The following article is from the 5783/2022 Edition of Havruta Magazine.
By Michael Greenfield
When I say, “language barrier,” you know exactly what I mean. Why is it that we don’t have a phrase for its opposite? We take for granted those moments when a shared language unexpectedly connects us to one another.
My Hebrew is strong enough to get by in Israel, but not strong enough to fully navigate Jerusalem’s public transit app, which is why I asked the man next to me – black hat, long black coat, zero English vocabulary – when, exactly, to scan the QR code to board the bus. He explained, I scanned, and we sat down opposite each other.
After a quiet moment, he looked at me quizzically and then asked me the Talmudic question that was printed in Torah-font Hebrew on the front of my Pardes t-shirt, “Who is wise?”
I suspect he was wondering if I, with my bare head, knew Ben Zoma’s answer to that question, as he surely did. (He had not yet seen the back of my shirt, on which Ben Zoma’s answer was prominently stamped: “The one who learns from everyone.”) I did know the answer, and when I ribbed him for asking me a question, the answer to which he obviously already knew, he laughed and a barrier was broken.
Torah is a language. This is one-third of the secret sauce behind the magic of Pardes, and I hope they’ll forgive me for laying bare their IP. To finish the recipe, you just need to define Torah as broadly as humanly possible and then find teachers who speak the language of Torah as fluently as possible – though each may have a different dialect – and who have devoted themselves to plumbing its depths.
It will lead to moments of disagreement, to wildly divergent views, and to endless encounters with holiness. My friend on the bus asked me about Pardes and, not knowing the Hebrew word for pluralistic (plurolisti…I should have guessed that it was a loan word from English), I simply painted a picture for him of men and women, secular, Orthodox, and everything in between, all studying together in one Beit Midrash in Jerusalem. His eyebrows went up and his jaw dropped a bit, but he never lost his smile. I understood. It’s how I first reacted when I heard about it.
There is a thing that happens in Israel that I find incredibly beautiful, something I haven’t experienced elsewhere. In a class on Israeli poetry, our teacher, Rachel Korazim, named it for me so succinctly that it felt like a light turned on: Secularizing the holy and sanctifying the secular.
For me, that is Israel. When studying shmittah (the biblical commandment of the sabbatical year), it quickly becomes obvious that the language of Torah is both literal and metaphorical, and is written into everything that happens in Israel. Everything. Secular and holy aren’t opposites, they are alternate ways of seeing any given moment, and it does us well to know how to see them both, because they are each always present. This is a teaching I’ve encountered over and over at Pardes.
The gift of learning from the Pardes faculty is experiencing their ability to pull so many disparate threads, both secular and holy, from an astounding and diverse wealth of texts, ancient and modern, and then weave them together such that the threads become a map, and the concept they have been guiding you towards all along suddenly appears in your mind, at the very moment they are naming it.
At the conclusion of two consecutive classes with faculty member Gila Fine, spanning the literature of multiple continents, she reached a final teaching—We are most useful to God here on Earth where we can do the one thing that God cannot do: become better—which is beautiful all on its own. What I can’t share with you in writing, though, is how that final teaching reverberated backwards, through all of the texts we had just covered, in a way that sanctified the secular and secularized the holy, and then pulled me forward to places of my own.
Michael Greenfield is the Director of Education at Temple Har Halom (THS) in Park City, Utah. He attended the Summer 2022 Pardes Learning Seminar before writing this piece and has since attended the Summer 2023 Pardes Learning Seminar.
Read more articles from the 5783/2022 Edition of Havruta Magazine here.
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