NHC Summer Institute 2009: Days 1.5-2.5

I argue a lot. People who have met me tend to realize this pretty quickly. So I was pretty excited to go to last night’s dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After getting there, though, I had some serious reservations. The session was structured in order to deliberately avoid direct arguing! What would I do? I often feel lost in discussions where there’s no opportunity to challenge people.

But it quickly became clear that the model for this session was very well-planned. Designed and facilitated by the Jewish Dialogue Group, it allowed for participants to state their background and feelings on the issues, and then to engage in what was called a “connected conversation”, where we could respond to each other, but within the constraints of statements about ourselves. We could talk about how we felt about another person’s opinion, but we can’t directly challenge them or ask them for a response, except for clarifying questions. What this leads to is an absence of what on the surface appears to be the only type of probing discussion. However, participating in the discussion, I learned a lot about other points of view, and about the objective facts at issue. The session didn’t, as I had anticipated it might, descend into a bunch of people talking about how they felt with no material evidence in question. Rather, we discussed concrete and applicable concepts.

After the discussion, I spoke with the organizer, and indicated on the email list that I was interested in taking the facilitator training in order to facilitate (obviously) this kind of dialogue elsewhere. I don’t know what the status of Brown’s dialogue on these issues is, but I’m excited to get involved as a participant and potentially a facilitator.

I wrapped up both of my classes today. In the morning, we baked all of the challah for the Institute, and in the afternoon, we finished up by talking about the financial aspect of Shemitah, whereby debts between individuals are forgiven at the end of the Shemitah year. We looked at a recent opinion piece comparing a rabbinical exception to this procedure to Secretary Paulson’s bailout in late 2008.

I’m about to write my first post for Jewschool! If I’ve set everything up correctly, it should show up here as well.

WAHOO!