I love Florida College. It has a way of getting in your bones. When I came to FC as a student in 2005, my plan was to stay only a single year. Then I changed my mind and I figured I’d just stay two years and get my AA. Then I changed my mind again and ended up double majoring for my BA in Biblical Studies and Liberal Studies. Then, in 2016 having just finished my comprehensive exams but not yet begun my dissertation, I returned once again to teach Bible.
I love Florida College. Over the past seven years of my teaching, I taught twenty-three different courses and served the Biblical Studies, Biblical Languages, History, and Humanities departments, and took on overloads nearly every semester. I presented my research at fifteen different national conferences; I wrote my dissertation; I developed myself as a scholar. And I taught.
I taught thousands of students. I taught courses as varied as Hebrew and Greek, Law of Moses and New Testament History and Geography, Great Books and Greek History. I taught freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors (and fellow faculty and preachers and elders); I taught majors and non-majors alike. I taught future preachers, future graduate students, future businesspeople, and future moms. I taught Christians and non-Christians and those who’ve since become Christians. I sought to teach not only the contents of the biblical text, but to love the text, to love the Lord, and to serve one another and their communities with their whole selves.
And those students went on (and will go on) to do amazing things. My students are changing the world. I’m enormously grateful to be part of their stories.
But one of the tough parts of working here is that things are constantly changing. These young people come and stay in our classrooms (and our offices, and our homes) for just a short time before they move on to greater and more permanent things. They will leave the campus and the classroom, but will remain in our hearts. They’re my students, and it’s a blessed thing to watch them grow and mature into amazing adults and incredible friends and go out and serve the Kingdom and transform the world around them.
Florida College is a place of transition and the institutional memory is short: a generation comes, a generation goes, and no one remembers those who came before them. Life is in flux, and the only constant is change: the students, buildings, and programs may change but the work remains. Such is the case, even for me.
It is with a heavy heart that I report that I was informed last week by the President that budget concerns at Florida College have necessitated the non-renewal of my contract for next year. I don’t know what that means for my family, yet, but God is and has always been good to us. The location may change, but my service for the Kingdom remains.
I love Florida College. It has a way of getting in your bones. So while I’m leaving the campus and the classroom, I remember that FC isn’t any of these things, FC isn’t a building or even a set of buildings in Temple Terrace. It’s not a set of programs, or even really a place located alongside the banks of the Hillsborough. Florida College is the people. And I wish all the best for those people, and especially for my students. I love you all. Thank you for making my seven years at FC a blessing.
Jared W. Saltz
Ben Neviim 
I read a post of yours on Facebook and really appreciated it. Everything you wrote — it was on immigration — echoed my beliefs. It was shared by a Christian friend of mine. I’m Jewish, and obviously can tell that you have Jewish ancestry and studied at HUC. It seems that you are now a Christian preacher. I was just curious if you could tell me if HUC allows non-Jews to study there? From what I can tell it doesn’t seem like it does. Wondering if you could shed light on that.
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Hi Heather!
Thanks for reaching out. As to HUC, yes, the grad school was actually founded for the purpose of educating Christians. After the holocaust and WWII, the board and key members at HUC-Cincinnati wanted to provide a soft-solution to future issues with antisemitism. The idea was to specifically educate Christian phds who would go on to teach at Christian seminaries and train Christian pastors who would then preach to their congregations–and having been educated at HUC this respect for judaism and appreciation for Israel would trickle down into the pew of Christian congregations.
That plan worked really well! For a long time, HUC was an elite program for Hebrew Bible/ANE and *many* professors at major Christian universities saw HUC as the place to go.
Sadly, the current board in thoughtless (I’d go so far as to say stupid!) and reckless decisions, have decided to shut down the grad school–right when antisemitism is on the rise in the US and Western Europe again.
So, the short answer is “not only yes, they allow non-Jews into the grad school, but the grad school was created in large part to educate non-Jews!”
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