Our Approach

OUR APPROACH

"תלמוד גדול שהתלמוד מביא לידי מעשה" 
"Study is greater, as study leads to action"
(Talmud Bavli, Kiddushin 40b)

For a concise overview of what we do, please see the Program Components and Courses pages. 
For details on how and why we do it, please read on.

Fundamental Principles & Elements of Our Approach (scroll down for details)
our niche
program size
core curriculum
First-Year Writing/Seminar as "the core of the core" 
students
faculty
inquiry-driven
writing-intensive
seminar format
the conversation model
real & contextualized
interdisciplinarity & Yisrael Bishlaymuto
Torah Bishlaymutah
paid internships
livnot u'lehibanot: "to build and to be built"
the power of ideas

our niche
Inquiry: Israel is a unique institution.  Although there are many outstanding programs in Israel for American and other anglophone students, our small, selective-enrollment institute is the only one of its kind.  The institute's fundamental mission is to integrate a Torani shana bet beit midrash program with an accredited, core-curriculum, first-year-of-college program whose primary subject matter is Yisrael Bishlaymuto:  Am Yisrael, Torat Yisrael and Machshevet Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, and Medinat Yisrael.
The institute thus provides an innovative option for shana bet, filling a much-discussed niche in the market through its conceptually sophisticated, honors-level, inquiry-driven, and leadership-focused synthesis of continued Torah learning in a Torani environment with for-credit study in the academic disciplines and a powerful, writing-intensive, Israel-centered introduction to academic inquiry.  Our students will have the unique opportunity to pursue continued high-level beit midrash learning while beginning their post-secondary academic studies in a true first-year program -- a deliberate and coherent framework that will train their minds, support intensive personal growth, lay a solid foundation for excellence and leadership in their chosen pursuits, and provide them with meaningful and widely transferable college credits that can fulfill core, major, distribution, writing-intensive, elective, and other curricular requirements. (We aim to develop credit-granting School of Record relationships with several accredited colleges and universities, including a primary affiliation with Bar-Ilan University.)

 program size
          Enrollment is limited to 18 students.  This allows us to select those applicants who we believe will benefit most from the program and who are most likely to form a cohesive group, one that operates on the Rambam's highest level of friendship: colleagues who join together for the sake of a shared, noble objective.  Keeping our enrollment small also enables us, in contrast to mass-market programs, to provide a specialized and uniquely individualized, student-centered, and participatory experience.  All students have scheduled one-on-one weekly meetings with the Institute Director.  Other faculty members hold weekly office hours plus scheduled one-on-one meetings with students throughout the semester.  All student projects arise from the student's own particular interests, questions, perspectives, and preoccupations, and are further developed through collaboration with our faculty.  Keeping our program small is one of our fundamental principles, and it is vital to achieving our objectives.

core curriculum
          While enabling a great deal of individualization, the program's small size simultaneously enables us to take a core-curriculum approach, in which all students take the same courses at the same time.  We focus on key primary sources, and on mastering fundamentals by applying them to special topics; we cultivate broad understanding and a wide range of reference while developing in-depth knowledge and intellectual acuity by drawing connections between seemingly discrete areas of inquiry; our second-semester conceptual rubric (Am Yisrael, Machshevet Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, Medinat Yisrael -- the Jewish People, Jewish Thought, the Land of Israel, the State of Israel) is a powerful organizing principle that enables us to closely analyze interrelated issues from a variety of textual and disciplinary perspectives.  Our core-curriculum approach also reinforces the effect of the program's size in promoting a ruach kvutzah (group spirit, esprit de corps): a powerful coherence and deep sense of community and common purpose, which extends far beyond the classroom.

First-Year Writing/Seminar as "the core of the core" 
          Our first-year writing course is simultaneously rigorous and exploratory, and it serves several key functions that together make it a powerful catalyst for intellectual and personal growth.  At its most fundamental level, it approaches the writing process as an inquiry-driven thinking process -- not merely a recording or publicizing process -- and it functions thereby as an introduction to academic inquiry.  Some of the general objectives in this regard are developing and refining real "figuring-something-out" questions and strong hypotheses; evaluating, using, and integrating sources; distinguishing between sources of supporting evidence, sources of complicating evidence, and sources of material useful for developing new approaches to the evidence; analyzing evidence closely and in adequate detail; and revising for substance and editing for correctness.  These objectives and their various constituent skills are the intellectual "moves," or habits of mind, that provide a foundation for the writing-intensive nature of the program as a whole. 
          All too often, the first-year writing course ("English 101") is at best a missed opportunity: instructors frequently impose topics and approaches based on their own personal whims or ideologies and, in many cases, do not fully exploit the course's potential to serve as a first-year seminar and an introduction to analytical inquiry.  In contrast, at Inquiry: Israel, we encourage students to develop their analytical and rhetorical abilities through the work of constructing projects that arise out of what they are learning and encountering both inside and outside the classroom.  Building on this starting point -- the lines of inquiry that are arising for the students based on their own experiences and preoccupations -- we move through a sequential series of exercises and essays that use close and precise analysis to think through real conceptual and/or practical problems, draw connections between various bodies of knowledge and inquiry, and engage in conversation with other thinkers and practitioners who share those interests.  Student projects in the course can pursue various kinds of inquiry: personal, academic and professional, religious and spiritual, political, scientific, cultural, and others, and various combinations of these categories.
          In this way, the course serves as a conceptual center for students' experiences in Israel, enabling them to use the writing process as a framework within which to actively, substantively, and thoroughly reflect on, analyze, and think through what they are learning and encountering both inside and outside the classroom.  The course thereby serves a grounding, centering function, providing students with ways to think carefully and deliberately about their experiences and how they will respond to and integrate them as they go about the vital work of clarifying and refining their identities, goals, and plans.  The course does not, however, "try to bite off more than it can chew."  Rather than seeking instant or all-encompassing answers, it emphasizes an inductive approach, guiding students to narrow their focus and work incrementally, pursuing precise lines of inquiry that can, over time, be assembled together into a larger set of conclusions.
          Click here to see examples of student projects from previous versions of the course.

