What Do Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook and English Have in Common?

by Dr. Vitela Arzi- Head of the English Department, Elkana Campus

Each year, Orot staff and administration focus on a general theme that is incorporated into students' education studies. This year, thirty years after the passing of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda HaCohen Kook Zt”l, Orot Israel College is focusing on the life and legacy of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda. The selection of this topic has created a new challenge for the English Department, where we preach and practice the integration of the “sacred” with the “secular,” as we firmly believe that relevant Jewish content should be integrated into the teaching of English, and that our English lessons should be enhanced by educational, cultural and Jewish values.

Over the past few years, the English Department has developed learning centers, units of study, activities and games on uniquely Jewish themes such as “Shmita, ”  “the Jewish Diaspora,” “Jewish Leadership,” “Light the Candles Project,” “Jewish Identity,” “Dedication and Shlichut,” “Jerusalem,”  “Matan Torah- Am Israel and the Nations,”  and many more. These activities, projects and modules, supervised by pedagogy instructor Dr. Chaya Katz, transformed abstract esoteric concepts into concrete visual, auditory and sensory-motor experiences, which were then integrated into our Practicum Teaching, and were highly appreciated by the training schools in Rosh Ha’ayin, Ofra, Petach Tikva, and Ra’anana.
When a theme is selected and declared to be an Annual Educational Topic, the staff of the English department gathers for a brainstorming session and proposes specific applications of this theme to our various courses. Usually, the students who benefit from these ideas are those students majoring in English, who are slated to become English language teachers themselves and will be able to adapt the pedagogic principles they have been taught to their own future classes.
This year, however, we decided to expand our target population, and introduce the annual theme into courses of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). These EAP courses are mandatory for all students in academic institutions for the purpose of improving students’ English reading comprehension skills, thus enabling our majority non-English-speaking student population to tackle academic texts required for their seminar papers and ongoing academic work. Students are placed in five levels based on their psychometric test scores.
Two reading-comprehension Modules have been prepared for the low, intermediate, and pre-advanced levels by Mrs. Mona Schreiber, Dr. Smadar Falk-Perez, Mr. David Wapner, Mrs. Hannah Kessler, Mrs. Tzilla Rabinovitz, and Dr. Bat Sheva Keren. One Module focuses on Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda’s biography, while the other focuses on his observance and spiritual legacy. The Modules are based on existing texts that were abridged, modified and edited by the instructors for teaching purposes. Suitable questions were prepared based on the content of the texts and the pedagogical goals of the modules.
From a purely academic point of view, the texts and the accompanying questions provide opportunities for practicing English-language skills such as main idea, details, pronoun references, new vocabulary and more. Yet content-wise, the texts provide an ideal opportunity to discuss significant issues such as Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda’s vision, his view on the Divine commandment to settle the Land of Israel, his attitude toward the State of Israel, the study and editing of his father’s writings, the history of the settlement movement and the “hesder” yeshivot.
The EAP staff feels that preparing reading comprehension modules for EAP courses is particularly advantageous.  Not only will more students be exposed to the Annual Educational Topic in English, but the idea that English can be incorporated across the curricula will hopefully have long-lasting effects.  We hope that our current students, who will become educators and educational leaders, will develop a more positive attitude towards English once they realize how it can be utilized beneficially to promote a variety of educational themes. Hopefully, in their own future schools, in their various educational roles, perhaps even as school principals, those teachers will be supportive of combined interdisciplinary “sacred-secular” programs and initiate collaboration with English teachers at their prospective schools.
Our graduates will thus become messengers of Orot Israel’s educational philosophy according to which the so-called “secular” subjects can co-exist harmoniously with “sacred” topics since such a synthesis is desirable, possible and attainable.