Jewish Reconstructionist Federation Education Department

Back to TorahQuest Home TorahQuest Recipe Take one part Torah, one part your life, one part your favorite modality of creativity, and shake them together. Repeat recipe with others. What do you get? Active and involved Jews who know and feel they are co-owners of the Jewish tradition. A collection of sharable Torah wisdom created by today's Jews. Rabbi Shai Gluskin, TorahQuest Program Director Short Description TorahQuest is about getting people to respond creatively to the Torah. In this way, they add their own voice to the long engagement Jews have had with Torah. One version of this, described below, has participants building a physical "web site" in their classroom. Rationale for Developing the Technique A hyperlink is the same as a dibbur matchil. A dibbur matchil is the word that links a commentary with the text that it is commenting on. It is the link between two documents. This is similar to the Jewish commentators of all ages who make direct links between a primary text and their own comments on it. Torah study is based on associative (as opposed to linear) thinking, which mirrors the way the Internet works. Participants will take from what they already know about how the web works, and apply that to what they know less about: Torah study. Preparation Select a primary text. If the participants would have trouble navigating from a printed chumash (printed Torah), make a handout that just has the verses of the text you want them to study. As we develop a TorahQuest manual, we will be creating more and more of these good-to-go text handouts. Keep checking torahquest.org for support materials for TorahQuest Create a blank home page on poster paper that says, Congregation B'nai Torah 6th Graders Study Cain and Abel replacing the congregation name, class description and Torah text with the ones you are actually doing. Find one or several comments that have already been created relating to the text you are studying. It is nice to have a classical comment or midrash as well as contemporary ones created by both children and adults. This models the commentary process and puts the participants in a peer relationship with all other commentators, past and present. Print comments from the TorahQuest Web of Commentary.Buy Bialik's The Book of Legends. He organizes much of the teachings, stories, and wisdom of the Talmuds and rabbinic midrash collections into topical themes. There is a wonderful index. Hint: When you are looking for commentary to serve as models for your students, quickly skip over the ones that don't resonate with you easily. Many times teachers become overwhelmed and frustrated in bringing classical midrash or commentary to their students because they don't understand the connection or the point that the author is making. Skip those. Keep reading until you find a comment that you like. Description of the Technique Study A whole room full of people studies the same text together, studying in pairs (with a group of three if there are an odd number of students) Hevruta-style. (Read our Guide to Hevruta.) You might want to print and hand out the guide to participants. Students are not asked to finish the text they are given, but rather to engage with the text. Each pair studies at its own pace. Some participant may want to take notes during the study. For some, it helps them to notice what they are noticing by writing their immediate responses down. These notes are different from the creative responses they will make later. Create Each person creates one or more responses to the primary text, using just about any medium you (or they) can think of. The facilitator provides the pallette of materials so that participants will be able to choose from a varitey of media. See the packing checklist for a sample list of materials to provide. Participants work alone or in groups that form naturally based on shared interest. Following is a partial list of modes for responding to a text. (This is a long list. If you are planning to use TorahQuest over an extended period of time, you could model several of these forms of response and require each student to practice each modelled mode of response. When the modelling lessons end, each student is free to choose his/her own mode of response.) story to explain something missing in text to explain something ambiguous in text illustration cartoon word translation word decoration word play association with other text in Torah elsewhere association with own life a play or dialogue song video sculpture study someone else's response to primary text a question or list of questions of the text a moral challenge arising out of the text "hand made Midrash" à la Jo Milgrom bumper sticker using contemporary mode of communicating writer interprets the text (e.g. newspaper article, help wanted ad Share "You-can-touch-it" web. The students "post" their responses to "web pages" made from butcher paper hung around the classroom. The "home page" is at the center and serves as an evolving table-of-contents. Participants read each other's work in order to appropriately group similar themed responses on the same page. The "hyperlinks" linking the remote pages to the "home" page are made of yarn, string, or party streamers. The posting process already gets students reading each other's work. In addition, the teacher/rabbi/lay leader/ can gather the group together for a more formal discussion, both about the content of the participants' creations and their feelings about the process are aired. "You-can-click-it" web: You and/or the participants themselves upload the commentaries using the TorahQuest Web Of Commentary tool at http://torahquest.org This is a great way to share the wisdom of the participants with greater community, relatives, friends, and those people everywhere in search of Torah wisdom on the Internet. For more information and/or to participate in TorahQuest, please contact Rabbi Shai Gluskin and Ilana Freyda Streit at torahquest@jrf.org, tel: 215-782-8500 ext. 16 or 17. This text updated Sept. 16, 2003