East Meadow synagogue completes 39-year Bible study

The East Meadow Beth-El Jewish Center on Prospect Avenue in East Meadow completed a project Feb. 3 that not many others have taken on — an almost 40-year, word-by-word, verse-by-verse study of the Jewish Bible.

“I wanted to engage our adults in adult learning,” Rabbi Ronald Androphy said. “I personally and the synagogue believe that Jewish people should be life-long learners,” adding that religious education is not just for children but for adults as well.

Androphy started the class in 1983 with “Genesis,” the first chapter of the “Tanach,” the Jewish Bible that they studied every Thursday from October through spring, verse by verse.

The class started with about 40 students and ended last Thursday with 50 screens tuned into a class on Zoom, which Androphy switched to during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The entire Bible is a long document, and it contains 39 books, 929 chapters and tens of thousands of verses, and we did every single verse,” Androphy said. “There are over 23,000 verses in the entire Bible.”

Androphy said the class studied the English translation of the Hebrew Bible, but also analyzed the different interpretations of the Hebrew words. They made use of all the tools of biblical study, including traditional and modern commentaries, archeology, other Semitic languages and modern literary theories.

Eleanor Goldman, who is now 93, has been in the class since the start. “When the Rabbi first announced that he was going to have this class, I joined because I thought that I would like an adult version,” Goldman said. “My knowledge of the Bible was from what I had learned in Hebrew school and in Hebrew high school.”

Goldman described Androphy as a marvelous teacher. “He really encourages you to think,” she said. “We’ve gone through this word by word, sentence by sentence, and he always explained what we have learned through archeology, and he explained the grammar and made sure we were following along.”

Judy Sorscher, head of the EMBEJC Adult Education Department, has attended the class for about 15 years and is jokingly called “the newbie.” She said Androphy is a wonderful storyteller. He “is a man that really believes in doing a thorough and entertaining course,” Sorscher said. “He really knows his stuff, and we all enjoyed his side comments and his tangents.”

Androphy said he knows of no other synagogue that has undertaken a study like this. Class members made sure the words that they were reading made sense from the author’s perspective in the context that they were written, and they studied how the words are relevant to today.

“I vowed to not retire until I finished this study,” he said. “I realized early on that it was going to be a long process since we were being so thorough.” Androphy said he doesn’t intend to retire anytime soon.

Goldman said she never expected the study to take nearly 40 years, joking with Androphy that she had hoped she would live long enough to finish it. “I was being facetious,” she said, “but it turned out that I am the last surviving member of the original group.”

Androphy said that doing an in-depth study such as this one gives Jewish people a full panorama of the foundational period of the Jewish people and religion. The Bible “can teach us so many important lessons on how to live our own lives in this world of ours,” he said.

Goldman said the most fascinating part for her was trying to understand the exact meanings of the words and verses. “We were doing our class in English,” she said. “Rabbi would have the Hebrew for us, and I would look at that because I do know Hebrew and have some knowledge of it, but going in depth with the Hebrew was fascinating.”

Elation and accomplishment are what Androphy said he was feeling after finishing the class. He said the number of people in the class and the work he put into preparing for it helped him to feel this way.

Sorscher said she was joyful and excited to finish and could not wait to continue the group’s studies. “It was a wonderful journey,” she said.

The synagogue will now study two of the books of the Apocrypha, Suzannah and Judith, Jewish books that were not included in the canonized Jewish Bible, as they came later.