students
We seek mature, motivated, inspired students who themselves seek meaningful lives of vision, excellence, and achievement, and who have strong commitments to service and leadership grounded in a lucid apprehension of identity and heritage and in an equally clear-eyed pursuit of learning, study, ideas, and inquiry.  As Inquiry: Israel is a shana bet program, our students will have spent the prior year learning full-time in yeshiva and will be ready to dig in from the outset, to consolidate and build upon the foundation laid in shana aleph; we are committed to doing our utmost to guide them as they continue advancing toward their objectives.

 faculty
          Our faculty combines advanced academic training and yeshiva learning.  Some of our instructors have semikha (rabbinic ordination), all have MA degrees, and some have PhDs (and some who have MAs are currently working on their PhDs).  They are experts in the subjects they teach, and actively involved in their fields.  All of them are committed to serving as mentors, to the program's educational philosophy and methods, and to our fundamental belief in the power of ideas and inquiry to shape the future of Am Yisrael.

inquiry-driven
          Our students are brimming with questions and the spirit of inquiry and discovery.  What are they thinking through, reflecting on, and "burning" to figure out?  How can we most productively engage these preoccupations and priorities?  Where do these interests intersect with those of the larger community?
          In order to support our students in their quest to build lives of excellence and achievement for themselves and for Am Yisrael, we base our pedagogical model firmly upon the Jewish tradition of analytical inquiry, active engagement, and close attention to detail.  Each aspect of our curriculum -- semester arcs, assignment sequences, student projects, individual class meetings, and one-on-one meetings with faculty -- is grounded squarely in the process of figuring something out.  This process of developing real questions, and then thinking through and developing answers to those questions, encourages real and relevant work in which the student has a genuine interest, is a powerful catalyst for student engagement and growth, and makes for a uniquely challenging, rewarding, and student-centered experience.  

writing-intensive
          We approach the inquiry-driven writing process as a thinking process -- a powerful means of developing, clarifying, exploring, and engaging ideas, of honing the student's ability to think analytically, creatively, precisely, and flexibly, and of refining the intellectual skills and mental habits that characterize a well-educated person and a well-trained mind.  This approach to writing is one of the pillars of our pedagogy and our curriculum.

seminar format
          Our second-semester courses are conducted as seminars, and a good deal of the first semester uses this approach as well, in combination with other active formats.  A seminar is neither lecture nor "discussion section" nor shiur.  Seminars take place around a conference table, and they encourage an active, engaged, "think-tank" ethos, and the understanding by students that what they are doing matters and is of vital significance.  The conversation is not a series of dialogues between individual students and the instructor, each initiated by a raised hand or by the instructor calling on one of the students; it is, rather, a group endeavor in which each student engages with the others as well as with the instructor.  The aim is to engage closely and proactively with the texts in order to understand them, the questions they raise, and their implications for the various issues under consideration.

the conversation model
          The gemara and academia both place great emphasis on the conversation model.  Central to both modes of inquiry is the understanding that one who investigates a question or advances a thesis is by and large not plowing unbroken ground but rather joining a conversation that has been ongoing for some time, amongst a community of others who have similar interests and are pursuing related projects.  This understanding emphasizes working with sources and colleagues, synthesizing various perspectives, and doing real work by entering into real conversations ongoing in various fields.  Inquiry: Israel shares this understanding and much of our program is based upon it, including the kind of writing we teach, our use of the seminar format, and our second-semester Public Conversations series.

real & contextualized
          The Public Conversations series is one way in which the program engages real, current issues and contextualizes its work within a network of thinkers and practitioners who are pursuing related lines of inquiry into these issues.  Another, of course, is our classes, which include various guest speakers who share their expertise and perspectives, as well as field encounters with policymakers and public officials, archaeologists, rabbis and legal authorities, scientists, activists, artisans and business owners, and others who are currently active in our areas of interest.  On the whole, our program examines Israel (the people, thought, land, and state) as a set of primary texts: the material that we will seek to understand more deeply and more thoroughly through the lenses of key Jewish texts and various disciplinary tools.  This approach ensures that students see their studies as relevant and vital, and it facilitates strong student engagement.

