Class to Explore ‘Matters of Life and Death’

Rockville, MD — You are staring down the barrel of a gun. Do you kill the dangerous intruder, or do you let yourself be killed?“ ”Do you intervene to stop the crazed maniac attacking the woman at the street corner, or do you walk on by?“ ”Is there ever a reason to turn a weapon on yourself?“

These are some of the questions that will be brought under the intellectual microscope in a new class, ”Matters of Life and Death.“ The program promises an opportunity to experience ”yeshiva-style” learning, even for those with no background in the study of Talmud, says Rabbi Mendel Kaplan of Potomac’s Friends of Lubavitch, who will teach the class starting next Tuesday at 8 p.m., at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville.

The pilot for a new series of adult education classes – being called Tier Two (Tier One covered “From Sinai to Cyberspace”) – offered by the New York-based Rohr Jewish Learning Institute (JLI), the six-week course will take place in 10 communities throughout the United States.

The series will be followed up with continuing multisession courses this winter and next spring, dealing with the legal and mystical dimensions of Torah and Jewish mystical philosophy, respectively.

It’s a class that won’t be for everyone, Kaplan says, but for those who “want to feel [they’re] getting more serious learning … from the original source.”

That’s the difference, he explains, between this class and other Jewish adult education courses. Hebrew reading ability is not a requirement, although the class will be completely text-based, and students will be expected to do more than sit back and let a teacher tell them about the “concepts, tradition and history” of the material.

“It won’t be a lecture,” agrees Avi West, education officer for the Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning in Rockville. West is excited about the new class, which he sees as a “wonderful” opportunity for student graduates of the PJLL-sponsored Florence Melton Adult Mini-School of Greater Washington to continue their Jewish learning.

“Very often, after our program, which is two years,” West says, “students are frustrated. They’ve learned snippets of classical Jewish text, and they think, ‘All we’ve learned is the Reader’s Digest version [of Talmud].’ ”

Yet, he adds that “Talmud study still seems to be a very esoteric issue,” and lauds Kaplan for his great enthusiasm in opening up the discipline to all. “It’s great to see someone like that,” West says.

The beauty of the JLI program is that it “produces materials superbly,” West adds, referring to the English translation textbooks of source material. With translations from the original Hebrew and Aramaic, “students can open the book and see right there the concepts from Talmud, such as social justice and rabbinic debate … people get to struggle with the text and ideas [themselves].”

This self-struggle is the purpose of the class, Kaplan notes. The questions above, which were posed on the advertising mailer for the class, will serve only as stepping-stones to learning how to use Gemara – Talmud including the later discussions on the Mishnah (the part of the Talmud that contains the legal codification of the core of the Oral Law) – to find answers to questions with life and death import.

“The Torah is the blueprint of the world,” Kaplan says, and contains the answers to all such questions, but teasing them out can be daunting for those who lack the background and understanding of traditional Talmud study.

“The primary idea behind the program,” Kaplan emphasizes, “is that there is a lot in the classes for all to learn, at a very basic level.”

And, in an interactive class, students are bound to come up with their own questions on matters of life and death, relating them to current events, Kaplan notes. He will leave the contemporary examples to his students – yet will guide them to seek out “the appropriate verses, analyzing the meaning behind the words used, the proofs and rebuffs” right there in their textbook before them to arrive at Jewish answers themselves.