Our students’ lives are complex and filled with a range of struggles. In our Limudei Kodesh classrooms, we have the opportunity to build students’ emotional strength and their personal connection to the Torah by focusing on the Biblical narrative’s insights into personal development and emotional experience. In this session, we will explore approaches to integrating serious Tanakh and parshanut study with a perspective that foregrounds students’ emotional worlds. We will discuss examples of important themes that can be developed through Tanakh study, such as: guilt and shame, development of personal identity, and the nature of grief and joy, with an eye to developing a methodology for curriculum planning that incorporates awareness of high school students’ emotional reality.