interdisciplinarity & Yisrael Bishlaymuto
We learn constitutive Jewish texts and various disciplinary concepts first of all for their own sake, and we also put these studies into action by using the material as a set of lenses through which to analyze current issues, problems, and questions within and across our four overarching subject-matter categories (Israel: people, thought, land, and state).  In this way, we engage a range of disciplinary approaches as well as Yisrael Bishlaymuto (Israel in its entirety):  Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, Torat Yisrael and Machshevet Yisrael, and Medinat Yisrael. 
These categories provide an incisive framework for grappling with the complexities inherent in issues that span and intersect across disciplinary boundaries, such as demographic issues in the Jewish People and in the State of Israel, or how Jewish political thought and regional geographic and economic differences inform the question of proportional versus direct representation in the Knesset, or the role of halakha in addressing interrelated ecological, urban-planning, transportation, and public-health issues.  Students' work in the First-Year Writing/Seminar is naturally interdisciplinary, as they systematically deepen their engagement with the range of their experiences in Israel, and develop projects that inquire simultaneously into the experiences themselves as well as their personal, professional, spiritual, and intellectual resonances.  The Public Conversations series brings together various disciplinary and practical perspectives on particular issues addressed in coursework.
On the whole, our program aims at understanding things in and of themselves as well as the interconnections between them, identifying points of contact and overlap as well as conflict, understanding and harmonizing various perspectives, and, ultimately, at giving our students a sense of coherence: an understanding of what things are, what makes them different from each other and also how they fit together, and where each individual student might find a place and a role within the larger scheme of things. 

Torah Bishlaymutah
In keeping with this overarching theme of coherence and wholeness, just as we seek to engage Yisrael Bishlaymuto, so too do we pursue Torah Bishlaymutah.  This approach understands Torah as the constitution, legal code, morasha, and mesorah of a sovereign Am Yisrael and accordingly, our curriculum draws on the full range of sifrei kodesh and machshevet Torah to guide not only the student's individual development and personal growth, but also our collective engagement with contemporary issues and policy in Medinat Yisrael.

paid internships
          One way in which students are able to tailor the program to their interests, and another example of our commitment to an applied curriculum, is our internship program, which places students at some of Jerusalem's leading institutions in a range of fields corresponding to those studied in our courses.  The internships are paid for two reasons:  one, we believe that paying and being paid encourages all parties to take the internship seriously; two, apart from volunteering, acts of chesed, and other voluntary efforts, we do not believe in unpaid labor.  We cooperate with the hosting institutions to ensure that these internships are substantive opportunities that will advance our students toward their goals.
          Inquiry: Israel makes it a priority to introduce and connect students to resources of various kinds, as appropriate for each individual.  The internship program is one means toward this end, which we also pursue in smaller ways throughout the year as we seek to widen our students' horizons in tangible ways and equip them with various knowledge and tools that will be useful in refining and achieving their goals.

livnot u'lehibanot: "to build and to be built"
          Livnot u'lehibanot was a central concept of the chalutzim (pioneers of the State of Israel) and remains an important tenet of Israeli thought.  In its understanding of the reciprocal nature of individual and communal/national development and flourishing, it is also a concept shared more widely, in fields such as psychology and public policy.  Our fundamental objective is always to catalyze and guide our students' intellectual and personal growth, and we also believe that education is best understood and pursued within a larger social context -- as part of the work of the community & the nation.  Our program aims to facilitate our students' efforts to engage with the world in a deliberate, meaningful, and sustained way as individuals, professionals, and members of a community -- and we believe that in order to be fully achieved, these objectives are best pursued within larger physical and metaphysical frameworks.  Individual education is most effective when supported by and contextualized within a strong community and nation; communal and national flourishing is most likely to be achieved under the leadership of substantively educated individuals with a strong sense of place and context.  We see all of these goals as interdependent.

the power of ideas
We take ideas seriously.  We believe that ideas matter.  We are committed to learning lishmah, to our core-curriculum approach, and to avoiding premature vocationalism -- to the power of ideas, learning, and inquiry to shape the individual. 
We also believe that ideas have consequences beyond the individual, that they fundamentally shape the community, the nation, and the world.  We believe that ideas are in fact practical -- and so we believe in applying them to the world beyond the classroom to engage real, current issues and problems. 
We see great, enduring ideas, and a culture imbued with them and built upon them, as integral to each student's work of self-development and self-government, and as the foundation for truly strategic communal and national leadership -- and, it bears repeating, we view individual and communal flourishing as inextricably reciprocal processes. 
We believe, ultimately, that all our efforts toward these ends must be grounded firmly in deep engagement with Jewish ideas and inquiry, Jewish texts and conversations, Jewish wisdom and values, and Jewish heritage and vision.