Ralph is passionate about adult education and has been a member of the Melton Mini-School Faculty since its inception in Melbourne six and a half years ago. He has been involved in adult education his entire adult life and started off teaching his contemporaries when he was a young adult and attracted by the opportunity to teach a group of motivated adults in a non-denominational environment.

Rabbi Ralph Genende

"I enjoy the mix of excellent texts, the broad range of motivated students and the supportive Melton family (both locally and internationally)", says Ralph. The greatest challenge for him has been integrating text and life, mind and heart. "As a Melton teacher I love the open engagement with ideas."

Teaching at the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School has been a liberating experience for Ralph. "It has allowed me to teach for the sake of promoting Jewish knowledge", he says. "It's a case of uncluttered Torah L'shma. The Melton environment encourages the notion that the text belongs to all Jews regardless of their religious knowledge or practise - I find this empowering and it has lifted my teaching."

Rabbi Ralph Genende is currently College Rabbi at Mount Scopus Memorial College and Congregational Rabbi of Beit Aharon, a modern Orthodox community with particular emphasis on the inclusion of women. Ralph is a modern Orthodox rabbi with a B.A. in English Literature, an Honours degree in Psychology and a Masters degree in Counselling. Rabbi Ralph, as he is known at the College, is not only a member of the school Executive Leadership Team but is also an active member of the Jewish Studies Faculty. Rabbi Genende is a trained counsellor (with a Masters degree from Auckland University) with a special interest in pre-marriage counselling and marriage enrichment.

He met his spouse at school - when he was 13 and Caron 12. "It was a religious school with separate campuses for boys and girls so I joke that we met in the moat between the campuses... Love obviously overcomes all obstacles?" Ralph enjoys nothing better than spending time with his wife Caron (a clinical psychologist) and his three children. He also loves reading, writing (especially poetry), walking, travel and relaxing with his family.

Examples of students that have grown through their experience in his classroom are seen in two cases: The first is a woman who discovered her Jewishness and embarked on a remarkable journey of personal growth and learning as a result of Melton studies. The second is when one of his students, so inspired by the class on Organ Donation, set up a national organisation to encourage organ donation and continues to do extensive work on the Halakhic parameters and how to stimulate Jewish communities to be more positive and forthcoming in their approach to organ donation.

Strategies that he uses in the classroom are encouraging questioning and employing a Socratic strategy by using questions to provoke and stimulate student participation in all of his classes. He finds the chevruta strategy helpful whereby students have the opportunity to tackle a text in pairs or small groups. This involves them and brings the lesson alive.

Advice Ralph would give to other teachers is this: Engage your students! Benjamin Franklin put it best:
Tell me & I'll forget
Teach me & I'll remember
Involve me & I'll learn

Keep on learning yourself - the Jewish imperative is "Lilmod Ulelamed" To learn and to teach and don't underestimate what you are doing: As Henry Adams has said "A teacher affects eternity he (sic) can never tell where his influence stops".

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