Page 8 - Demo

By RABBI MICHAEL SHIRE, PH.D.
TORAH GODLY PLAY: Godly Play for Jewish Education
I rst met Jerome in Houston in the late 1980s. I was a doctoral student in Religious Education at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and had fallen in love with a rabbinic student whose home town was Houston! We would visit Marcia’s parents in Houston each summer and stay for a month. Having explored the city, its environs and all the museums, there was little left to do, and I was looking for action!! It came to me that having read some of Jerome’s articles on religious education (particularly Life Maps: Conversations on the Journey of Faith) and noting that he was resident in Houston, I might well get to meet him and talk religious education. Jerome was gracious enough to invite me to Christ Church Cathedral in Houston, and we sat on the oor with wooden objects all around him. I had no idea what I was about to experience, and it was a transformative experience. A rst Godly Play story— particularly if told by Jerome—is a life-altering experience. There was something in the experience that I had never experienced before and yet had always been searching for. I had grown up in a liberal Jewish household in Birmingham, England and committed myself to Jewish education as my career—but nothing in my Jewish Education paralleled that
spiritual experience and lled me with such wonder and delight. Suddenly my Torah came alive in a whole new way, and having studied faith development and religious growth, I realized that here was a methodology that combined inner consciousness with religious language and sacred story. As a teacher, I wanted to share it with others.
Marcia and I moved back to the UK, and I became the national director of Jewish Education for 65 synagogues and Jewish day schools. It was a busy time, but I managed each summer on our visits back to Houston to get some time with Jerome and Thea, including glorious long lunches at his favorite Italian restaurants! In the UK, I had become involved with a group of interfaith religious educators (ISREV) and was invited to their conference. Jerome had been invited to speak, and I seem to remember his topic was ‘laughter’. I sat next to a young woman who was as excited as I was to hear him. We were both writing up our doctoral dissertations, and remarkably our topics and research designs were quite similar. It was the beginning of a long and rm friendship with Rebecca Nye and her family. Rebecca and I discussed the possibility of inviting Jerome back for a Godly Play
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the CIRCLE | SEPTEMBER 2017