Episode 19: "The Classes" (+) [V]

So. The past three months.

After Ulpan and Egypt, our official classes started up in October. The default for most of us was that Hebrew would continue. The next step for me was Advanced Aleph, which was focused on the tail end of our Hebrew text book and prep for the next level, Bet. I was moving on up, Jeffersons style, and the step forward came with quite a shakeup. I had all new teachers and a lot of new classmates. Honestly, it was pretty hard to deal with the new status quo. I had grown used to our teachers and our group, and by the end of summer we had all grown pretty close. But I did know a lot of the people in my new class, and I did have Becca Kib with me from Ulpan. Remember this girl?

She came over my place to study a lot.

The class itself had kind of a rough start. The teachers, Tali and Anat, were exceptionally nice and great at what they did. The problem was the transition between Ulpan and the semester courses, in terms of pacing and content overlap. During one class, Tali started us off with numbers we had already covered during Ulpan, which pushed my roommate Corina to make the switch out of my class in hopes of finding a more challenging teacher. In the first couple of weeks after she left, I wondered if I should have made the same choice. The pace seemed mind-numbingly slow in our class. But after a while, very gradually, the tempo evened out a bit. It was never as challenging as Ulpan was, but I did end up learning a lot from my teachers.

As for my main classes, there were three. The first was Early Church History, with Dr. Petra Heldt. She'd a wonderfully nice German lady who I happened to meet during one of my excursions with my favorite nun, Dr. Pederson. Petra and Pederson are friends through an ecumenical Christian fraternity in Jerusalem, and first meeting Petra through Pederson was a pleasure. Once Petra and I figured out I was taking her class, I was really excited.

This is her.

The class turned out okay. A major hiccup that I thought the course suffered from was the format. Instead of laying out the groundwork of the emerging church in a chronological, or at least linear order, Petra preferred to take glimpses at different aspects of Christianity in early centuries C.E. Her goal in doing so was to help us put the pieces together to form one larger picture of a changing faith. Her methods were probably wisely chosen, but for me they were somewhat frustrating. I felt I had no definitive ground to stand on in approaching the class material. On top of that, I felt the readings were, a great deal of the time, highly esoteric. I found myself skimming passages that seemed to cater to scholars of Petra's caliber rather than to beginners. This isn't to say it was a bad class; I very much liked Petra and valued her intelligent insights. That said, given the sometimes difficult material and the greater lack of focus, I wasn't always motivated throughout the course.

The second course is my "money" class, the one that was almost 100% consistent in keeping my interest. The title of it was Religious Foundations of Judaism. It was an intro level course that covered the basics of the religion. I was pretty floored by it early on. My teacher, Raphael Jospe, gave us a substantial amount of reading, a good chunk of which was written by him. His writings about Judaism were absolutely amazing. I was so impressed by the humility, compassion and intelligence behind his work. With a couple of his articles I felt that I better understood the religious need for Israel as a homeland and the Jewish sense of being "chosen," all without ever considering his opinions arrogant. His course was taught so well that sometimes I would find myself more awake by the end of class than at the beginning. His lecturing--which was simple, occasionally emphatic, and always interesting--opened up Judaism to me in exactly the way I'd hoped to receive it. This course has definitely had the most meaning for me out of them all.

Jospe teaching during our field trip this December.

And last but not least, The Emergence of Biblical Israel, with Yigal Levin. I had some serious reservations about committing to his class after the first lecture. It was four hours long, more about archaeology than I'd known, the final exam was worth 60% of my grade (scary) and Yigal himself seemed to be extremely dry. The content of the class was pretty much an archaeoligcal/historical look at how the nation of Israel first came to be, and comparing that to what we know from the Bible. I decided to stick with it, and a really encouraging pep talk from my flatmate Roni got me into better spirits about taking the class. In the end, it was one of the most challenging classes I have ever taken.

Although Yigal turned out to be a really cool teacher, I went through a lot of struggle with my faith because of what he taught. He's Jewish, but he had no reservations about asserting his opinion that the Bible was not a historically accurate work of literature. His main deal was scrutinizing the conquest of Canaan (the book of Joshua) and picking apart what didn't work...which actually turns out to be a lot. To tell you the truth, that class may have fundamentally changed how I see my religion. I've talked with a lot of people over the past couple months about how much my faith has suffered from this course. The whole process has not been pretty.

The accidental architect of my faith crisis: Yigal Levin.




This is Yigal explaining an archaeological dig in Tel Aviv.

There was a point at which I had to talk to him about my problem with his class, and he responded well, encouraging me as best he could, I guess. Maybe I'll expound on this one later.

So all in all, classes were a mixed bag. There were highs and lows, but some really great teachers for each of them. I'm glad I took what I did, but right now I'm considering moving on from most, if not all of them (except Hebrew). I've spent a lot of time studying events of antiquity, and zero on Islam, so I might change things up a little bit. We'll see. Regardless, it's been a very informative semester. I'm fortunate to have such amazing opportunities here.

Shalom,
Eric