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A path with great potential for mutual understanding between secular and religious Jews is shared study of Jewish texts. This approach, reflected in several pluralistic batei midrash that flourished in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin's murder, motivates the Elul program, whose 35 centers in Israel bring together Israelis of all stripes to study classical and modern texts.

The name Elul reflects the program's commitment to bringing in multiple perspectives and is an acronym for the talmudic phrase "Elu v'elu," or "These and these are the words of the living God," stated by a divine voice affirming the value of multiple textual interpretations within a legal system.

When Gila Levin, formerly ritual director at the Jewish Center in Princeton and now its interim religious school principal, was looking last year for a serious Jewish text program to bring in "people who we don't usually see," she came upon Elul, whose approach she thought would appeal not just to those already committed to adult Jewish education, but also to secular people who wanted to learn Jewish texts in a pluralistic way.

"They don't want a rabbi to come and tell them, 'This is what it is,'" Levin said. "They want to discuss it in an open way."

When Levin reached out to Elul, she learned that, by happenstance, a woman in the Elul circle, Shira Ben-Sasson-Furstenberg, would be in Princeton for a year with her husband, Yair Furstenberg, a talmudic scholar who would be at Princeton University for the year. As the Jewish Center's Elul class finishes its 20 weeks of mutual study, it will be facilitating congregational, small-group study of Elul texts on the eve of Shavuot.

Ben-Sasson Furstenberg explained the Elul approach she followed at the Jewish Center, which is in some ways similar to the egalitarian approach to Jewish study developed by the havurah movement in the United States.

"There is equality between the participants in the beit midrash," said Ben-Sasson Furstenberg. "The person who teaches or facilitates is not the knower; there is no authority -- not a rabbi or a professor." Furstenberg herself, for example, is a cultural anthropologist.

Another leitmotif of Elul is that Jewish sources are basic for Jewish identity. Using these texts, Elul works to create a pluralistic Jewish language that can reach both religious and secular Jews.

"It was important to own your Judaism, not have it owned only by extreme people like Yigal Amir," said Ben-Sasson Furstenberg. While Elul does respect academic and religious knowledge of Jewish texts, what it values most is accessing the text through personal experience and finding the self in the text. "You understand the text through your inside, not through academic background and religious experience," she explained.

Finally, Elul encourages dialog and creativity in small chevruta learning groups that then bring what they have learned back to the larger group during a "harvest" at the end of each class session.

The study at the Jewish Center focused on the personalities of the Jewish sages of the rabbinic period, although the weekly packets also included modern Hebrew poetry and commentary or even secular materials related to the topic, for example, an essay by Rabbi David Hartmann on tolerance and diversity and a slave narrative by Frederick Douglas on being taught to read by his mistress only to have the master forbid her to continue.

Class member Polly Strauss of Princeton came to the class with a certain amount of trepidation, because she had always found it challenging to look at a text and make sense of it. But the chevruta environment of small group study at Elul opened the texts up for her. "What was most amazing about the whole experience," Strauss said, "is how you can sit with a few of your friends and, if everyone feels comfortable opening up with their thoughts, you can sort of tease out meaning, a word, a phrase, or a sentence at a time."

Strauss especially appreciated that, before Passover, Ben-Sasson Furstenberg reviewed texts the group had studied about the rabbis mentioned in the Haggadah. "The fact that all those guys' names and quotes were right there in the Haggadah -- that really brought it all home. All those names of rabbis that your tongue stumbles over if it is your turn going around the seder table -- we had a sense of them," she said.

Strauss also enjoyed the camaraderie and sense of community that developed through the Elul sessions. "I love a Kiddush luncheon, bagel-and-lox conversation, but this was a way of getting to know people in a very substantial way," she said.

Although Strauss found it easy to accept her occasional bewilderment with a text, others were frustrated by confusion they attributed to their own insufficient backgrounds in Jewish text. Princeton business attorney Marsha Novick found herself struggling at times when she lacked a piece of background knowledge, for example, that people are prohibited from taking eggs from a nest unless the mother bird is away.

Noting that even in college she preferred to listen to a knowledgeable teacher rather than her fellow students, Novick said that she liked it best when the entire class studied together under Ben-Sasson Furstenberg's guidance. "I'm more interested in information than process," she said. "The notion of teasing things apart in our little groups didn't appeal to me as much as having Shira say, 'This is what this means; this is what they were thinking about.' Then I'm happy to have a group discussion about that."

But despite some frustrations with the chevruta approach, Novick very much enjoyed Elul and learned a lot.

"I definitely would do it again, because I think the material is so interesting," she said. "Before, I had heard of Hillel but never Shammai or any of the other guys. Now I have some sense of the history of the rabbinic period and what some of the issues were. I didn't know anything about Talmud, and it's interesting to see the kinds of things that concerned them and how they went about thinking about them." In one class about Elisha ben Abuyah, Novick heard about Milton Steinberg's "As a Driven Leaf," a fictional reimagining of Elisha's life, and is about to read it.

Alison Politziner enjoyed hearing people's ideas in chevruta but liked even more being together in the big group where Ben-Sasson Furstenberg provided necessary background. She, too, would do the class again if it is offered, but suggested that perhaps more preparatory information would be helpful for people like her with little background.

"I felt like I had walked into a 300-level class when I hadn't had the 100-level or 200-level class," she said.

Louise Sandsmith, who teaches citizenship classes to immigrants and does immigration case law preparation for Lutheran Social Ministries of New Jersey, suggested that the chevruta process actually strengthened her learning, even though it was sometimes challenging.

"The fact that we were in small groups and at times were at sea and had to figure out the point and what the connections were, that we were groping and had to do it without someone telling us, I learned more," she said. "The chevruta learning was a powerful process, even though some people complained and wanted Shira to teach us. It was a nice way to get to know people as well."

Sandsmith also appreciated that the class continued for so long, rather than for just a few weeks, and she noted positively the strong subgroup of Israelis who came to Elul.

Although Irv Newman found the texts at times a little esoteric, using a form of explication that he was unfamiliar with, he really liked the experience.

"It was very good background to understand how the ancients thought and why the rabbis did what they did and how human they were," he said. He enjoyed the balance between chevruta study and whole-group discussion.

Because Newman never went to yeshiva, he appreciated the opportunity to study talmudic texts.

"It gave me a different insight into important stuff in my history and how the whole rabbinic period, which was so long and so important, happened," he said.

Levin, who arranged the program, was very happy about the results of the Elul experiment at the Jewish Center and thankful for getting to know Ben-Sasson Furstenberg, who she called a great facilitator and an interesting person.

"I think Elul was a refreshing and exciting new way of studying," Levin wrote in an email. "It brought to the group the understanding that issues that occupied the minds of the sages are the same issues that occupy our minds even today. The difference is that we have a more contemporary way of thinking, and it was interesting to learn how the sages dealt with those issues."

For Levin, the Elul group also forged a path toward a different future for adult education at the Jewish Center.

"This was a great group who made me realize that there is room for serious, high-level learning at the Jewish Center," she wrote, "and I hope this trend will continue."