As Americans tuned in to the final days of both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, another kind of political back and forth engaged Jewish men and women at Chabad-Lubavitch centers around the country. Participants took apart diverse questions not from a partisan perspective, but from one that uses Jewish texts as a lens through which to view modern politics.

Steven Wyke of Dayton, Ohio, said the weekly classes – recorded locally and available online through the Chabad.org multimedia portal Jewish.TV – were interactive and engendered participation from a diverse crowd.

“I found it very interesting and very practical,” he said. “It gives the Torah connection to issues, but doesn’t take away my choice. Instead, I can see and understand more about the spiritual implications” of various decisions.

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Jewish.TV creative director Rabbi Shais Taub said that the series has been in development for almost a year. First proposed by Chabad of Greater Dayton director Rabbi Nochum Mangel and associate director Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin, the idea was to create a forum through which to analyze such issues as tax reform, welfare, health care, campaign finance and immigration from the point of view of classical rabbinic sources.

The last two classes of the six-part “Election 2012: A Jewish Perspective” series, “Campaign Finance” and “The Immigration Debate,” air respectively on Sept. 13 and Sept. 20. (Recordings of all classes can be viewed by clicking here.)

According to Taub, the new offerings take Jewish.TV, which maintains in excess of 8,000 videos on a host of spiritual topics, into new territory. Never before has it waded into the murky waters of American politics.

Still, says the rabbi, the programs do something different than what you might find on the major and not-so-major networks. By talking about Torah principles as they apply to the elections, Mangel and Klatzkin effectively leave the candidates and their parties out of it.

“They don’t tell you how to apply these principles,” explains Taub. “They give you the tools and leave it up to everyone else to figure out the issues. You’re forced to think.”

For Mangel, who’s given business and ethics classes for years, the project offered an exciting chance to add Judaism’s views to the political mix.

“Everybody’s tuned into the elections and people are deciding a host of issues,” states Mangel. “The Torah has an opinion on these issues, so why not bring it to the table as well? We don’t tell people how to vote; what’s important is for people to have a better understanding of what our rabbis and our tradition have thought about these same issues.”

Rabbis at those Chabad Houses screening the classes with their own congregants get a downloadable teacher’s edition and a handout to help keep their own local debates on track. Organizers say various locations will be using the classes as part of their programming up through the November elections, and possibly beyond.

“I don’t think the election is going to end the debate about many of these issues,” surmises Mangel.

At Chabad of Harford Count in Bel Air, Md., Rabbi Yekusiel Schusterman is giving the classes a try in his community, which at just an hour and a half outside of Washington, D.C., has its fair share of politically-minded members. They hosted their first class last Tuesday, and after screening Mangel’s class on the redistribution of wealth and acknowledging the Torah’s imperative to maintain a just economy, participants grappled with how far to apply the responsibility to care for the poor.

“In general, I think the most important concept that needs to be shared with people is that Judaism is relevant,” says Schusterman. “Torah is just as real of a guidebook in 2012 as it was in 1,000 BCE.”