Adult Education

In May 2021, I was asked to lead a Shavuot themed study for a Hadassah group on Zoom. Because the participants were all women, I chose to focus on Ruth’s agency as a women in Chapter 1 of Megillat Ruth. I was told that some of the participants had extensive Torah study experience while others had none, so I made sure to include a variety of different commentaries and explain everything clearly as we went. We went through the text of Chapter 1 of Megillat Ruth and discussed the different commentaries and what everyone’s opinions were on the texts. The group had asked for a musical component. Most of the women in the group were in their sixties, so I bookended the study with Carole King’s “Where You Lead,” which was familiar to the members of the group and echoes Ruth’s speech to Naomi. Below is the PowerPoint I created for that study.

During the High Holidays in 2020/5781, we were forced to be fully online due to COVID. Temple Beth Shalom decided to look for opportunities to engage with other Treasure Coast synagogues, and one of these opportunities was a Zoom study session on Yom Kippur afternoon. I was tasked with creating a study program for one of these study blocks. As a cantor, I have always been fascinated with the piyyut (liturgical poem) Unetaneh Tokef, with its talk of judgement day and what might happen in the year to come. In addition to COVID, there was a lot of social unrest, and I had seen many rewritings of Unetaneh Tokef from colleagues in an out of the Reform movement as a social justice text. I decided to examine Unetaneh Tokef under this lens using the original text, classical commentaries, and a few of the rewritings that had been making their way around my various circles. I ended the study with the song “Who by Fire” by Leonard Cohen, also a rewriting of Unetaneh Tokef. Members of three different congregations attended this study. Below is the PowerPoint that I created.

In the summer of 2015, I was the student cantor at Congregation Or Hatzafon in Fairbanks, AK. For most of the year, the congregation is a lay-led congregation. As a cantor, I am passionate about Shabbat liturgy, and I wanted to share this passion with the congregation. I created an adult education curriculum of four sessions. The goal of the sessions was twofold: the participants would learn the meaning and history of the Friday evening liturgy, and the participants would learn some melodies for each of the prayers in order to be able to lead services themselves. Below is an outline of the curriculum.