There is something magical about adults learning in a group.  It is a great relief to set aside our daily experience of being the “experts” at what we do professionally and relinquish intellectual guidance to someone else.  It is enlightening to hear the leader’s wisdom and to hear the wisdom born of the experiences of our peers.  It is exhilarating to be challenged to think harder, feel more intensely, and make intuitive connections between today and times past.  It enhances our sense of Jewishness to wrangle with difficult concepts and explore more deeply areas that we may have only touched upon in previous years of learning.

At the graduation ceremony and luncheon at Hebrew College, we could hardly believe we had spent two years studying together and that subsequent Wednesdays would not find us in one synagogue or another learning, laughing, and enjoying physical and mental sustenance. As satisfying as the Meah experience was, at its conclusion we felt like we all needed and wanted more.  A check-off list sent around at graduation showed us that virtually everyone wanted to continue learning together.

Hot summer evenings found a small committee of us planning out a curriculum, designing a program, committing to conducting the sessions ourselves, and laying out a calendar of meetings that we hold approximately monthly at the Federation offices.  We decided to run our post-Meah project ourselves, taking responsibility for our own learning and teaching and limiting our studies in this first year chronologically from Bereshit through Maimonides. 

During our first meeting in October, we studied parashah Ki Tetse and tried to puzzle out why this parashah has more commandments than any other during the year (72 commandments).  We used commentaries drawn from various mainstream sources (thanks to the Internet) and tried many different combinations of commandments to find coherent themes.  Many people commented at the conclusion of the evening that they had never actually thought about the parashah in this depth, despite having read it annually for many years.

Future meetings will focus on elements of the book of Judges, early midrashim, Rashi, the Jewish wanderings from Bible to Medieval times, rabbinics, Maimonides, the Jews and Muslims of Spain, and several other topics.

Gina Vega