It's been a few days since I last updated; after today's Israel Day parade (which I will discuss in my next post), I'm rather tired, but I'll try here now to describe my first two days at Drisha Institute in New York City.
Students were expected to be at Drisha Institue, 37 W. 65th Street (just west of Central Park), at 10:00 am for Orientation Day, June 29th. Taking the commuter train from Summit to Penn Station, and walking the 30-some blocks north through the city, I somehow managed to arrive in time, I know not how. Drisha is on the fifth floor of a building, consists of an entrance hall used as a dining area, a beit midrash and an adjoining room used for tefillah (prayer), a very small kitchen, office space, and a few smaller classrooms, slightly smaller than a typical Goldwyn Smith seminar room. The Beit Midrash has a good range and collection of books, as far as I'm concerned; virtually all are in Hebrew, but there are also a few parallel Hebrew-English volumes, including a large number of Tanakhs, the Kehati Mishnah, and maybe around a third of Rambam's Mishneh Torah. I don't think that I saw a single ArtScroll volume at all, and all of the Tanakhs are JPS.
There are around forty or fifty students in at Drisha, I'd say, all in their twenties, and about three-fifths to two-thirds females. Based on skirt-wearing, I'd say that most of them are of the Orthodox persuasion; based on the fact that I'm also the only vegetarian, I'd also say mostly from Orthodox families. Most (but not all) have backgrounds in Hebrew Day Schools, and have spent at least a year in yeshivah or seminary, respectively. I'm definitely less knowledgeable than virtually every other student. Many of the other students also know each other already from day school, camp, or the like. I of course know Lani, and also know, from the Cornell Jewish community, the older siblings of two of the other girls. Thanks to being friends with Eli Shaubi, I realized that I had already seen the names of all of the Sephardic males in the cohort (dead serious). Also, one guy bought his yeshivah textbooks from one of my other Cornell friends. The basic lesson is that the world of observant Jews is very socially incestual, and many people know many other people, unless they grew up outside of the tight-knit circuit, as I did.
Typical orientation exercise -- rules, regulations, expectations, etc., were scattered throughout the day. Our first activity was an ice-breaker, speed-dating (or whatever you want to call it), that actually gave sufficient time to learn a little bit about our interlocutors. We also, as a class, discussed ideas of law and punishment. Because the single shared subject that we will all be studying together is the sixth chapter of tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud, which deals with execution of criminals -- specifically be סקילה (sekilah), or stoning -- in Jewish courts. (In Rabbinic codification execution by סקילה became the pushing of the condemned off of a cliff, rather than the pelting of his body with rocks, as the text of the Torah seems to indicate.) We talked about the right to punish, but drew short of the source of the authority to punish. We then discussed the somewhat difficult subject of regular communal prayer, which is mandatory-- it looks as if there will be two minyanim (congregations), one egalitarian, and one with a mechitza, a partition dividing men and women from each other.
Drisha also fed us the first day, which was a rather nice, unexpected surprise. I was fairly hungry by this point, and welcomed the chance to put something in my stomach. Following Minchah (afternoon prayer), we had our first classes, which we chose. The options included a class on gender and sexuality in the Talmud, a class on the intertextuality of the biblical narrative of the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham (taught by the Rosh Yeshivah, the chief instructor), and a class on the Mishnah of tractate Sanhedrin. I was very interested in this last less, for three main reasons: first, I love studying Mishnah; second, the class requires no knowledge of Aramaic; third, I think that the subject matter will work very well in complement with the study of the Gemara that makes up the program's main topic. For those of you unfamiliar with the study of Talmud, the Mishnah, a Hebrew-language document dating from around the year 200 C.E., is a concise verbally-transmitted law code, broken into six orders which contain a total of 63 tractates, and forming the core of Talmudic study. The next three centuries of discussion on the Mishnah became canonized as the Gemara, which is in Aramaic. Although I know some Hebrew, my Aramaic is next to nonexistent.
Interestingly enough, my Mishnah class consists of almost all men, which I find rather surprising, and highly unlikely, given the fact that most students at the Drisha June immersion program are women. The only woman in the classroom, other than the instructor, was Lani, who is the most intense scholar of Mishnah I know, and presumably chose the class in order to deepen her knowledge of Mishnah. We had enough time to discuss the mishnayot of the first chapter, which deal with the sizes and jurisdictions of various courts.
We were fed dinner, and, during the late evening section, studied independently. After an unsuccessful attempt to secure a learning partner to study the Rambam's Mishneh Torah, I continued to study the Mishnah tractate of Bava Metzia, finished it, and began Bava Batra. Lani was very excited at my beginning tractate Bava Batra, which she has studied extensively. We prayed Ma'ariv (evening prayer), and I continued to sit in the Beit Midrash for some time, and continue with Bava Batra, of which I finished the first chapter.
The next morning, Friday, I overslept until 5:56 am (yes, you read that correctly -- I was supposed to get up at 5:00, if I wanted an opportunity to study Jewish approaches to spontaneous prayer with Devorah). I barely made it to Drisha's communal Shacharit (morning prayer) on time (it's a long commute from Summit, New Jersey), at 8:15, and was wrapping on my tefillin while everyone else was beginning pesukei dezimra. We were fed a simple breakfast, and then began a three-hour class on Talmud. We began by analyzing the death penalty in Jewish law in general, and seeing which of the four kinds of execution are used for what transgressions, what their biblical sources are (or are not), and how the Rabbis interpreted those sources.
My new chevruta Abby and I focused on the Mishnaic text of the sixth chapter of Sanhedrin, but also found ourselves looking in the books of Leviticus and Numbers, the Mechilta, and the Sifrei. It seems as if the Rabbis never extended the death penalty to any crime not explicitly mentioned in the Torah, although they could have done otherwise (apparently, some of the Dead Sea scrolls show that non-Rabbinic sects favored extending the death penalty). Death by decapitation has a very weak Biblical source, and the Rabbis more or less invented strangulation as a penalty, applying it to all of the death penalty cases for which the Torah did not specify a method. We discussed some reasons why that might have been; certainly, it can be seen as a leniency, because the Rabbis (with the exception of Rabbi Shimon) considered it a less painful means of death than any of the others. There was some conflict among the Sages as to why unspecified death penalties are carried out through strangulation; Rabbi Yonatan simply received it as an Oral Tradition that strangulation is the method used for all unspecified death penalties, while Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi indicates that strangulation most closely resembles Hashem's method of execution. There is also an opinion that it is an act of kindness to the condemned, choosing for him the least painful method of execution when in case of doubt. There's also a funny notion that decapitation is a specifically non-Jewish (read: Roman) execution method. I don't exactly know what all of this means, but I'll be thinking about it.
We also discussed community service projects which students are expected to perform as part of their participation in the Drisha program. I'm very pleased by this; community service was never part of my Tzfat curriculum, and I'm glad that it has returned to a place of importance in my religious education.
We left class early, on account of it being Erev Shabbat. After running a few errands in the city, I took the train, not back to New Jersey to Victor's house, but to Long Island, where Eli lives, in order to spend Shabbat with him. More on that next post. For now, I need to get to bed.
~JD
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