A few years ago I received an email from Joe Reimer, a professor emeritus of Jewish education at Brandeis, with a request: to be part of a small working group supported by the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at Brandeis that would focus on the teaching and learning of Jewish spirituality. Certainly because of the people who would be involved, and possibly because of my own predilection to say yes to good ideas too quickly, I happily decided to join.
The lens of the study ultimately became trained on the study of Hasidic texts in adult Jewish education settings. There were six of us in the group and we met on zoom for a year (I’m writing this before securing everyone’s permission to share names, so I’m keeping them private). In each session one of us took a turn sharing a reflection on our own experiences of teaching Hasidic texts, standing both inside the experience and on the balcony looking down on it. We practiced noticing and asking questions, and we started to develop a bit of shared language.
After a few months, Joe shared that the Mandel Center was interested in hosting a convening on the topic, and we started to think about a gathering. Then October 7 came, and we, like so many others, were thrown. Our sessions, which from the beginning included one Israeli, became a time to connect and to process the shared pain and grief of the world. We pushed back our plan for a convening by a year.
This week the convening finally happened, with 23 participants from various backgrounds, institutions, and communities. I was especially delighted that so many current and former IJS faculty members were among the group. (You can read more about it here.)
By design, the convening was a space for not only some incredible teaching of Hasidic texts by some of the most talented teachers I know, but also reflection on what’s happening when we teach those texts. And, straddling the worlds of academe and spiritual practice, it also included meditation, singing niggunim, and teaching modes like movement improvisation that helped us play with what we might think of as boundaries between disciplines or realms.
At one point, pulling me back into the real world for a moment, a participant asked me, “How do you justify this kind of thing to your board and your funders?” I honestly hadn’t considered the question that much, perhaps because the Mandel Center was able to foot the lion’s share of the bill. Still, we were making a significant investment in the time of our faculty, which is precious. So the question has been sitting with me.
“And the Holy One called to Moses, and God spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying:” (Leviticus 1:1). Rashi’s first comment on this verse—his first comment on the Book of Leviticus—reads as follows: “Before every Divine speech act, before every utterance of the Holy One, before every instruction-invitation (tzivui, as in mitzvah—JF), there is a call, the language of affection, the language used by the Ministering Angels: ‘They call one to the other’ (Isaiah 6:3).”
I sometimes hear from Jews that it can feel weird to invoke the language of “calling” or “vocation” (which also means calling) to describe our relationship with the Holy One or the way we came to the professions or relationships to which we’ve dedicated ourselves. Particularly in English, it can feel Christian. And yet—with affection for, but not apology to, my Christian colleagues and friends—this is one of those things we Jews had first. The experience of calling is a central aspect of Jewish life, as suggested in the very name of the central book of the Torah: Vayikra, “And God called.”
Teachers, whether they work in public schools or at universities or in synagogues or at IJS, confront a unique set of challenges when it comes to calling. Those of us who teach texts, yours truly included, often start teaching because we love studying these texts and want to share our love of them with others. If we have some skill, and if we’re blessed to be in the right environment, we come to experience that innate desire as a calling, and we learn to help those we teach discern the voice of the Divine calling to them (you) in the course of Torah study.
Yet like so many other passions in a world that demands economic productivity, teaching can become more labor than love, and that flame of an initial calling can die to an ember if it isn’t tended. Which is why teachers, like all of us, need regular opportunities to renew their sense of vocation, to get quiet enough to hear the roar of the still small voice, to blow air on the embers and add fuel to the fire. In quotidian terms, we call that professional development. In the more majestic register of Torah, we might call it hitchadshut, an act of making new again. That’s my answer.
On one level, particularly as we approach the Passover seder, I’m tempted to say that we’re all teachers and we’re all learners—which is true, we are. But I also think it’s important to lift up the unique skills and talents and experience it takes to do particular types of teaching. Not anyone can teach a high school chemistry class, and not anyone can teach the Sefat Emet. It takes work and preparation, and most significantly it takes a sense of deep love and affection—a sense of calling.
Your call is different than mine. Each of us is on a particular path, which is part of what makes life rich and wonderful. Yet all of us can experience a calling—to forms of work, to types of service, to particular relationships, to Torah and mitzvot. Like many of my colleagues at the convening this week, a large part of the work I have found myself called to do is to help you and one another and as many people as we can to sense and renew their experience of calling through the extraordinary teachings of our tradition.