For those of you who were at the 2011 Noahide Conference and sat in on Doug Taylor's teaching session on Shabbat this will be very familiar to you. For those of you who weren't, I will attempt to explain the process.  I hope it will prove useful and engaging for this study group.

At the conference, Doug showed us a pretty common method of engaging the Torah during study that's simply genius.  I think would work really well with this online group as it has for chevrutha's throughout the world and ages.

Basically, we read the parshah and then we all immediately generate as many questions as we can about the text without attempting to immediately answer any of the questions.  The purpose is to have a brainstorm of questions (instead of brainstorming for ideas).  There are no stupid questions.  In fact, we should also be asking the seeming obvious questions as well as the this-doesn’t-make-sense questions.  After all the questions are posted, we each can go through and post our answers to the questions we know so we share our knowledge with the group.  Hopefully as we all share whatever we know, all the questions will get answered.

At the conference, Rabbi Greenbaum reminded us “how good is our portion” and gave us 3 things we can start doing everyday to enhance our enjoyment of the portion HaShem has kindly blessed us with: 1) Study Torah, 2) Prayer, and 3) learn from our fellow.  Applying Doug’s method in this group will help us accomplish two of the three.  Let’s try it and see how it goes!

(If you have specific questions about this study method that Doug taught us, I encourage you to contact him directly on here under 'dougtaylor'.)