Global Day of Jewish Learning
Sunday, November 12, 2017
Schechter Manhattan, 805 Columbus Ave, NY 10025
Theme: Beauty and Ugliness
Description | Teachers and Sessions | Kids' Programming
Listen to Recordings and Read Source Sheets Here
Hosted by:
Event Description
Hadar, Schechter Manhattan, Shaare Zedek, and LimmudNY will be hosting a Global Day of Jewish Learning on Sunday, November 12, 2017, at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, on 100th and Columbus, from 9:45am-3:00pm.
Join with more than 400 communities in 48 countries and 6 continents for a day of Torah study. For a schedule of the day, please see below. In addition to the teaching sessions, there will dedicated space for chevruta learning as well as childrens' programming.
This event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be available for purchase between 11:50 am and 2:30 pm. Recordings of sessions are available here.
2017 Schedule
| 9:45am | Welcome and Opening Remarks | |||||
| 10am |
Dr. Benjamin Sommer Jewish Theological Seminary |
Mean Girls at Work: Reimagining Sarai and Hagar Dana Levinson Steiner NYU Bronfman Center |
Blessings for the Good, Bad and the Ugly Elan Margulies Hazon |
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| 11am |
The Art and Jewish esthetic of Mark Rothko R. Michael Paley UJA-Federation of New York |
Hallel Without A Bracha: How Do We Celebrate Israel? Rabbi Jonah Geffen Shaare Zedek |
Taking Mikveh Out of the Basement Sheridan Gayer ImmerseNYC |
Towards Astonishing Beauty: How Prayer Lifts us up and Opens our Eyes Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses Romemu |
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| 11:50am | Lunch Break | |||||
| 12:15pm |
Professor Judith Hauptman Ohel Ayala |
A Jewish Legal approach to Greenhouse Gasses? David Eber SAJ |
Eliyahu Freedman Avodah |
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| 1:15pm |
Traditional Prayer: Difficulties and Opportunities Zvi Hirschfeld Pardes |
It's hard to raise parents: on learning from each other Michal Kohane Yeshivat Maharat |
I'm an Atheist and I Believe in God Dan Ross Columbia/Barnard Hillel |
Shayna Golkow Park Avenue Synagogue |
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| 2:15pm |
What Goes Down Must Come Up: A New Map of Spiritual Progress Dena Weiss Hadar |
Defining "need" in the wake of disaster Joe Gindi AJWS |
Daniel Henkin Tizmoret |
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2017 Class Descriptions
Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses— Towards Astonishing Beauty: How Prayer Lifts us up and Opens our Eyes
Jewish prayer functions to shape our consciousness so that our inner lives come to resemble the intentions of our heart. We will look at specific examples of how liturgy can enable us to see and experience the astonishing beauty underlying existence. In this session we will look at morning prayers to illustrate this concept.
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David Eber—A Jewish Legal approach to Greenhouse Gasses?
The Rabbis could have never imagined a problem like Climate Change. Ironically, it is by reading rabbinic texts on laws of neighbors; meant for people living in immediate proximity in which we can begin to see a possible Jewish legal approach to addressing greenhouse gasses, a problem of a global scale. In this class we will examine texts from the rabbinic to the contemporary periods of history which speak about topics as diverse as shooting arrows at your neighbor's property, property rights, to smoking, and we will ask the question of what actions for us might be generated from our study.
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Eliyahu Freedman—Is Poverty Ugly?
How do the Rabbis view the impoverished and poverty itself? An exploration of texts and stories from the field of food stamps advocacy with an Avodah alum will frame the conversation.
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Sheridan Gayer—Taking Mikveh Out of the Basement
There's a movement afoot to re-imagine the mikveh (Jewish ritual bath) ritual as a way for all Jews to honor the sacred nature of our bodies and experiences. Our community can now immerse for weddings, births, healing from illness or trauma, significant birthdays, b'nei mitzvah, divorce, pregnancy loss, fertility struggles, mourning, or spiritual preparation for High Holidays. Come learn about the ancient ritual of mikveh and how the trained volunteer mikveh guides at ImmerseNYC are facilitating transformative, powerful rituals for our community.
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Shayna Golkow— Getting Angry with God
Our lives hold both beauty and ugliness, so in order for prayer to feel authentic, we need space to express a full range of emotions. Analyzing a few psalms and contemporary prayers, we will attempt to open up our own potential for expressing anger, sadness, and disappointment with God.
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Rabbi Jonah Geffen—Hallel Without A Bracha: How Do We Celebrate Israel?
The founding of the State of Israel is a modern Jewish miracle, but it is an event of both religious and secular significance. A party at the boat basin is fun and makes a lot of sense, but how then are we to commemorate Israel religiously?
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Joe Gindi—Defining "need" in the wake of disaster
In the wake of natural and human disasters our impulse is to provide for basic needs of food, shelter, and security. While this is an important first step, elements within the laws of charity might push us to consider a broader understanding of need. In this session we will place talmudic conceptions of charity in dialogue with an emerging "rights-based" approach to disaster response and recovery. We'll use real stories of disaster relief to evaluate the policy implications of the Talmud's expanded definition of need.
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Professor Judith Hauptman—Why did R. Nahman permit Yalta to be carried on a palanquin on a festival? A New Reading of Bavli Besah 25b
Transport on a palanquin on a festival is prohibited and yet the Talmud reports that R. Nahman permitted Yalta, his wife, to be carried on one on a festival. We will examine what the short, halakhic anecdotes in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds have to say on the subject. And maybe offer a new interpretation as to why this rule was changed. Text handouts in Hebrew and English.
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Daniel Henkin—Instant A Cappella!
