Tomorrow’s Joe Average at an adult Jewish education class may look different than one would intuit. For one, he may not even be Jewish. Secondly, he might be sitting in church.
That’s the Next Big Thing for Berkeley’s Lerhaus Judaica, which is teaming rabbis and reverends to bring Jewish education to Christian audiences. And just as an effort to bring Jewish content to Irish audiences might entail a trip to Kilkenny, the push to educate Bay Area Christians involves heading into church.
Jehon Grist, Lerhaus’ executive director, notes — unsurprisingly — that many of the program’s Christian students have “relatively little background in the Jewish community.”
The course focuses on “the early history of Jewish-Christian relations 1,500 to 1,800 years ago, when the two religions started going their separate ways,” Grist says.
“But when you get down to it, we have an enormous amount in common. With that kind of approach, it’s hard for [Christians] to say they don’t care about Jews or don’t like them.”
So far, the class has been offered to Unitarians, Baptists, Methodists and is now taught at Dominican University, a Catholic institution in San Rafael.
While the mention of “adult Jewish education” often conjures up mental images of sitting in a basement room of the local synagogue, noshing on a Danish, drinking undrinkable Farmer Brothers coffee and watching the associate rabbi spell out “Maimonides” on the chalkboard, much has changed in the past few decades. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of great homegrown courses taught by scholarly local rabbis — every temple in the area can make a legitimate claim here — but the field of adult education is growing and evolving.
For one, not everyone belongs to a temple or is willing to drive all the way to an adult education center’s offices (Grist notes that the lack of parking alone near Lerhaus made this situation untenable).
“Both parents are working, so it’s not as if they can go to the ends of the earth to take a class,” notes Kerin Lieberman, associate director of the Bureau of Jewish Education. “Life is so very full.”
But it’s not as if Lieberman and others in the adult Jewish education game are tossing up their hands and saying “so be it.” They’re learning to adapt to the demands of today’s society — and have found that the best place to reach busy Jews may be at work.
Grist, also a Hebrew instructor in addition to his executive director duties, just completed beginning language courses at both the San Francisco and Redwood City offices of Checkpoint Technologies. The high-tech company, which claims to be the “world’s leading supplier of laser scanning microscope-based equipment for the semiconductor industry,” has a significant presence in Israel.
“So for the Checkpoint Tech folks, they needed more of a Hebrew background than ‘shalom’ and ‘l’hitraot,'” Grist notes.
“These people have very little free time. But they need Hebrew classes, and they need them on-site, so we put the program together for them.”
Lerhaus, BJE and others predict more and more classes will be held in the workplace. They also work with local synagogues, JCCs and Jewish campuses, and are pushing to bring more and more instructors to Jewish old age homes.
But perhaps the most visible reminder of the popularity of adult Jewish education is the success of the Feast of Jewish Learning, a Lieberman brainchild hatched by the BJE and joined by numerous other Jewish agencies.
The Feast is a smorgasbord of Jewish education, with dozens of instructors teaching numerous courses in one ultra-educational night. The event, now a local tradition, has grown large enough that it has broken down into regional “Nights of Jewish Unity” in every quadrant of the Bay Area. In fact, more than 500 people showed up for a recent unity night at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.
Events at synagogues, JCCs and the Feast offer Jews a chance to cherry-pick the courses that seem most interesting to them. Other programs, however, create their own curricula and methodically teach it over a two-year program.
The Wexner Program and Florence Melton Adult Mini-School are two such programs. Both are branches of established foundations: Wexner is based in New York City and Melton’s curriculum is generated at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, with the program’s American headquarters located in Chicago.
Until very recently, the only Melton franchise in the state was in San Diego, but the Bay Area now boasts two, at the Los Gatos and Palo Alto JCCs.
“This is a sequential program, for people who are looking for that,” said Sharon Lenox, the director of adult learning at the Palo Alto JCC and the Melton School.
Her students “are very pluralistic. They didn’t necessarily want to study at a synagogue. This is a setting that does not require an affiliation with any organization.”
After the two-year program, the students are offered the chance to take a 10-day study trip to Israel. In its first year in Palo Alto, the program drew 60 students.
Programs in the South Bay especially and all over the Bay Area are thriving because the region’s Jewish population has dramatically grown over the past couple of decades.
But, Grist soberly notes, the attendance in his classes and, he believes, in other organizations’ has not grown proportionate to the population. And it’s not difficult to see why.
“There are declines, especially in Hebrew, because it’s labor intensive. There’s always homework. It’s not that people aren’t intellectually capable, and our tuitions are below most community college rates. It’s the time,” admits Grist.
But, once again, he isn’t kissing off the Jewish population. Adult educators are working to incorporate DVDs and other high-tech gadgetry into their courses. They have devised home-and-DVD classes and are even working on entirely online instruction.
“It is,” says Grist with a laugh, “Lerhaus to go.”