SVARA's name comes from the 2,000-year-old Jewish concept that one’s internal ethical impulse informed by serious Jewish learning—together called svara—is not only a legitimate source of Jewish law, but can even “trump” Torah. Svara has been central to the philosophy and evolution of the Jewish tradition for these two millennia and underlies the unique nature of Jewish thinking itself, but has been, until now, a "secret" guarded by talmudic scholars and rabbis.

In the three and a half years since its founding, hundreds of students have learned at SVARA and participated in its vision through SVARA's year-round weekly shiurim (classes) in Chicago, and intensive weekend and week-long bet midrash programs hosted by Jewish and secular institutions around the country, including The Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies at The Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley, where students receive graduate credit for their courses.

All texts are taught in the original Hebrew/Aramaic, but most classes are open to students who have no experience in Talmud study and minimal Hebrew skills. An ability to decode the Hebrew alphabet (merely sound out the letters) is the minimum requirement for most classes. Students are taught how to use Talmud dictionaries and reference works and given supplementary materials to help them along. Learning is done b’chevruta, in paired partnership, and students learn to master the texts to the point of “ownership.”

At SVARA, we strive to create a space in which folks historically excluded from the tradition can engage in intimate and intense conversation with it—and each other—through serious text study and dialogue. We are a place where complex and challenging issues get brought to the table with love, compassion and honesty. To that end, SVARA works to imagine a just world and strives to model such a world within its walls. We ask its learners to be active participants with us in that act of ongoing creation.

SVARA’S GOALS

1. The serious study of Talmud. To learn how to learn. In order to achieve this goal, a rigorous approach to the acquisition of text skills is followed. Attention is paid to the vocabulary and technical structures of the talmudic sugya as well as to the deeper messages of the Rabbis whose ultimate concern in creating this new tradition and this new record of it—the Talmud—was not so much how to act but, rather, how to think.
2. To help our students gain insight into what is most deeply Jewish about Judaism. In other words, how does the "Jewish system" work? One goal of our learning is to discern—and resuscitate in order to apply to Judaism today—those radical principles of the Jewish tradition which have been long submerged or reserved only for the elite rabbinic class in every generation. The texts we study are, typically, representative examples—and reflections—of the traditionally radical nature of Judaism and the Jewish legal tradition, texts which reveal the deepest values of the Jewish tradition. We attempt to gain insight into the rabbinic mind and the ongoing endeavor of the Jewish tradition, to "upgrade" Torah in every generation. Students witness, firsthand, how courageously and radically this transformation has been carried out over the past two thousand years and how it might continue in this traditionally radical fashion today.
3. To help our students gain the confidence and halachic expertise to enter into the communal Jewish conversation on a sophisticated level. Our hope is to begin to nurture a cadre of queer and not-so-queer "players" who will bring their insights and life experience to bear on the reinterpretation of Judaism today using a "traditionally radical," i.e., Rabbinic, approach.
4. To expose our students to the experience Talmud study as a spiritual practice. While the content of the texts themselves is a crucial component of our learning, the process of learning from the original talmudic texts, b'chevruta (with a study partner), is at the core of the millenia-old spiritual practice known in the Jewish tradition as derech ha-shas, The Way of the Talmud, whose ultimate goal is self-awareness and the ability to access otherwise inaccessible inner truths.
5. To create interpretive communities in which queer and not-so-queer folk can engage with Judaism as a courageous and radical tradition. We hope to inspire and equip our students with the necessary text skills to set up for themselves batei midrash (study halls) in which they can continue to learn on their own to penetrate, challenge, enrich and contribute to the continuity of the evolving Jewish textual tradition—and to be pushed, challenged and enriched by it.

To bring a SVARA-On-The-Road bet midrash program to your community, please contact us at info@svara.org or call (224) 392-8022.