Sicha Basadeh – Hands-on Traditional Israeli Agriculture Workshops
Source: Sicha Basadeh
Sicha Basadeh provides group hands-on learning experiences all around Israel utilizing their mobile factories for the production of Biblical – Talmudic agricultural products. From start to finish each person is completely involved in extracting their own honey from honeycombs, producing 100% pure oil from freshly harvested olives and baking their own matzot for Pesach. Of course, each natural product is packaged to be used at home with family and friends.
Sicha Basadeh is committed to stimulating a fresh reading of the traditional Jewish library. They do this by learning about a topic from as many angles as possible, approaching each topic intuitively using people’s natural curiosity as a guide. This opens an interdisciplinary dialogue and leads to an exploration of science, technology, history and mathematics. Each discipline adds important knowledge and insight to the topic which leads to a rich and authentic reading of the sources.
Sicha Basadeh programming focuses on the hand/mind connect. They work to bridge the worlds of formal and informal education. In all programs, hands-on learning enhances and enriches decontextualized study and formal classroom study provides the theoretical framework for the hands-on encounter.
So much of what has been recorded in our sefarim is based in the material culture and technologies of the given time. From the ancient near east through the Renaissance and of course to today’s Information Age, Jews have been writing about how their heritage and culture respond to material world and society.
Here are a few examples. The laws of chametz and matza begin with looking at the science of fermentation and the chemistry of dough, continue with a look at how bread was baked in the talmudic period and culminate with the invention of the Ashkenazai matza. The process of turning olives into oil invites a fresh reading of the laws of Shabbat as well as an understanding of the various grades of oil used in the Temple.They also explore the laws of truma and maaser and see how the Mishna viewed and understood the transformation of olives to oil. Geographically, they explore where the olives grow well in Israel and see how the olive forms a central part of Israeli heartland culture.