Between the Classroom and the Sanctuary
By Rabbi Igael Gurin Malous
The other afternoon, while I prepared for Rosh Hashanah, thinking of sermons and the sound of the shofar, I logged into Zoom to teach my Talmud class at AJRCA. Instead of pews and prayer books, I was greeted by a grid of faces, students scattered across time zones, each framed by their own small square. And yet, the questions that filled our screen belonged unmistakably to this season of judgment, repentance, and renewal. Not overtly. You see, we were studying the opening lines of Bava Metzia 2a, the sugya about two people holding onto a garment, each insisting, “ani matzatiha ” (I have found it) or “ani kanitihah” (I acquired it). The rabbis, with characteristic precision, debate how to divide what is claimed by two. It is a legal question of ownership, but as often happens in the Talmud, the text opens into something larger: What happens when two people cling to the same truth? How do we share responsibility when our claims overlap? As I was teaching, I started thinking that this garment was not just about property but about the self. During the High Holidays, we too are caught in a tug-of-war, one hand clinging to the story of who we were, the other grasping for who we hope to be. Like the claimants in the sugya, each side insists: This is mine. My mistakes are mine, but so is my potential. My brokenness belongs to me, but so does my capacity to heal. The rabbis’ compromise to divide the garment reminds us that on Yom Kippur, we confront our own split selves, stitching together the torn fabric of our lives into something new. Often when I teach this sugya, students quickly sense that the argument is not just about clothes. I have been asked before: Can this be about memory, about how we hold the past differently, yet have to live with one another’s claims? Often, we feel that the solution, splitting the garment, is unsatisfying, because in real life, reconciliation is rarely so neat.
On Zoom, people’s voices are unmuted and remuted, and debate pulses with urgency. The Talmud’s refusal to resolve easily becomes, for us, an invitation: during the High Holidays, we do not erase competing truths; we carry them, sometimes awkwardly, toward repair.
The theme of teshuvah, repentance, reflection, response, and return, is highlighted when I study it in the comparison between Bava Metzia and Yoma 85b. It offers a fascinating insight. Rabbi Akiva teaches there: Happy are you, Israel, before whom do you purify yourselves, and who purifies you? Your Father in heaven! Here, the divine is less a judge tallying claims and more a partner longing to cleanse and renew. On one page, we haggle over garments and possession. On another, we glimpse a God who holds us more gently than we have one another. The tension between din (judgment) and chesed (compassion) became palpable. We are urged to hear an inner voice saying quietly, Who should I reach out to that Ive been avoiding? What claim of “being right” am i holding on to? In that moment, a 1,500-year-old sugya leapt off the screen and into a life. Teaching on Zoom in this season is humbling. Some students want historical context, others want existential resonance. The academic frame often prizes analysis, while the holidays demand transformation. My task is to bridge the two: to honor the rigor of scholarship without losing the spiritual call to make teshuvah.
The zoom grid of faces itself has become a kind of shofar, each square a reminder that teshuvah is not solitary but communal, that we do this work not in isolation but in relationship, even when mediated by a screen. What can we take from the Zoom classroom into our sanctuaries and homes this High Holiday season?
Three practices. First, study or wrestle with a text. Perhaps the opening of Bava Metzia, or maybe a single line from the liturgy, or a verse from Torah, and ask: what does this reveal about my own divided claims, my own inner tug-of-war? What does this text make me think about? Second, make one small act of reconciliation; a phone call, an email, or a text, maybe. restore the connection. Third, let’s all embrace complexity rather than rushing to resolution. Let competing truths sit side by side, trusting that compassion holds more space than judgment. As the season unfolds, and as always, as a talmudist, I find hope in the dialogue between classroom and sanctuary, between the grid of faces on my screen and the faces I will see in shul. Between all of us. The students’ questions, like the blasts of the shofar, break through routine and awaken me to the possibility of change. What part of the garment of your life are you holding onto most tightly, and what part are you willing to release? May our study deepen our prayers, and may our prayers, in turn, lead us back to study and to one another, so that the work of renewal continues well beyond the closing gates of Yom Kippur.