10-11:30 a.m. EST
Course fee: $160, financial aid is available
Location: Zoom
Hosted by: Hebrew College
Registration: Click here

Jewish spiritual wisdom has put many names on the experience of encountering the divine. This course offers some unexpected insights from the Bible, rabbinic literature, and Kabbalah about what it means to give a name to the Transcendent: from the Torah’s ineffable four-letter Name to unusual metaphors, to the Kabbalists’ 72- (actually 216-) letter mystery, and beyond. This course will explore familiar and unfamiliar sources, with an emphasis on articulating and clarifying our own spiritual awareness.

For additional information or questions, contact the Hebrew College Tamid Team

The Jewish Experience
in Central Europe

Course Title: The Jewish Experience in Central Europe
Instructor: Rabbi Leonard Gordon (Read Bio)
Dates: 6 Tuesdays, Spring 2025: 2/25, 3/4, 3/11, 3/18, 3/25 & 4/1
Time: 7-9:00 p.m. EST
Course fee: $300, financial aid is available
Location: Zoom
Hosted by: Hebrew College
Registration: Click here

Our course will examine Jewish life and thought in Central Europe during modern times. Central Europe stands on a number of boundaries, and we will learn about how Jews lived under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and at the edges of the Nazi and Soviet Empires. Our focus will be on three cities: Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, and representative Jewish thinkers from each. After grounding ourselves in the history of the region, we will read from the stories of Franz Kafka (Prague), the social scientific writing of Sigmund Freud (Vienna), and the early Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl (Budapest). Our class will explore the claim that despite their secular identities, each of these writers can be read as an exemplary secular Jew at the turn of the 20th century. Our texts will include a small volume on modern Jewish history and selected writings from each of our authors. No prior background is assumed.

This class is occasioned by a Hebrew College Jewish Educational Journey to Central Europe from May 5th-15th. For further information about the trip go to: Jewish Journey to Central Europe | Hebrew College

For more information or questions, contact the Hebrew College Tamid Team

An American Jewish Bible? – Introducing Robert Alter’s
The Five Books of Moses

An American Jewish Bible? – Introducing Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses

Program: Hebrew College Tamid
Instructor: Dr. Avi Bernstein-Nahar (Read Bio)
Dates: 8 Wednesdays, Fall 2024: 10/30, 11/6, 11/13, 11/20, 12/4, 12/11, 12/18 & 12/26
Time: 7-9:00 p.m. EST
Course fee: $400, financial aid is available
Location: Zoom
Hosted by: The Cambridge Collaborative
Registration: Click here

Perhaps every great chapter in the Jewish story includes a new take on the Hebrew Bible – a deep well of narrative, poetry, and law with which Jews have been in dialogue since antiquity. In American modernity, however, the dialogue has slowed for the obvious reason that the great immigration and acculturation process in American Jewish history that occurred between 1881 and 1945 included the acquisition of English and the loss of distinctive Jewish languages, Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew.

Shedding Hebrew, do American Jews thereby end the dialogue with the Hebrew Bible? Not inevitably: American Robert Alter – and Everett Fox before him – is intent on providing us an English translation of the Bible imprinted with the Hebrew original and ripe with opportunities to be in dialogue with the original text and its subsequent rabbinic commentators. Does it deliver what it promises? And what are the inevitable drawbacks and shortcomings of studying the Bible in Alter’s translation?

Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible: A Translation and Commentary (W.W. Norton) has been called a “landmark” in American literary history, and a “stupendous achievement” destined to “revive the literary power of a Hebrew masterpiece.” Each session will take up a different portion of text, comparing Alter’s renderings with the Hebrew, and with alternate translations, including the Schocken Bible, the Jewish Publication Society renditions, and the King James Version. Each session will also help participants make historical sense of Alter’s herculean effort by drawing connections with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, whose own translation of the TaNaKh into German paved the way for Alter’s work.

In this class, students will discover connections with the Hebrew Bible they never knew they had, and leave seeking more opportunities to explore its depths. Class preparation will take about two hours per week. A syllabus and bibliography will be distributed prior to the first class. All are welcome.

