Professor expands Jewish studies at Missouri State

Springfield, Mo., is certainly a change from Berkeley, Calif. — but Rabbi Julia Watts Belser is relishing it.
Rabbi Belser, 30, is a new assistant professor in the religious studies department at Missouri State University in Springfield and is building up the university’s Jewish studies program. She moved to Missouri at the end of the summer with her partner, Joshua Johnson, and their cat, Mayhem.

Rabbi Belser previously taught Jewish studies at the University of California, Davis, and earned her doctoral degree through a joint program at UC-Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley after earning her rabbinic ordination from the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, in Los Angeles.

Most of her students in Springfield are not Jewish.

“I want them to have an experience of Judaism, not just as a system or a distant phenomenon, but as a living reality in people’s lives,” Rabbi Belser said.

Religion in general is very important to her students, Rabbi Belser said, which makes them respectful when studying Judaism.

“I find the students very hungry to learn more about Judaism and quite respectful of Jewish history and Jewish practice. The fact that religion matters very much to many of the students here has been a great asset to me as a teacher. Some of the work of selling why religion is important … here I feel a lot of that work has already been done,” Rabbi Belser said. “It’s fun to teach Judaism is a place where a lot of people are fascinated by and interested in religion.”

Rabbi Belser realizes her students may encounter few other Jews, so she is careful to represent a wide variety of Jewish perspectives, other than her own, in her courses.

Expanding Jewish studies
Although there are a few other Jews on the MSU faculty, and Rabbi Rita Sherwin of the Reform Temple Israel in Springfield had taught a survey class, the university didn’t have too many classes on Judaism. Missouri State brought Rabbi Belser in to change that.
Since she arrived in time for the fall semester, Rabbi Belser has been teaching the survey course, Paths of World Religion, and she is expanding the MSU curriculum to include more advanced courses in Jewish thought, Talmud, Midrash and religious connections with the environment.

Rabbi Sherwin said Rabbi Belser has been a welcome addition to the community in Springfield.

“It’s a pleasure to have her here,” Rabbi Sherwin said. “I personally love that there’s another rabbi here in Springfield ... (The expansion of Jewish studies) is long overdue; it’s something that needed to be done … this is a conservative, Christian community, for the most part, and so many of the churches and schools and the universities are really wanting to learn about Jewish roots in Christianity, so that’s a lot of what I do here, and now that’s a lot of what Julia’s doing here, which is invaluable.”

Bringing texts to life
Some aspects of life in Springfield have taken some adjustment.

“Springfield, Mo., is not the kosher-keeping capital of the world,” Rabbi Belser joked. “I talk (in class) about the different choices I have made around food here.”

She also gets students to engage with the material by working with translations of primary-source texts. For example, in their study of Yom Kippur, Rabbi Belser has her students read Maimonides’ writings on repentance.

“It’s a way of both looking at how Jewish texts work but also bringing them alive — Maimonides has such a vivid description of making teshuvah,” or repentance, Rabbi Belser said. “I realize most of my students have never experienced a Passover seder, which certainly does change how you present Passover. At Davis, one-fourth of my students had attended a Passover seder, so I asked students to talk about seders they had been to.”

Since that option wasn’t available, Rabbi Belser brought in different haggadot and analyzed them with her students.

“It just takes creativity to make things work. I find the students are eager and very open and interested,” she said.

Rabbi Belser said she’s grateful to Temple Israel, which opens its doors to students curious to see what Jewish services and holidays are like.

In addition to her work as a teacher of Judaism, Rabbi Belser has also co-written a health manual for disabled women in developing countries, where health care is often a rarity.

“I’m a wheelchair user, so it’s a project that is really close to my own heart,” she said.

The book, “A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities,” is published by the non-profit Hesperian Foundation.

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