MaTaRoT Monthly Workshops: January

Up Close and Personal: A Talmudic Tale about a Teacher and a Learner
Instructor: Elie Holzer
Date: January 9, 2024
Time: 12 – 1pm
Cost: Free
Location: Zoom

We tell ourselves “stories” about the kind of teacher we are, and we tell ourselves “stories” while observing other teachers and students. What intricacies of these two types of stories might be at play in our day-to-day experience? This experiential workshop is designed to explore that question as we delve into a short rabbinic story.

Elie Holzer is a practice-oriented philosopher of Jewish education, who holds rabbinical ordination and a Ph.D. in Jewish thought. His research attends to to the intellectual, ethical and spiritual dimensions of havruta text study; the hermeneutics of “otherness and self” in the teaching and learning of Hasidic homilies; the hermeneutics and spiritual pedagogies of niggun. Elie has served as a faculty member of MTEI since 1997. He co-directed and taught in the Beit Midrash for Teachers in the DeLeT program at Brandeis University. He is the author of the winner of the 2014 National Jewish Book Award, A Philosophy of Havruta: Understanding and Teaching the Art of Text Study in Pairs (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2013) with Orit Kent, which grew out of his work in both of these contexts, and he published Attuned Learning: Rabbinic Texts on Habits of the Heart in Learning Interactions (Academic Studies Press, 2016). Elie lives in Jerusalem and serves as Professor at the School of Education of Bar Ilan University, where he also holds the R. Dr. Ochs Chair for Teaching Jewish Religious Studies.