Beyond Hebrew school: New course delves into Jewish religion, culture and history for adults

Feb. 3—When Rabbi Jack Shlachter, an instructor for a new course on Jewish religion and culture in Santa Fe, opened the floor to questions at a recent class, Gil Gross piped up.

"I'll see if I can get an answer to this because when I was a kid, it just made the Hebrew school teachers run," said Gross, who then asked about the purpose of what seemed like erotic poetry in a religious text.

Shlachter, a retired Los Alamos physicist and rabbi of congregations in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, was delighted by the question. He opened a discussion of how the poetry could reflect love, including love of God.

The lesson was part of a year-round course created by three local Jewish leaders that aims to help area adults delve into Jewish ritual practice and understandings of God, Jewish culture and Jewish history.

Shlachter teamed up with Shabbat with Friends New Mexico founder Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, who lives in Albuquerque, and Temple Beth Shalom's former education director, Joy Rosenberg, to kickstart the course, called "Exploring the Jewish Experience," in January. The lessons will be organized in three trimesters, with weekly sessions covering topics like Jewish dietary laws, Jewish humor, antisemitism and Jews' contemporary contributions to American culture, said Gartenberg, who developed the course around a curriculum from the American Jewish University in Los Angeles.

Participants can sign up for one or all trimesters, which cost $18 each.

While most attend the course's Tuesday evening sessions in person — currently in a participant's home — people can also join online, and a few have been Zooming in from other states, Shlachter said.

The course is designed for multiple audiences, he said, including adult Jews who want to better understand their Judaism, adults undergoing a year of study to become eligible to convert to Judaism and people who are not Jewish and "simply want to gain a much stronger understanding of what this Judaism thing is all about."

The number of people in Santa Fe interested in the course exceeded instructors' expectations. While they would have been happy with with five or 10 students, around 25 have joined the first trimester.

The high interest may be an outgrowth of the Israel-Hamas war, said Gartenberg, who has taught a similar course in Albuquerque since 2020.

The war has spurred "a great deal of people" to explore their Jewish heritage, Gartenberg said, echoing Shlachter, who called the months since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 a "difficult time" for Jews.

"For me, what I look forward to every week is really exploring the questions that I have and feeling like I'm in a safe place to ask questions," said Kathy Levine, a participant taking the class as a first step to convert from Roman Catholicism to Judaism.

"I'm taking the class to learn more and see if it's really the right path for me," she said.

Another student, Jennifer Felsburg, said she was raised in a modern orthodox conservative family and wants to relearn aspects of the religion.

"It's interesting to see things from a different perspective," Felsburg said. "With a little more gray hair, I see this very differently than I might have the first time I was exposed to it."

Shlachter said many people who grow up Jewish do not absorb "the beauty of Judaism" from religious education for children — himself included.

He had little connection with his Judaism for roughly a decade, until, at age 25, his thesis adviser sent him to Los Alamos National Laboratory for the summer, and he went to the local synagogue to meet people, he said.

"My own life trajectory, I think, makes me passionate about this," he said. "Nobody really explained effectively to me, and I think that this is probably the case for several of the people in the class, that there's a lot to Judaism that is very sophisticated.

"I could easily have gone the route that many Jews in this country go, which is to have some kind of Jewish education as a child ... and never turn back and connect with Judaism [as an adult] because it seems like a waste of time," he continued.

"It's like a well-kept secret, that if you don't realize there's so much to it, you probably would walk right past it."