New Yorker About an hour’s drive north of
Seoul, in the Gwangju Mountains, nearly fifty South Korean children pore
over a book. The text is an unlikely choice: the Talmud, the
fifteen-hundred-year-old book of Jewish laws. The students are not
Jewish, nor are their teachers, and they have no interest in converting.
Most have never met a Jew before. But, according to the founder of
their school, the students enrolled with the goal of receiving a “Jewish
education” in addition to a Korean one.
When I
toured the boarding school last year, the students, who ranged in age
from four to nineteen, were seated cross-legged on the floor of a small
tentlike auditorium. Standing in front of a whiteboard, their teacher,
Park Hyunjun, was explaining that Jews pray wearing two small black
boxes, known as tefillin, to help them remember God’s word. He used the
Hebrew words shel rosh (“on the head”) and shel yad
(“on the arm”) to describe where the boxes are worn. Inside these boxes,
he said, was parchment that contained verses from one of the holiest
Jewish prayers, the Shema, which Jews recite daily. As the room filled
with murmurings of the Shema in Korean, the dean of the school leaned
over to me and said that the students recited the prayer daily, too,
“with the goal of memorizing it.”
Park
Hyunjun founded the school in 2013, and now runs it with his son, the
dean. The two were trained at the Shema Education Institute, which was
started by a Korean reverend and brings Christians from South Korea to
Los Angeles, so that they can witness firsthand how Jews study, pray,
and live. The reverend’s thesis is that the Jews have thrived for so
many years because of certain educational and cultural practices, and
that such benefits can be unlocked for Christians if those practices are
taught to their children. During the drive from Seoul, the dean told me
that he was worried about what I would think of his school’s Jewish
classes. “I don’t always know exactly what Jewish education is,” he
said.
In the classroom, the students paired up
for “Talmudic debate.” Their dialectic centered on a paraphrased verse
from Deuteronomy: “Money improperly earned may not be donated to
church.” The room erupted into impassioned pleas and gesticulations,
then two students were chosen to debate in front of the class. Sanguk
Bae, seventeen, sat with one palm on the ground and the other hand
waving a Bible in the air, arguing that the law was the law, and the
Bible was not open to interpretation. Min Kwon, sixteen, countered that
God loves everyone and forgives easily. The class concluded with a
recitation of a psalm.
Outside, over bulgogi, Park Hyunjun laid out the goals behind his
curriculum. “I would like to make our students to be people of God and
to have charity just like Jewish people,” he said. Before I left, the
dean pulled out a crate of Talmud books in Korean that the school used.
There were forty-page books with more cartoons than words and
two-hundred-and-fifty-page books that included lesson plans and study
questions. He conceded that he wasn’t sure if they had “the same concept
of Talmud” as the Jews do. “Our Talmud book,” he said, “is kind of a
story about our life.” [...]
It was hard to imagine South Koreans halfway around the world deriving
any value from this book without a guide like the rabbi at my Jewish day
school. But, as it happens, they do have a guide: a
seventy-eight-year-old rabbi named Marvin Tokayer, who lives in Great
Neck. [...]
