Avidan Halivni is a professional matchmaker. As associate director of the Chicago-based Jewish Learning Collaborative, he helps people to find a suitable Jewish tutor..

The rabbis of antiquity counselled in Ethics of the Fathers to “get yourself a teacher” - and JLC is a modern way of doing it.

It began as an initiative of Moishe House, the worldwide network that subsidises groups of young Jews in different cities to live in a house in return for putting on Jewish activities for their peers.

It began, he explained, as an “informal experiment” within Moishe House to provide tailor-made opportunities for its activists because the in-house educational resources couldn’t always meet their needs. From Moishe House it has now spread to other organisations, serving their lay leaders and professional staff.

What is critical is matching learners with the right mentor. “More so than any content piece that brings people together, the relationship has to be there. This is a form of chavruta,” he said, referring to the time-old Jewish tradition of studying with a partner.

Learners do not simply fill out a form, they have a personal session with a JLC member who “listens to their story and makes recommendations for educators”.
So far the initiative has clocked up over 13,000 hours of learning with nearly 690 learners across 40 organisations in four years. “Limmud UK - and some of the volunteers and staff - is our first international partner,” he said. Also about to come on board are Yesod Europe, the continental arm of the Joint Distribution Committee.

Learners pair up for six months, a year, or more, meeting regularly from weekly to monthly. They can switch topics or educators if they wish. It is about “establishing a practice of ongoing learning for the leaders of the Jewish community as a statement of value,” he said. In Judaism, ‘we are lifelong learners — this is not something you graduate from,get a gold star and you have maxed out.”

Halivni himself has a Jewish day school and yeshivah background, who worked as an informal educator in Jewish summer camps and later spent two years in Berlin with the Masorti movement.

While some JLC’s learners have a strong Jewish background like him, others may have felt ambivalent about their Jewish education, while others may have had little or no Jewish learning. A significant percentage of the workforce in the Jewish community, he noted, are not Jewish and may welcome the chance to understand the fundamentals of Judaism.

Some people may come with specific requests, such as to study from a different perspective than what they have previously experienced before. Someone might say they have never studied the parashah with a woman before or “I want to learn with a queer educator”.

The take-up of the programme reflects a growing demand. “I think millenials, people of Generation Z [he is 28] are looking for a language to express what they feel is going on around them, to make sense of the world And Jewish texts, Jewish learning, chavruta study can offer that language to engage these tough ideas, and to engage the tradition… I think increasingly people are looking towards a religious vernacular to do that.”

Even self-defined progressives, he believes, who maybe in a previous generation “would have disavowed any sort of religious frameworks are looking towards some aspect of the tradition to frame their understandings of the world… and Jewish learning is an outlet for that.”

Limmud Festival begins on December 20. For more details, see limmud.org/festival