The Story of Hebrew Quest, 1/3

My last post was the story of how Holy Language Institute got started. This is the next chapter, how Hebrew Quest came to be.

I had been teaching my ten-lesson course across Saskatchewan with great success for a couple years when things changed. I was starting to get invitations to teach outside the province and didn't want to because I'm a homeboy and thought travelling was a relative waste of time. I was also starting to get bored of teaching the same material and of driving several hours to and from classes. So I decided to film my course and put it online. I had learned from my students that most of them were more interested in Hebrew as a spiritual experience than as a language, so I determined to make my course the richest and most Messiah-centered experience possible! I spent the summer of 2010 crafting the course which grew from ten to forty lessons, building three studio sets in the basement of my grandparents' farmhouse, and assembling costumes and props. Then in the fall I started filming, which for the first several weeks mostly consisted of making mistakes and trying to find my voice and not blink all the time. The archives of Holy Language Institute contain 195 unreleased videos of me manually starting the camera, talking until I stumbled over my words, and then trudging back to the camera to stop and try again. After months of throwing myself heart and soul into Hebrew Quest I finished on 1/11/11 and spent the rest of the cold snowy winter editing and producing the forty lessons before releasing them in the spring.

Originally I offered the entire program for free with a request for donations and the response I received was spectacular, with literally thousands of people from over a hundred countries starting their Hebrew Quests and excitedly telling me how it was changing their spiritual lives. Unfortunately most of my students didn't donate anything which was starting to put HLI in the red and leaving me feeling hurt and resentful. At the encouragement of many people I reluctantly started charging a small one-time donation, while still giving free access to everyone unable to donate. Initially I was disappointed that giving everything away for free didn't work, but this adjustment turned out to be for the best because it created a mutually generous relationship between me and my students and caused them to value their Hebrew Quests even more. Eventually, when I started teaching new lessons every week, the one-time donation turned into a monthly thing. Looking back, I can see that my desire to make it possible for everyone to experience Hebrew regardless of their financial situation was good. Since then I'd even say it's become one of the three thing that sets Holy Language Institute apart - along with being Messiah-centered and a real community, we're also affordable.

This snapshot is from the Classroom set where in Lesson 13 I tell the miraculous story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who more than anyone else was responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a modern language. The account of how this determined man was supernaturally called to "the revival of Israel and its language" and overcame immense hardships to answer that call has been of great inspiration to me and my own work. In the next two posts I'll show you the Construction and Middle Eastern sets and give you a summary of what I packed into the 55 hours of Hebrew Quest. If you have more questions you may also enjoy checking out Hebrew Quest for yourself at http://holylanguage.com/quest!