Yeshiva Enters the Information Age

MORRISTOWN, NJ [CHI] — A call rings out across the study hall “Yitzy! Hey Yitzy! Do you have that piece of Gemara figured out?”

“Yeah, I think so, here!” and Yitzy tosses a small, portable flash drive across the room. It’s caught by another student and promptly plugged into his idling laptop, which opens a file on the new program, Gemara Berura.

On the program, the entire sugya (passage) is laid out on the screen, and the student is tasked with separating the various sections, and connecting them to one another via various labels, e.g. question, challenge, answer, etc. this forces the student to actually read and classify everything he sees, instead of just translating words and moving on.

The study hall is littered with notebook computers as a people try to make headway in their classwork. The first class to appropriate this software is that of Rabbi Dovid Dick, the head of the second level class. Before discovering Gemara Berura, Rabbi Dick’s class was famous for his multicolored, wall-spanning and sometimes complex charts. Now, the class sits in front of a screen as the rabbi loads the program, and works through it with the class, asking questions the whole time.

“It’s great” reports Rabbi Dick, “I don’t waste markers, and people don’t just wait to see the answers, they figure it out for themselves. The program really forces you to think, there’s no skating through Gemara.”

Yeshiva Tiferes Bachurim, a division of The Rabbinical College of America, is the first yeshiva of its kind to use the new software. The reasoning: a cutting-edge and advanced type of learning environment would be a well suited for a cutting-edge and advanced way of learning Gemara, the mainstay of the yeshiva day.

The announcement was made in Rabbi Dick’s class and a vote was taken. When the resolution to adopt the program in everyday learning was passed by a wide margin, plans were set in motion to acquire the software directly from its Israeli developer.

A week later, the Rabbi passed around a flash drive with copies of the program and a list of authorization codes. More than half a dozen student’s now work with Gemara Berura on their own laptops with dozens more sharing a laptop with those students