(Bonus Episode) What Every Bride Needs to Know: Reflections on Kallah Teaching Part 1

You're a Yoetzet Halacha.

You have experience as a teacher in general, a high school teacher, and a kallah teacher, and now you are teaching teachers.

So can you speak a little bit about how being a Yoetzet Halacha impacts the way you train kallah teachers, and how being a kallah teacher can maybe inform some of your work as a Yoetzet Halacha? Like, how have these influenced or impacted one another?

They really are deeply related.

Um, what happened was I kind of thought it would be interesting to teach kallah, and I was watching women, for example, when we were...

You studied in GPATS before me.

That's very interesting how these things went, right?

Yeah.

So women that were ahead of me in the graduate program for Advanced Talmudic Studies at Yeshiva University, a few of them, after learning midda in depth for a long time, like I did, continued to learn and study to be able to be kallah teachers, um, you know, because it's really-

Yeah

... important to have a very good-

I, I was-

... handle on all the sources.

I was in that category.

Oh, fabulous.

That...

Yeah.

[laughs]

Okay, and I looked at women like you and I thought, "Wow, if they could do that, I wonder if I would even feel comfortable teaching," 'cause I feel like I really need to go the deepest dive possible before I would ever feel like I could be a kallah teacher.

Mind you, I was also my first year of marriage.

Like, I wasn't really in a place to be a kallah teacher, but I was just thinking-

Mm-hmm

... about my love of Torah and my love for people and how to kind of use those two together.

Um, but I remember thinking that I, I just would only wanna become a kallah teacher if I really felt like I was prepared.

And then I became a Yoetzet Halacha, and I finally thought, "Oh, I'm prepared," except not pedagogically.