By Leah Braunstein Levy appeared in the Atlanta Jewish Times

“The goal of these programs is to offer more variety and appeal to a broader cross section of our Middle School students and families,” Ian Ratner, President of the Board of AJA, wrote in a letter to supporters.

Head of School Rabbi Pinchos Hecht is very excited about this new program, which he feels will enable AJA Upper School to better serve their diverse student body.

“At AJA, we know that everyone learns differently, and we believe in teaching every student in the way he or she learns best, as we are charged to do in Proverbs; chanoch l’na’ar al pi darko, ‘teach each child according to his or her own way,’” said Rabbi Hecht. “Therefore, in order to serve the needs of ALL our students, the Judaic Studies curriculum will be divided into two tracks for the 2015-2016 school year. We’re calling the two programs Moreshet Torani (Torah Heritage) and Moreshet Yisrael (Jewish Heritage).”

The Moreshet Torani track will look very much like the traditional Jewish day school Torah curriculum that is currently in place at AJA Upper School, but with more room for a richer Torah and Talmud study experience. The school plans to add more time for intensive Gemara study, and cover more material in Tanach (Chumash, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim) in greater depth. These classes will be offered for both male and female students in separate Judaics classrooms, as is the current practice at AJA Upper School.

“We feel that this will allow us to raise the bar in our Judaics program, preparing AJA Upper School students to shine in even the most academically challenging post-high-school yeshivot and Judaics programs in Israel and the rest of the world,” Rabbi Travis said. “Our job is to ensure that our students are as fully prepared for high-level yeshiva study as they are to enter the world of college academics. However, we are aware that not all of our students find the traditional day school model the best fit.”
For students who view their Torah learning through a different lens, or who connect to Judaism in less traditional ways, AJA will provide the Moreshet Yisrael option. The school also hopes that this will inspire students who enter the Upper School challenged by Hebrew language or traditional text decoding skills.
“Like all our classes at AJA, this track will also be challenging and academically rigorous, and like all our Judaics classes at AJA, Moreshet Yisrael will be built around the traditional texts; but Moreshet Yisrael classes will be more progressive, less text-intensive,” Rabbi Travis said. For these students, AJA has planned Judaics courses that are thematically based rather than a linear study of text, and with the addition of non-traditional sources. The Moreshet Yisrael track will be fully co-ed.

“For example, if we offer a course called “The Ethics of War,” we will still teach our students how to unpack and decode traditional text, with a great deal of focus on Devarim (Deuteronomy), where the Jewish laws on warfare are found,” explained Rabbi Travis. “However, we might add study of the Geneva Conventions, or the rules for martial behavior that have been developed by other societies, to broaden our understanding of how the Torah presents rules to control the chaos of war. Our sources for such a class would not be limited to text study, either. AJA supports co-curricular and cross-curricular learning, and therefore, art projects, secular literature, and even segments from a movie like Saving Private Ryan could be incorporated into our understanding of the big picture of the ethics of war. Our Moreshet Yisrael track will bring far more understanding of Torah to some of our students than comparing Bible commentaries in isolation.”

Classes offered in the new Moreshet Yisrael track will fall into the three disciplines of rabbinic literature (study of Mishnah and Talmud), biblical literature (study of Tanach, including Bible, Prophets, and Writings), and Jewish history.