Reflections on Mahloket Matters: How to Disagree with people you don’t agree with you

Mahloket Matters- How to Disagree Constructively with People who you Don’t Agree With

Rabbi Tobie Weisman

December 30, 2022

It’s November and a very dark cold night here in Vermont. The 110 year old small synagogue is often mistaken as a house since it’s small and unassuming, located on a quiet residential side street in Montpelier, Vermont. Montpelier is the smallest Capital in the U.S., with only 8000 residents. There is no official paid rabbi of the shul, but there are two rabbis who live in Montpelier. One of them is me and the other is Rabbi Shana Margolin. Rabbi Shana moved here about 15 years ago to be the full-time rabbi for a few years and then stayed on when the job ended for lack of funds. Shana grew up Reform and went to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical School and I grew up Conservative and went to a trans denominational rabbinical school called the Academy for Jewish Religion. Although we have very different outlooks on Judaism, we have been learning together on the phone (now on Zoom) weekly for the past 16 years with a wonderful friend who is a Boyaner Hassid, a follower of the Boyaner Rebbe in Jerusalem. We learn Hassidic commentaries on the Torah portion and Jewish holidays. Sometimes Shana and I learn on our own as well which we love to do. After taking a class taught by Pardes Institute faculty called Mahloket Matters, a text-based series on how to constructively speak with people you don’t agree with, I asked Shana to co-teach the class to anyone in our shul who wanted to attend.  Pardes gave me a mini-grant to offer the Mahloket Matters series to 15 people. 15 people was unattainable. That would only happen if we had a well-known guest teacher. We would be lucky to get 4-6 people with a community of less than 100 members. Text study is not  “their thing“!  We asked people to register but we got about 4 people to registration and some of them called in sick.  

We were nervous. What was going to happen tonight? We did advertise that we would bring good food to share thinking that would be a draw on a cold evening at 5:30-7pm.

We were so relieved when people started to show up! Only six people showed up the first night, but that was a huge win. We decided not to scare people off by splitting them into Hevrutot, study partners. Everyone seemed to have a great time! When we asked who was planning to come back, everyone raised their hand. The next week, we had double the participation. People came who were Jewish and not Jewish but interested in the topic. Since it was at the shul, people who were “regulars” ran to get copies of the Torah to share with their Hevrutot, their study partners and look up the sources for more in-depth insights.

By the third class, we had someone who came early to set up the tables, others to set up the food and copies of the Humashim, Torah texts. People came on time and were excited to be together again. We would have Hevrutah, partner time followed by group time. During the third session, people started sharing about difficult times with their families. Nobody wanted to leave.  It didn’t matter if people were Jewish or not or if they had any Torah learning background or not. Everyone wanted to share their opinions and everyone’s opinions were respected. We were all sad when the five weeks were over. We are now in the process of collecting people’s feedback and are looking for ways to continue learning together soon.  I am so grateful that the Pardes Institute encouraged me to offer this series because it showed me that people really do want to get together to learn from Jewish sources on how to live more connected lives. The Mahloket Matters series shows how deeply each generation of Jewish leaders thought about important life issues. The topic Mahloket Matters is compelling to people because who doesn’t want to learn how to better engage with people we don’t agree with in a constructive way? No one is an expert on life’s challenges! We all can grow in our learning.

I can’t wait for the next opportunity to learn together!