Jews In Portland Go Online To Study The Talmud New York Seminary Offers Internet Course Being Taken By 90 People Around The World

The centuries-old writings of Jewish civil and religious law called the Talmud are just a click away on the Internet.

Members of a southwest Portland congregation, Havurah Shalom, are clicking away and enhancing their studies by interacting with one another and Jewish scholars around the world on the information superhighway.

“It’s very gratifying,” Rabbi Joseph Wolf said, “to get online and see seven comments from people in my congregation, arguing about something they never would have had a chance to get their hands on before. They are grappling with the real material.”

With Wolf’s guidance, 36 members of his congregation have enrolled in an online adult education course offered by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Wolf said the Internet is a particularly useful forum for studying the Talmud, which is best understood through a series of questions and answers and vigorous debate over its meaning.

The 24-week course is the first anywhere on the Internet that teaches the Talmud not only in English but also with links to the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts, said Michael Starr, distance learning project manager for the seminary.

First offered last month, the course costs $200. Through a gift from a benefactor, the price was reduced to $150 for members of Portland’s Havurah Shalom.

A total of 90 people are enrolled, including some from Great Britain, South Africa, China, Venezuela and Ecuador.

The curriculum is presented online by Rabbi Joel Roth, a master teacher of the Talmud who recently discussed Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, which began Tuesday at sundown.

How did Hanukkah begin? The celebration dates from 165 B.C. when the Jews of Judea, led by Judas Maccabee, defeated their Syrian oppressor, Antiochus IV. At the end of the three-year struggle, the Jews gathered in the temple in Jersusalem to give thanks.

The Talmud, written several centuries later, recounts how the Jews found only one small jar of oil with which to light the holy lamps that were supposed to be kept burning in the temple at all times.

Miraculously, the oil in the small jar lasted for eight days.