Rabbi Jeremy Gerber | The Difference Between Teaching Religion and Teaching People
Rabbi Jeremy Gerber
There is a version of religious education that treats students like containers to be filled. The teacher presents information, the student absorbs it, and success is measured by how accurately the material is repeated back. Rabbi Jeremy Gerber has watched this model fail for years. It produces people who can recite facts about Judaism but who never feel personally connected to it.
Teaching religion and teaching people are two fundamentally different activities. The first transmits content. The second builds capacity for engagement, curiosity, and independent thought. Rabbi Jeremy Gerber has always prioritized the second, and the difference shows in how his students talk about their experience.
Content Without Connection Is Forgettable
A student can memorize the order of the Torah portions and forget them within a month. That same student can spend an hour wrestling with a single verse and remember the experience for a lifetime. The difference is not the material. It is what the teacher asks the student to do with it.
Rabbi Jeremy Gerber Wallingford Pennsylvania Torah study sessions were known for their emphasis on questions over answers. He would present a text and ask the group what troubled them about it. What did not make sense? Where did the narrative seem to contradict itself? What assumptions were they bringing to the passage? That method generates engagement because it treats the student as a thinker, not a recipient.
The questions that matter most are often the ones nobody expected to ask. A congregant notices that a character in Genesis acts inconsistently. A teenager wonders why a law seems harsh by modern standards. Those moments, when genuine curiosity meets an ancient text, are where real education happens.
The Teacher's Real Job
Rabbi Jeremy Gerber believes the teacher's job is to make the student care. Not through persuasion or pressure, but through genuine intellectual challenge. When someone encounters a text that resists easy understanding, and a teacher helps them stay with that difficulty rather than rush past it, something shifts. The text stops being homework and starts being meaningful.
This approach requires patience. It means tolerating silence when a group is thinking. It means resisting the urge to provide the answer immediately. It means trusting that the struggle itself is the education, and that a student who works through confusion arrives at a deeper understanding than one who is simply told what to think.
During his years at Congregation Ohev Shalom in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, Rabbi Jeremy Gerber applied this method across age groups. Adults and teenagers responded to the same fundamental invitation: your questions matter, and the tradition takes them seriously. That invitation is more powerful than any lecture.
Why This Approach Matters Now
Religious disaffiliation is rising across the United States. Rabbi Jeremy Gerber sees a connection between that trend and the failure of content-first education. When people leave religious communities, they often say the experience felt irrelevant or disconnected from their actual lives. That irrelevance starts in the classroom, or the study group, or the sermon that talks at people instead of with them.
Teaching people means meeting them where they are. It means connecting ancient texts to contemporary questions without pretending the connection is easy or automatic. It means accepting that a student who pushes back is more engaged than a student who passively agrees.
Rabbi Jeremy Gerber has built a teaching practice around this principle, and it reflects in how his students describe their experience. They do not say he taught them about Judaism. They say he taught them how to think within Judaism. That distinction makes all the difference, and it is the distinction that keeps people coming back.