Growing Jewishly at Limmud

The Limmud promise around the world is that ‘wherever you find yourself, Limmud will take you one step further on your Jewish journey’. The form of that Jewish journey, and what one more step means, will differ hugely for each participant – and that is why our program is so broad and diverse, including sessions on Israel, ethics, politics, history, Bible, culture, literature, the arts, Talmud, meditation, communal issues, social justice, the environment, and more. We are so excited to see what creative and exciting topics you, our presenters, want to share at Limmud. But to ensure we are facilitating our participants’ Jewish growth, we will only accept sessions with Jewish content or a Jewish angle.

Arguments for the Sake of Heaven

We are blessed to live in a community where many of us are not shy about giving feedback…

Why do you have sessions about X?
Why would you have this person at your event?
Why didn’t you have this person at your event?
This session was unbalanced.

We have spent a long time thinking through how to handle these issues and apply the Limmud core values to specific situations. Being a volunteer-based endeavour means we seek to include our volunteers as we grapple with these situations, and this involvement is something about which we are uncompromising. We know what makes sense today may not make sense with different people and different circumstances tomorrow. We commit ourselves to making Limmud a challenging, enlightening and positive place in our community.

We have developed the following information and guidelines to address some of the challenges we have, and continue to deal with.

Limmud is a huge meeting place of the community and we are typically inundated with people wanting to present. However, there is no ‘right’ to present at Limmud. We review all applications and carefully assess whether any sessions appear to be inconsistent with our core values or might breach our guidelines. We also have practical restrictions in terms of presenter slots, and we seek to put together a balanced and interesting program. For example, if we have too many people applying to present on broadly the same area then we have to be selective. At other times we have made the judgement call to reject a session on the grounds that it was likely to be polemical rather than educational. There will always be those who disagree with the decisions made, but we recognise that this comes with the territory and we do make a point of trying to be respectful even when we disagree.

For various reasons, we do not accept all sessions submitted to us for a Limmud event. However, we must make clear the fact that the acceptance of sessions does not mean Limmud endorses or sympathises with the views expressed by presenters in that session. Limmud events are grassroots and reflective of community issues and interests.

In particular, Israel is a topic that can be a magnet for passionate opinions and disagreement. We understand that Jews who care about Israel can and will hold different views. We believe it is critical that when people disagree, they engage civilly and assume and respect the good faith of others. In general we seek to maintain high standards of civility in language and behaviour when we discuss all matters within the Jewish community. Limmud offers a space where adults can make informed decisions about which topics and presenters they want to listen to and engage with. We seek to encourage healthy, vigorous and broad debate. In that spirit, we do not provide a space for people to present who promote boycotts and sanctions against the State of Israel.