Jump into the world of contemporary Jewish a cappella singing and create an instant choir with your Global Day of Jewish Learning friends! Some singing experience is recommended and it is helpful if you are able to sight-read music, although neither is required.
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R. Zvi Herschfeld—Traditional Prayer: Difficulties and Opportunities
Together we will explore the evolution of prayer fro the Biblical to the Rabbinic model, and how this transition addressed existing challenges and crated new ones. We will explore texts that both address these difficulties and some approaches to using them as opportunities for growth
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Michal Kohane—It's hard to raise parents: on learning from each other
Rabbi Akiva as a parent and Insights about acceptance, change, women's roles and more.
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Dana Levinson Steiner—Mean Girls at Work: Reimagining Sarai and Hagar
While the topic of gender equity continues to find a more public voice in 2017, a darker issue continues to prevail: female rivalry. As workplace culture can fail to provide an equal playing field for women, women find themselves set up to compete against one another, perpetuating a cycle that has existed for millennia: the mean girl. What does our Jewish tradition say about the mean girl, and how can we reimagine her to be more than the conditions she's stacked against? In this session, we'll explore the origins of the mean girl in Sarai & Hagar, and how we reimagine female workplace bonds.
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Elan Margulies—Blessings for the Good, Bad and the Ugly
Blessings ask us to slow down and give thanks and can help cultivate a feeling of perpetual amazement. Jewish tradition has blessings for wonderfully fragrant fruit, seeing the ocean and even for seeing an exceptionally strange creature. Together we will explore a selection of blessings to give thanks for the good, the bad and the ugly.
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R. Michael Paley— The Art and Jewish esthetic of Mark Rothko
Until the modern world there are scarcely any great Jewish artists. But then suddenly, with expressionist and abstract painters there were many. But what made them Jewish? We will explore this question through the work of the marvelous Rothko multiforms and particularly those nine paintings created for the Seagrams Building that now hang at the Tate Modern in London. It is a fascinating journey.
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Dan Ross—I'm an Atheist and I Believe in God
In this session, we will confront contemporary atheist ideologies and their critiques of religion, as well as Jewish sources, traditional and modern, that open questions about the necessity (or lack thereof) of having a relationship with God. And in reflecting on the challenges surfaced in these texts, we will explore our personal beliefs and questions about the Divine
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Dr. Benjamin Sommer—What is Holiness? A מחלוקת לשם שמים (debate for the sake of heaven) between Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy have very different ideas about what can be holy and how something or someone becomes holy. This difference, we will see, creates two different patterns of Jewish thought that persist into the present, and these patterns have important ethical and political implications for contemporary Jewry.
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Dena Weiss—What Goes Down Must Come Up: A New Map of Spiritual Progress
In this class we'll explore a teaching of R' Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, a student of the Ba'al Shem Tov and author of the Me'or Einayim. His teaching presents a challenge to us to re-evaluate what we think of as spiritual and religious growth or proximity to the Divine. He suggests that by changing our spiritual trajectory and reorienting our internal notions of progress we can achieve much more and grow much further than we thought possible before.
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Kids' Programming
| 10am |
3rd - 5th Graders Daniella Adler and Ruth Servi
Drop off is at 9:55
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K-2nd Graders Experiencing Blessings of Nature Rina Goldberg and Elisa Marcus Drop off is at 9:55
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Family Art Space Schechter Manhattan alumni will be working with everyone who stops by to create a thematic art project |
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| 11am |
K - 2nd Graders Daniella Adler and Ruth Servi Drop off is at 10:55
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3rd - 5th Graders Rina Goldberg and Elisa Marcus Drop off is at 10:55
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| 11:50am | Lunch Break | ||||||
| 12:15pm |
K - 2nd Graders Beautiful and less beautiful places in Israel Itamar Gur Drop off is at 12:10PM
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3rd - 5th Graders Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Exploring Jewish Ethics Esther Azar Drop off is at 12:10PM
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Family Art Space Schechter Manhattan alumni will be working with everyone who stops by to create a thematic art project
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| 1:15pm |
3rd - 5th Graders Let’s make our world beautiful again, Israel as a case study Itamar Gur Drop off is at 1:10PM
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K - 2nd Graders Don't Judge a Book by its Cover: A multi-sensory exploration of the God Spark in all things Esther Azar Drop off is at 1:10PM
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Esther Azar—Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Exploring Jewish Ethics 3-5 graders
Can we judge things by the way they look? Can we find the God spark in things that appear ugly? Join Esther, the Director of Family Programmng at Shaare Zedek as we use our senses to explore our perceptions and how they effect our experience.
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K-2 Experiencing Blessings of Nature (10am)
In this session, children will think about all of the ways that the natural world inspires us and causes us to feel wonder and a sense of gratefulness. Children will engage in a multi-sensory activity culminating in the writing of their own blessings.
Beauty in Nature (3-5) (10am)
In this session children will do a text study from a short passage in Kohelet Rabbah, focusing on a description of Gan Eden. Children will then participate in a discussion and an activity on Tikkun Olam; exploring humanity's role in protecting the earth and how we can preserve the beauty of God's creation.
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3-5 Lesson: Inspired to Bless (11am)
In this session, children will be introduced to several of the traditional birchot ha-nehenin (blessings of enjoyment) and consider what may have inspired their authors to write them. This study session will culminate with children writing their own blessings.
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Kindness is Beautiful (K-2) (11am)
In this session children will listen to a read aloud of Hannah's Sabbath Dress, by Itzhak Schweiger-Dmi'el. Children will then explore the connections between the concept of beauty and kindness through hands-on activities and a short discussion.