“How Do Human Beings Learn, and How Do we Change?” - Ariel Burger, author of Witness: Lessons from Elie Weisel’s Classroom

Bad Rabbi Media

Rabbi, Artist, Musician Ariel Burger discusses his nearly lifelong relationship with Elie Weisel—as a sensitive, searching teenager navigating a life of Talmud and comic books; an undergraduate jostling between college and rabbinical studies; as his Teaching Assistant while pursuing a doctorate on an approach to conflict resolution based on Hasidic spirituality; and finally as a student-colleague and teacher-artist forging his own pathways of activism, identity, and the ethics and metaphysics of memory. He muses on Weisel’s highly eclectic, at times almost mystical, always insistently human approach to teaching and learning. He relates some of the powerful experiences — the “karmic burdens,” spiritual transformations, collective epiphanies, and personal paths to healing — he witnessed in the BU course Wiesel taught for 40 years. (Also: the High Holidays are coming and I can’t stop thinking about what it means that I can’t stop thinking about it.)