Welcome.

I’m excited to share a new initiative in Jewish education I’m working on called Zichru. It’s a systematic learning program designed to help people master Chumash, Mishnayos, Taryag Mitzos and Nach step by step, in an organized format that’s easy to review and remember.

My goal is to help raise the bar in learning and set a standard where every Jewish child by the time they reach their bar or bat mitzvah have mastered the foundation knowledge of Judaism. (I’ll get into specifics in another post).

I chose the name Zichru for a number of reasons:

1. Zichru means “remember” which is the core of my mission.

My hope is to help restore mastery as a standard in our personal learning as well as in our educational settings. For whatever reason, the skills to attain mastery and a long term kinyan in our learning have been neglected and many people suffer as a result.

Hours, days, weeks, months and years of good effort in learning quickly or not so quickly fade away because people haven’t been taught how to manage their learning and review. It’s a shame and it doesn’t need to happen.

Everybody can remember their learning, they just need to learn how. Zichru is designed to deliver that result and demonstrate what’s possible when people remember what they learn.

2. What makes Zichru even more fitting is that it comes from the third last verse in Nach, in the Book of Malachi.

We are mandated to זכרו תורת משה עבדי, to “remember the Torah of Moshe, My servant”. This verse comes right before we are told of the coming of Eliyahu who will restore the hearts of the fathers to their sons, and the hearts of the sons to their fathers with the advent of Moshiach.

The mandate to remember is essential because memory means much more than mere retention. It implies a strong connection which is what we want in all of our learning.

It’s not surprising that people who forget their learning experience a loss of connection to the material. In many cases, it’s the loss of connection to the material that results in the forgetting. It’s hard to review material that we don’t feel is a part of us.

My hope is that Zichru will furnish people with a much stronger connection to the material from the get go, by building their mastery step by step, as part of a comprehensive framework to continuously use.

3.  Teaching people how to remember and master what they learn is what I love to do. 

I’ve met thousands of people who were convinced that their memories were poor. They’ve limited their academic reach or personal ambitions in learning because they can’t seem to hold onto what they’ve learned. The fact is that most were simply never trained how the mind likes to organize material for greater clarity and more effective review and retention.

Once people discover there’s a process that works, everything changes. My prayer is that Zichru should serve as a game changer for every individual that participates and ultimately a real game changer in Jewish education.

Mastery in our Mesorah was never meant as an exception. It was meant for the masses.

B’ezras Hashem, we’ll get there, step by step.