Fourth in a series on people and places fostering commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people.

As enrollments in educational programs for younger Jews have mostly declined or remained static, adult study has become a growth industry. Many courses are developed locally by individual rabbis and teachers; but the field is also being transformed by curricula designed for multiple settings. Among the best known are the two-year Wexner Heritage seminars, the Meah program sponsored by the Boston Hebrew College, and the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School developed by the Hebrew University.  Among the least acknowledged is the biggest: the Jewish Learning Institute (JLI) of Chabad. Last year, in the U.S. alone, JLI enrolled over 42,000 individuals at over 250 settings, or several times more than all the other national programs combined.

Operating out of an office in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, JLI is a highly coordinated enterprise. The staff, overseen by Rabbi Efraim Mintz, develops and packages each course, pre-tests materials, produces workbooks that are distributed to each student, prepares promotional materials for use by Chabad centers, and keeps close tabs on teachers and students. Each course lasts for six weekly sessions; for the convenience of travelers, each unit is taught during the same week at every location both in America and around the globe.

Perhaps most remarkably, every instructor is required to attend an annual week-long conference to master new courses and review pedagogical methods.  The challenge, Mintz says, "is to get teachers who are used to frontal teaching"—i.e., lecturing—"to teach otherwise." "Otherwise" means limiting lectures to no more than 60 percent of each 90-minute session, leaving the rest of the time for discussion, debate, and even role-playing. Mintz has also developed an online study hall for instructors to share techniques, and Facebook and Twitter pages to link students with each other.

Since its inception in 1998, JLI has developed 37 separate six-week courses. The most popular have been on Jewish thought, law, and mysticism, but this past year the biggest attraction was "Biblical Reflections," which filled the average class with 55 students. Mintz is especially proud of the effort to shape courses that will address students' "multiple intelligences" and diverse learning styles.

In a Boca Raton, Florida synagogue that I visited, some 25 men and women sat around a large seminar-style table and vigorously debated the proper balance that a leader must strike between humility and self-assertion. To spark discussion, the teacher, Rabbi Moshe Denburg, employed a Power Point presentation and a workbook, Portraits of Jewish Leadership, presenting relevant talmudic texts in the original Hebrew or Aramaic accompanied by English translation.

The first session of this course was devoted to the teachings of Hillel the Elder (1st century B.C.E.). Denburg briefly sketched what the traditional sources have to say about that great sage, and then invited the class to respond.  When a student expressed puzzlement over seeming evidence of contradictory behavior on Hillel's part, the rabbi exclaimed that she had turned everything on its head; then he thoughtfully re-examined the material in light of her question. Other students commented on the ethical issues raised by the documents from the perspective of their professional experience as lawyers, physicians, or business people.  

Throughout the discussion, Denburg  was clear about his ultimate purpose: not academic study but inspiration and personal reflection. This emphasis on the existential aspect of learning sets JLI apart from other adult-education curricula. In the words of another instructor, Rabbi David Eliezri, the adults who attend these courses "understand for the first time in their lives how Torah touches on their lives. That knowledge is empowering, and brings change."

Measuring that change is not easy. Clear, however, is that JLI has transformed Chabad itself from a movement emphasizing the idea of a "mitzvah on the run"—donning tefillin or reciting a holiday blessing, for example—to one fostering sustained relationships between educators and learners.  With its claim of having enrolled more than 180,000 individual students over its first dozen years, JLI has drawn all kinds of Jews into the Chabad orbit. Beyond that, it has afforded to a great many Jewish adults the opportunity to reflect, perhaps for the first time, on the meaning of traditional Jewish texts for their own lives. To judge from the stimulated and enthusiastic people gathered in Boca Raton, it has also brought back to the synagogue a significant number of Jews who had been quite distant from any form of religious engagement.  Altogether, an impressive and praiseworthy achievement indeed.