Rabbinic Torah Study Summer 2009 Program
Source: Shalom Hartman Institute
Rabbinic Torah Study Seminar takes place every summer at Shalom Hartman Institute’s campus in the heart of Jerusalem. The intensive, ten-day seminar comprises lectures by Institute scholars, tutorials and small group learning, as well as encounters with Israeli thinkers, artists, writers, politicians and leaders of North American Jewry. It is open to rabbis of all denominations from every corner of the globe who aspire to deepen their pluralistic knowledge of Judaism, expand their first-hand experience of Israel, and develop interdenominational dialogue.
The Summer 2009 Seminar to be held between July 6-16, 2009, will try to help the participants explore the Jewish sources in order to find ways to deal with the economic, political and social turmoil which our society is facing today.
Rabbi Bill Berk, the program director, writes:
"We are responding to the unprecedented economic, political, and social changes taking place. We are well aware that the ground is shifting underneath us and we are asking the great scholars of the Hartman think tank to respond. We want to know what wisdom our tradition offers for how one might respond to crisis and uncertainty. In the Summer 2009 Rabbinic Torah Study Seminar, we will identify and explore Judaism’s core paradigms that emerge in response to change and loss of meaning and how those responses are expressed, interact, and often critique each other. We will study various paradigms of response in our classical and modern texts including the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar, post-Holocaust theology, and modern Zionist literature."