For additional information or questions, contact the Hebrew College Tamid Team

Jews, Torah, and “Judaism”

Program: Hebrew College Tamid
Instructor: Rabbi Jeffrey Amshalem (Read Bio)
Dates: 8 Mondays, Fall 2024: 9/23, 10/7, 10/21, 11/4, 11/18, 12/2, 12/16 & 1/6
Time: 7:15-8:45 p.m. EST
Course fee: $280, financial aid is available
Location: Zoom
Hosted by: Hebrew College and Co-Sponsored by Temple Sinai in Brookline
Registration: Click here

In this course we’ll study recent archaeological and historical research about the interrelated origins of the Jewish people, the Torah, and what would come to be known as “Judaism,” and discuss their ramifications for our own identities and practices as 21st century Jews. The goals are for the learners to understand current theories about the development of the Jewish people as a self-identified nation and the narratives and laws — which would become the Tanakh — used to develop, maintain, and shape this identity. The class will include scholarly sources, in light of which we will study classical Jewish texts with an investigator’s eye to see how they align with the new scholarship.

For additional information and questions, contact the Hebrew College Tamid Team

Origins of Judaism and Christianity

Program: Hebrew College Tamid
Instructor: Dr. Alan Avery-Peck (Read Bio)
Dates: 5 Mondays, Fall 2024: 10/28, 11/11, 11/18, 12/2 & 12/9
Time: 7:30-9:00 p.m. ET
Course fee: $200, financial aid is available
Location: Zoom
Hosted by: Hebrew College
Registration: Click here

Judaism as we know it today took shape in the first six centuries C.E., in the same period that saw the emergence and growth of Christianity. This course explains the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, asking what happened to Jews in the first six centuries and evaluating the beliefs and world-views they developed. Our goal is to understand how Judaism evolved on the basis of inherited texts and practices as well as in response to the experiences of the Jewish people. Thus we will come to comprehend the foundations of both Judaism and Christianity and to better conceive of the relationship between evolving religions such as these and the historical settings in which they exist. Significantly, we will see the ways in which Judaism appears to have been, or at significant points was not, the foundation for the Christian ideologies that emerged in this same period.

For additional information and questions, contact the Hebrew College Tamid Team

From Darkness to Light: The New History of Jewish Christian Relations

**From Darkness to Light: The New History of Jewish Christian Relations**

Program: Hebrew College Tamid
Instructor: Dr. Jacob Meskin (Read Bio)
Dates: 8 Tuesdays, Fall 2024: 10/29, 11/5, 11/12, 11/19, 12/3, 12/10, 12/17 & 1/7
Time: 9:30-11:30 a.m. ET
Course fee: $400, financial aid is available
Location: In Person at Temple Isaiah, 55 Lincoln Street, Lexington
Hosted by: The Lexington Collaborative (Temples Isaiah and Emunah)
Registration: Click here

Jewish and Christian researchers have invited all of us to re-imagine, in radical ways, the original emergence of what we now call “Christianity” from the matrix of Judaism in the first century CE.

These and other developments promise new hope for those who seek to repair the complex and often tragic history of Jewish Christian relations, and who look forward to Jews and Christians living side by side, in their respective faiths, as friends and allies.

In this course, we will study the often-painful history of Jewish Christian relations, drawing on the latest scholarship and innovative paradigms. Our focus will be on what happened, on why it happened and, above all, on how understanding the deep reasons behind past events can liberate us to envision a better future. Through this kind of study contemporary Jews and Christians can fully grasp that the future need not be like the past.

Among other topics, we will take up the following: the Jewishness of Jesus, the essential role of Paul and the relationship between his teachings and Judaism, the central nature of Rabbinic Judaism, Church doctrine and theological ideas about Jews in the middle ages, the Crusades, popular prejudices against Jews in Europe, the Reformation and the Jews, Christian Hebraism, British Protestant attitudes toward Jews, Vatican II and the Jews, and the relationships between Evangelical Christianity and Jews.

For more information or questions, contact the Hebrew College Tamid Team