Reimagining Rabbinical Education: Hebrew Union College’s Integrative Curriculum for the 21st Century

On the first full day of Hanukkah, on the fifth floor of Hebrew Union College's New York campus, Rabbi Wendy Zierler, Ph.D. conducts the final Jewish Textural Interpretation (JTI) class of the semester. After a 20-minute discussion of the laws regarding Hanukkah (Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayyim 670:1), the students break for a discussion period to "make meaning" of the Talmudic passage that is the foundation of the later conversation (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 21b). They will gather again later in the day to further discuss and share ideas.

This class, or combination of classes, is the brainchild of Rabbis Joseph Skloot, Ph.D. and Dvora Weisberg, Ph.D., born out of a reassessment of the rabbinical school curriculum at the College.

As Hebrew Union College approached its 150th anniversary, it launched a transformative rabbinical school curriculum designed to meet the complexities of contemporary Jewish life. Rooted in what President Andrew Rehfeld, Ph.D. calls "applied Jewish wisdom," this renovation represents the institution's most comprehensive educational reimagining in decades-one that prioritizes integration over compartmentalization, outcomes over credit accumulation, and flexibility over rigid requirements.

The initiative emerged from a 2022 Board of Governors mandate to "revitalize our seminary." Under then-Provost Rabbi Andrea Weiss's, Ph.D. leadership, a faculty task force embarked on an extensive listening campaign, gathering insights from faculty, students, alumni, and Jewish leaders nationwide. What emerged was a clear verdict: stakeholders expressed concern about uncertainty surrounding the modern rabbinate and the need for a curriculum to better meet the needs of the contemporary rabbinate, with even more integration between classroom theory and practical application.

The curriculum's approach is grounded first and foremost in what its architects call "integrative rabbinical education"-a deliberate synthesis of scholarly rigor with professional practice. As Rabbis Skloot and Weisberg explain in a forthcoming article for the CCAR Journal, the approach "drives toward the formation of rabbis as whole persons, rather than the completion of requirements." Rather than treating textual study and pastoral care as separate domains, the new design weaves them together throughout students' learning, rejecting any "dichotomy between theory and practice" while encouraging learning that connects classroom and field, mind and soul.

Weisberg explains it this way. "Originally, a student would have a class in Bible. And then, that same student would go to a class in Midrash, where a different professor, trained in a different discipline, would teach them how the early rabbis read and interpreted the Bible. And we thought-rabbis don't actually operate like this. We don't think about the Torah on the page without considering what anybody thought about it throughout history."

Almost everyone interviewed for this piece emphasized that this was, in a sense, a move closer to a classical yeshiva model of rabbinical education. Rabbi Zierler explains that in the middle to end of the 19th century, under the aegis of the Wissenschaft des Judentums- the scientific study of Judaism - there was a backlash in the Reform movement against the "rabbinic mode". Rabbis became historically grounded critical scholars. But they also ceased developing skills in rabbinic texts, which were so foundational in the development of Jewish culture and practice in the Diaspora as well as the Land of Israel.

Skloot and Weisberg, indeed all of the faculty, strive to ensure that the curriculum stays true to the College's Reform venerated roots, both in method and content. It assumes graduates will serve as teachers of Torah across diverse contexts rather than strictly as legal scholars. Its multidisciplinary nature celebrates creative and spiritual contributions across all Jewish eras, a hallmark of Reform Judaism.

Ambitiously, Alyssa Gray, J.D., Ph.D. (and Zierler's JTI co-teacher in New York), says "we are working with texts and motifs from these canonical literatures in order to create new Jewish culture."

The early years of the rabbinical school core curriculum for campus-based students center on foundational outcomes: fluency in Hebrew and Aramaic texts, skillful worship facilitation, critical textual analysis, personal theological development, and pastoral care grounded in Jewish ethics. The Year-In-Israel program (YII) remains central, immersing students in Hebrew language, Israeli history and culture, and foundational concepts that anchor subsequent stateside learning.

The curriculum introduces an innovative structure for students in New York and Los Angeles. Each semester begins with weeklong intensives that allow deep immersion in specific subjects. The flagship Jewish Textual Interpretation (JTI) course meets daily in two blocks: beit midrash sessions for differentiated language instruction and textual preparation, followed by seminars integrating insights across disciplines. Co-taught by faculty from different fields-Bible scholars collaborating with rabbinics experts, legal scholars working alongside literature professors-JTI embodies the curriculum's multidisciplinary ethos. Students engage texts not only analytically but also homiletically, theologically, and pastorally, composing divrei Torah and wrestling with enduring questions.

As Kristine Garroway, Ph.D. explains, "the aspirational thing that we're trying to get the students to do is to be able to make connections. We try to make those connections as transparent as possible. So rather than taking a first semester Torah class and a second semester Mishnah or reception class like Josh (Garroway, her co-JTI teacher in Los Angeles) would teach, now we're teaching them at the same time so that they can see very obviously how those things talk to each other."

Are the students getting that connection? Dr. Gray believes they are. She offers a small vignette to drive that point home. "A famous medieval scholar comments on a small passage in which a Talmudic sage notes that "Bavel" (Babylonia) resembles the Hebrew word "balul" (mixed up). "Bavel" mixes up Bible, Mishnah, and other learning. The medieval scholar connects this to "our" Talmud Bavli, where all this learning is noticeably mixed together. When I brought this to the class's attention, a student lit up and said, "aha, that's JTI!" That's it exactly, it's bringing it all together. It combines the past, the present and we're asking questions of the texts that scholars would have asked or do ask in the academy, but we're also asking questions of the text that students will need to be asking in their roles as rabbis."

One student in Los Angeles recalled that "JTI is, by far, the course I have learned the absolute most from. I can't imagine the program without this course to initially immerse us in Midrash, Parshanut, Reception Text, and Torah - it is because of JTI more than anything that I feel equipped to teach at my pulpit and advance my Jewish study on my own."

It's a significant endeavor to develop a new course, particularly one that meets eight times a week and requires two faculty members to run it effectively. Attendance for the students becomes critical. The course is built around hevruta study - with a partner or two - and this allows faculty members to model this type of study. But the professors, who have other commitments and time constraints, are stretched. Dr. Zierler maintains that she's as much a student as teacher in the beginning stages of this experiment. "Alyssa and I sweated blood for a semester. We worked incredibly hard to be able to bring this to the students, but I also got something out of it. I learned a ton - to teach and learn alongside one another and to be study partner and student of Alyssa's - how often do we get to learn together that way?"

Rabbi Weisberg agrees. "Teaching can sometimes be a very lonely profession. I personally think one of the advantages for us is the opportunity to work with someone else. Whoever you're working with will be grounded in something you are not and it's exciting to look at things you've been studying for years and see them from a different perspective, learn them in a different way. For me, that's worth a lot."