Educators are busy. They constantly dance between the multiple roles they play—teaching, enabling, counseling, negotiating, peacemaking, managing, assessing, planning, designing, creating, reporting, adapting—and the list goes on. Educators spend years building their repertoire, finding the styles that work for them, and refining them through numerous iterations. And then, when they finally hit their sweet spot, they face perhaps their greatest challenge—repeating what they’ve been doing over and over again.

Bibliodrama is not acting, per se. Its creator, Dr. Peter Pitzele (whose book, Scripture Windows, is designed to train the reader to use the method) imported methods from the world of psychodrama into the study of Tanakh, and honed them into an art form. In Bibliodrama, a transition is effected by moving from studying the texts from the outside, using the analytical and academic left brain, to studying them from the inside, in creative and imaginative right-brain mode—and thus, getting right into the kishkes of the stories we are teaching. Questions, ones with no obvious answer, are posed to the students who respond in first-person language, speaking as the biblical characters or even as objects.

The project is an exploration of the preparations for receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai, Exodus 19. Students engage in a number of different activities as part of their learning. These include studying the text, pursuing thematic approaches to understanding the relevance of the text, journaling, examining visual metaphors, generating ideas through dialog, and artistic expression. Built into the process is a significant amount of student choice, an expectation that students will try different things and refine their ideas over a number of iterations, and reflection.

Those of us reading this journal are a pretty self-selected group. We love studying Jewish text. We find meaning and value and personal relevance in the word of God, in the divinely inspired writings of our ancient leaders, and in the holy and courageous power of the rabbinic project. We care deeply about Jewish history, and the compiled written chronicles of these past 3,500 years. For many of us, learning Torah fosters a state of “flow”—when we are in the zone, fully absorbed, fully alive.