Melton offers Jewish education to diverse adults

By Jenn Director Knudsen

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Alan Cushway of Southeast Portland walked with trepidation into his first Melton class. He toted his binder, Tanach—and a secret.

“I was petrified,” Cushway said in a recent interview. Cushway now is in his second year of classes and preparing to graduate this spring from the two-year Florence Melton Adult Mini-School program.

Did his abject fear spring from a lack of academic confidence? Concern he couldn’t parse centuries’ old Talmudic texts in translation?

No. Fear for Cushway sprung from his secret. A senior pastor at a Gresham church, Cushway was very excited to learn from the Melton curriculum but uncertain his Jewish instructors and Jewish classmates would welcome his being Christian.

“Was I the enemy?” Cushway, 54, had wondered a year and a half ago. “Would I be accepted?”

Friend and current first-year student, John C. Pancoast, an ordained pastor in Northeast Portland, also worried about participating in the Melton program. It is, after all, a Jewish-education course.

“If there was some way to freak out about it, we thought about it,” Pancoast, 62, laughed during the interview with Cushway. (A Jewish friend and former Melton student introduced Cushway to Melton, and Cushway, in turn, brought Pancoast on board.)

The Florence Melton Adult Mini-School—a program out of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whose national office is in Northbrook, Ill.—is not marketed to the Christian community in any of the 62 mini-schools across the globe.

Rather, it’s described on the national Web site as a “social franchise” that “forms an international network of community-based schools offering adults the opportunity to acquire Jewish literacy in an open, transdenominational, intellectually stimulating learning environment.”

Betsy Dolgin Katz, Ph.D., Melton’s North American director, said in an e-mail, “We do not encourage participation for Christians unless they are involved with the Jewish community,” such as “married to a Jew or working with a Jewish institution.”

She continued, “We do not, however, exclude them. Our goal is to convey Jewish literacy and through that allow Jews to better understand what it means to be Jewish.”

Why, then, were Cushway and Pancoast—both with master’s from Western Seminary in Portland—attracted to Melton in the first place?

Simply put: To deepen their own Christianity through greater understanding of the religion at its root—Judaism.

“Part of our reason for being here is to learn and not evangelize,” Pancoast said, speaking for himself and his friend.

“For the last 10 years, I have been teaching the Hebraic background of the New Testament,” said Pancoast, who sports a gray, close-cut goatee. “I cannot tell you what it has done for me personally.”

He added, “As far as I am concerned, the Tanach is the dictionary of the [New Testament].”

Melton has profoundly influenced how he views scripture and it’s changed the lens through which he teaches. “Melton is the highlight of my week,” he said.

Cushway said once he began studying the Tanach and realizing the inextricable Jewish links to New Testament stories, “It has turned my teaching world upside down, literally.”

When presented with these links, his Christian students routinely respond, “Give me more; tell us more,” Cushway explained. “There are many Christians out there who are hungry to understand the Hebraic roots of their faith.”

Just as there are Jews hungry for their perspective on the Jewish texts presented in class.

Far from reacting negatively to the presence of pastors, “the instructors and the people were accepting and very gentle,” said Cushway as Pancoast nodded agreement.

“I was keeping my mouth shut at first, you bet,” Cushway said of his first couple months in class. Then, a lesson about the transformation of Abram to Abraham goaded Cushway to participate.

Since then, he said, “I feel a part of the class. I can make a contribution.”

Pancoast, too, at first was reticent to a fault.

He told instructor Jan Rabinowitch in confidence: “I don’t know what to do here, Jan. I feel like I’m in someone else’s house; I don’t want to disturb anything.”

Pancoast recalled Rabinowitch’s response: “John, you must share your views.”

Fellow first-year students Marvin Richmond and Shimron Tubman, both Jews, consider Pancoast an extremely humble, well-read New Testament scholar whose views enhance the class.

“He is really one of the backbones of the class,” Richmond said, adding, Pancoast answers Jewish students’ questions on Christian perspectives and thus supplements the group’s knowledge base.

And Tubman said Pancoast’s in-class participation creates the foundation for an interfaith dialogue, something in which she believes “very deeply.”

Erica Goldman, Ph.D., has taught Melton for eight years and has found that, generally, “These individuals (Christians) have a sincere respect and even love for Judaism and the Jewish people, and many other class members are moved by their sentiments.”

Cushway wears a kippah to class “as a sign of respect to the Jewish tradition,” instructor Sylvia Frankel, Ph.D., noted.

Goldman added Christians often “bring an understanding of some of the texts that many of the Jewish students have difficulty with.”

Ultimately, Goldman said, “It is fascinating to see Jews learn about Judaism from Christians, who may or may not have known that their understanding of a text is profoundly Jewish.”

For more information on Melton classes, contact local Melton Director Bonni Goldberg at melton@jewishportland.org or 503-892-3015, or visit www.meltonportland.org.