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June 30, 2006
A love of all learning
Canadian JTS grad combines Bible, biology.
KELLEY KORBIN
Isaac Elias is a 22-year-old man with some serious aspirations
for his future. He has just returned to Vancouver for the summer
after graduating from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
(JTS) with dual degrees: a bachelor of arts in Semitic languages
from JTS and a bachelor of science in biology from Columbia University.
JTS's List College is a Conservative Jewish education school offering
undergraduate courses in Bible, Hebrew language, Jewish history,
Jewish philosophy, Talmud and rabbinics. The school's website states
that while many of its graduates go on to careers in Judaism, "most
students pursue a wide variety of professions." This is facilitated
by the college's joint program with Columbia, whereby all undergrads
at JTS also complete degrees at the prestigious New York school.
For Elias, JTS offered a perfect opportunity to marry his long-term
career aspiration of becoming a scientific researcher with his seemingly
insatiable appetite to learn about the origins of the Bible.
In an interview with the Independent, he explained his decision
to attend JTS like this: "I've always been kind of a science
guy, but I found this program where I could also study Judaism formally
and that combination was too much to resist."
Elias was involved in United Synagogue Youth through Beth Israel
Synagogue during his high school days. He said that this exposure
to Judaism, along with his elementary school experience at Vancouver
Talmud Torah, whetted his appetite to learn more.
JTS's 200 undergraduate students are guaranteed housing at the school
and this was a real bonus for Elias, who treasured the communal
Jewish experience of the dorms, where all the kitchens were at least
ingredient-kosher and where "keeping Shabbat wasn't an issue."
He added that his time at JTS was his first experience really keeping
Shabbat and being with a group of like-minded people made it very
meaningful. "There were always people hanging around playing
board games and not doing things that involved money on Shabbat,"
said Elias.
Now that he's home, he said he's practising Shabbat on his own and
missing his JTS community.
Elias does not see himself pursuing a professional Jewish career.
Rather, his ultimate goal is to become a scientific researcher.
To this end, he has worked for the past two summers doing cystic
fibrosis research at the Child and Family Health Research Institute
at B.C. Children's Hospital.
But before he moves permanently into the world of science, Elias
plans to further the course of study he started at JTS. His JTS
degree mainly focused on the culture and society of biblical times
and how the Bible was compiled. He explained that, at JTS, "courses
are not necessarily taught from the Orthodox traditional perspective.
Rather, they acknowledge that parts of the Bible were written by
different people of different times and then compiled hundreds of
years later."
In September, Elias will begin a two-year master's degree in Assyriology,
the study of the Assyrian empire, at Yale University. "This
will give me [the] context out of which the Bible came. I hope to
flesh out the society in which it was born and written from 3000
to 1500 BCE," he explained. It will also give him a chance
to brush up on some of the Semitic languages he's been learning,
like Akkadian and Ugaritic.
On his divergent interests of biology and the Bible, Elias said,
"I don't necessarily see a link except that they're two things
I love doing." He added, "My mother always jokes that
I'll have to find a time machine to go back to the Babylonian empire
and do disease research."
Kelley Korbin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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