The holidays are behind us, and the heart of the school year is here. Whether you’re teaching Tanakh, Talmud, Jewish Thought, or any other area of Jewish learning, Sefaria’s library is full of resources to support your work — with texts and tools for learners of every age. I hope you find the resources we share below helpful!

Sefaria’s strength comes from our users, such as educators like you. If you’ve discovered a helpful way to bring Sefaria into your teaching or prep, we’d love to hear about it. Two easy ways to inspire and support colleagues around the world is to post on the Sefaria Classroom Facebook group or to reply to this email. No insight is too small! Sharing your educational creativity can help make the library come alive for learners everywhere.

Who? R' Sofia Freudenstein, Director of Jewish Life and Learning for the Jewish Community of Helsinki, Finland.

How? Sefaria is my go-to when I need inspiration for a shiur (lesson) or source sheet. Often, when I have a question about a passage from the weekly Torah portion, a page of Gemara, or a halakhic text, I click the verse to find existing commentaries that address my query.
Almost 100% of the time, I find a traditional commentary or a contemporary source sheet made by another Sefaria user with helpful insights. Sefaria’s interconnected interface is totally unique; a concordance or Masoret HaShas (a reference book connecting talmudic, mishnaic, and other texts) are helpful, but Sefaria makes all these intertextual connections available in one click!

Sofia’s Top Tip: I love the Visualizations page! Go to the bottom of the library homepage to find webs of connections between Talmud and Tanakh, how Rashi uses Torah verses in his commentary, and more. These provide a totally novel way to learn Torah. Viewing the Torah from so many different angles makes me appreciate its depth and ability to be relevant in absolutely every context.

Search Filters for Linguistic Learning
Ever used Sefaria’s advanced search tools to explore the many contexts of a single word? The word hineini (“here I am”), for example, appears across the Jewish library, but you might want to help your students zero in on the subtleties of hineini by looking only at its appearance in Tanakh texts.

With more specific search results, you can guide your students as they consider when the word is used and what the speaker might mean in each case. By looking at various particular examples, their observations may lead to a deeper understanding of the text.

Filtering searches by relevance, chronology, text category, and specific books is easily accessible through the Resource Panel (click anywhere to open). You can also opt to see only sources that exactly match the word you’re looking for.

Did you know every single Torah portion has a dedicated Topic page on Sefaria? To find it, type the name of a parashah (e.g. Parashat Bereshit) into the search bar on the library homepage, and you’ll see an option preceded by a hashtag (e.g. #Parashat Bereshit). Click on that option to select it!

Every enhanced Topic page has:

• A link to the Torah text
• A broad selection of relevant sources
• Introductory paragraphs to provide contexts for the sources
• Links to related topics
• For example, the Topic page for Parashat Bereshit features links to #Creation, #Adam, and #Genesis.

You can also find parashah Topic pages by heading to the Topics landing page and typing the name of the Torah Portion into the search bar.

The rabbinic discussions in the pages of the Talmud underpin so much of halakhah (Jewish law) that the two text categories are basically inextricable. So, why teach Talmud or Halakhah without a direct connection between the two? The next time you’re reading a page of Talmud or a halakhic text on Sefaria, click on any passage to open the Resource Panel. There, you’ll find an array of connections under the subheading RELATED TEXTS.

When you click on the word Halakhah (or on the word Talmud), you can follow how the two fields interact with one another. All books are fully linked, from Rambam’s fundamental text, the Mishneh Torah or Rabbi Joseph Karo’s work, the Shulchan Arukh, to a wide collection of Responsa, and much more.

This month, Cheshvan, is known for its dearth of Jewish holidays. But that’s not a problem for the perpetually curious! Here are a few texts you may want to explore during this relative lull in the Jewish calendar.

[English & Hebrew] Ohr Yisrael by Rabbi Israel Salanter, father of the 19th-century Musar movement. Published by his student Rabbi Itzele Blazer and available in a new English translation on Sefaria, this collection of missives delves into the foundational ideas of the Musar movement.

[English & Hebrew] Shemonah Kevatzim by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is a collection of eight notebooks on a range of philosophical subjects, broaching subjects like poetry, war, divine immanence , nationalism, and universalism. The first of these is available in a new modern English translation on Sefaria.

[English] Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective by Dr. Judith Plaskow aims to “rethink key Jewish [theological] ideas and experiences from [a] feminist perspective,” exploring how the lens of women’s experience can provide a new outlook on key Jewish themes, such as Torah, Israel, and God.

SEFARIA FOR GOOGLE DOCS
Add any source from the library to a Google Doc with a couple of clicks. Now including verse numbers!

SHEET EDITOR
Mix and match sources from Sefaria’s library of Jewish texts, and add your comments, images and videos. Useful Links The Sefaria Classroom | Teach with Sefaria | Webinar: Sefaria + Google Docs | About Sefaria