Rabbi Shlachter to lead free Jewish canon class at Mesa Public Library

Mesa Public Library is putting a Jewish texts class into the middle of Los Alamos’ early-summer calendar, and the timing is deliberate. Rabbi Jack Shlachter will lead a free three-part series beginning Monday, June 15, at the library’s main branch at 2400 Central Avenue, with each evening designed to welcome people who know little about Jewish tradition as well as those who want a deeper refresher.

The series, titled A Blast of the Jewish Canon, will run on consecutive Monday evenings and is sponsored by the Los Alamos Jewish Center. The first session is set for June 15 from 6 to 7:15 p.m., the second for June 22 from 5:30 to 6:45 p.m., and the third for June 29 from 6 to 7:15 p.m. Each night will begin with about 15 minutes of refreshments and informal conversation before shifting into an interactive discussion hour, and RSVPs are requested through the Los Alamos Jewish Center.

The curriculum is broad by design. The opening session will move quickly through the Jewish Bible, commentaries, the Talmuds, Midrash, the Zohar and responsa literature. The second will turn to fiction by Jewish writers across the diaspora and in Israel, including short stories, novels and poetry in Yiddish, Hebrew, English and Spanish. The final class will focus on Jewish thought, philosophy, history and other nonfiction writing. Each session stands on its own, so residents can attend one, two or all three without being lost.

The June 22 meeting has been shortened by half an hour so participants can get to the 53rd Annual J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. that same night at Duane Smith Auditorium, where astronautics and planetary scientist Dante S. Lauretta is scheduled to speak about the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission and the origins of the solar system. In a town where scientific lectures and religious education can land on the same night, the overlap shows how tightly Los Alamos’ cultural calendar is woven together.

Shlachter’s own background helps explain why the class fits here. He arrived in Los Alamos in 1979 as a doctoral student at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and in June 1995 became the first rabbi in the history of the Los Alamos Jewish Center to come up from the community. He has also built a personal library of more than 7,000 books, many of them Judaica and science-related, a mix that mirrors the town’s unusual blend of lab culture, public learning and small-community life.

That setting gives added weight to a program at Mesa Public Library, the Antoine Predock-designed building that opened at its current location on October 5, 1994. Los Alamos County has a 2020 census population of 19,419, and the Los Alamos Jewish Center says its small, unaffiliated, egalitarian congregation serves about 50 families, with members in Los Alamos, White Rock, Santa Fe, the Española Valley and Colorado. In a county that size, a free class on Jewish texts is not just a lesson series, it is a public conversation held in one of the town’s central civic spaces.