By Megan Brumer
A few weeks ago, we had the opportunity to go and study with students at The Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies. Pardes is a co-ed partner based learning community where students can learn and talk about Jewish texts.
When we got to Pardes, we watched a quick video about the school and then split into two groups divided according to which topic we were interested in. I chose to go to the class about Jewish History and Jewish Memory. We were given a packet of sources, and then we went into the Beit Midrash to study in chevruta, in partners. All of us Nachshon participants were paired with Pardes students and we went through each source one by one and talked about it and tried to understand what it meant in the context of our topic. After about 20 minutes of chevruta work, we came back together as a group and discussed each source one by one in the context of our topic.
Growing up, I attended a Jewish Day School so I have had experience with learning in chevruta before, but being at Pardes reminded me how helpful it is to learn in that type of setting. We were able to bounce ideas off each other, voice different opinions, and work through a text in order to arrive at a deeper meaning of the text than I would have been able to reach on my own. Even though there are more than two or three people in this project, The Nachshon Project is similar to a chevruta. We are able to work together and help each other to understand and explore both Judaism and our own personal Jewish identities.
