Celebrating Joshua Pernick

I got to take part in the first Pardes educators trip to Turkey with Rabbi Levi Cooper. I recall talking with one of the teenagers who we worked with on the trip, who pulled me aside to share with me a secret- that he was part of an underground Jewish social club called BBYO. It’s hard to overemphasize how grateful I felt to be learning full-time in an open beit midrash in Jerusalem after coming back from a country where living as a Jew meant living in hiding almost constantly.

Sefer Shmuel with Rabbi Michael Hattin. Michael also knew how to ask the right guiding questions, and in the right way, so that we truly felt like we were creating our own novel interpretations of the texts that we were studying.

Learn Talmud inside. My experience with Talmud study was virtually non-existent before Pardes, and Pardes was the first place I learned to break my teeth with a Jastrow.

Rabbi Tzadok. The man fasted for forty years to stave off the destruction of the Temple. That’s wild! He’s the highlight of every Talmudic story where he appears.

I love being able to bring Torah into spaces where it is absent, both within Jewish communal discourse and in conversations with other communities. When I was recently asked to come onto a local radio program, “Urban Talk Radio”, to talk about Kanye West, and was able to contextualize what we are seeing today with what we witnessed in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, it helped broaden and elevate the conversation. Because, as much as these Biblical stories are ours, they aren’t just ours. Our neighbors are also using them to try to build lives of meaning.

We need to reconnect with our core texts and stories, and have “Torah” rather than “Jewish Identity” serve as the lynchpin around which we construct our Jewish lives and Jewish communities.

Pardes provided a model for Torah-learning as being a bridge builder between people who otherwise might never cross paths with one another. My friend Tani Cohen-Fraade, who also studied together at Pardes, and I got to work right after I arrived here on building a “New Haven Beit Midrash” which is intended to provide Pardes-style learning for our broader New Haven community, some of whom spent a year at Pardes and some of whom have never opened up a traditional sefer in their lives.

Pardes was the place where I first learned to live a life immersed in Jewish text and community. So much of my life since leaving Pardes has been spent trying to replicate the Pardes experience, a place filled with people who looked different and prayed differently, who came from wildly different backgrounds yet were united by a common love of Torah and community.