What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Kollel

The Kollel is a place where married adult Jewish men gather to study Talmudic law full-time. The kollel is supported by donations from the community and fundraising programs such as selling raffle tickets. The kollel functions as a power pant for Rabbinic culture, generating the proverbial electricity to keep a community Orthodox and unassimilated.

During the day, the kollel learners study full-time. In the evenings, the rest of the Orthodox community comes in to the kollel to learn from the full-time learners. In this way, everyone gets some level of personalized instruction from men highly learned in Jewish law. Children in the day schools get extra help in the religious portion of their homework, and adults get to continue learning even into their old age.

The kollel functions as a social hub for the community, helping members network and find a place in it. Celebrations such as the 8th day circumcision, the greeting of holidays, and even bar mitzvahs can take place in a kollel. On summer mornings, schoolchildren will often come to the kollel for morning prayers, have a donut or two, and then learn with their friends and their rabbi for a few hours before playing the rest of the day.

The kollel functions as another home away from home, making sure that no one feels too isolated. Like the Sabbath, dependency on the kollel for learning Talmud is another way that Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism finds strength in weakness.

The Evangelical community can take a hint from this. Many Evangelicals, especially nerdy intellectuals like myself, experience strong isolation and loneliness even within the community. While there are apologetics groups and bible study groups that perhaps meet one per week or once per month, we still feel a great deal of isolation.

I would challenge an Evangelical community to borrow from the concept of the kollel and experiement with it. Perhaps a seminary school or even a local church could renovate a large room, fill the middle with chairs and tables, and cover the wall with bookshelves packed with Bibles and reference material. Then, the room could open a few nights per week for Bible study groups to meet. That way, groups that study on the same night could meet and network and interact with each other. They can form the same close-knit relationship with each other, and with pastors and seminary professors that Orthodox Jews have with their Rabbis.

It would help Evangelicalism become more closely knit and more intellectually vibrant, and would also solve two problems at once. To paraphrase the apologist James White: two of the biggest problems in apologetics are that the people socially involved in the Churches tend to be not well trained in apologetics. Yet the apologists tend to be loners, not connected to a Christian community. Many of the biggest apologetics disasters could have been avoided if the apologists had been a part of a Christian community. The kollel idea would take care of both problems with a single solution.