I'm beginning this post on Monday night, but will probably not finish writing it until Tuesday, on account of my need to get to sleep.
After my second day of classes at Drisha Institute, on Friday, May 31st, I left for Eli's house on Long Island, directly from New York City. I made a detour on my walk to Penn Station, mailing some postcards and picking up four pounds of strawberries as a gift for Eli's family. I left on the Far Rockaway train for Hewlett, in the Five Towns, where Eli lives. He picked me up from the train station, we picked up wine for Shabbat, and drove to his house. Eli's two sisters who are in the United States right now, Efrat and Michelle, know me by this point, as does Eli's mother. However, this was my first time meeting Eli's maternal grandparents or his uncle Tzachi. This may sound strange, but I am constantly surprised by how young Eli's family seems to me. I am the youngest of three, while Eli is the oldest of his siblings. Tzachi is younger than Eli's mother, and, the result is that Eli's uncle Tzachi is not much older than my brother Andrew.
I helped Eli's mother prepare fruit for Friday night dinner, which was a lot of fun. What can I say, I just enjoy chopping up fruits and vegetables. After dinner, Eli and I studied some of the mishnayot of the sixth chapter of Mishnah Sanhedrin, which I'm studying at Drishah. We compared the standard printed text with a much older and less corrupt manuscript, and found a surprisingly large number of differences, although most of them were nothing more than deletions of single letters. The next morning, Eli and I walked to his neighborhood synagogue, where the congregation members were all excited to see Eli, whose father is very well known in the community. I was honored with opening and closing the ark, and the Rabbi gave a (I thought) devar Torah on the different leadership styles of Calev and Yehoshua in this week's pareshah. Afterwards, Eli and I returned to his house, where we read together until his family was ready for lunch.
Eli then had the awesome idea of visitng Rachel Blady's house. Rachel only lives about an hour's walk away from Eli in the Five Towns, and we had an excellent journey; Eli even remembered a shortcut over a footbridge that saved us a significant amount of time. Rachel was happy to see us both, and we were both happy to see her. We spent around two and a third hours at her house, talking on her porch together. As I said about my conversations with Eli during our road trip last week, if you know our three personalities, you can almost write the script yourself; we talked about our friends, about our college careers, about next year, about the books that we had been reading, etc. Where the conversation ended, I think we were discussing historical linguistics, when Eli and I needed to leave. We made it back to his synagogue in time for a 7:30 pm lesson on Pirkei Avot, prayed, had an evening meal, prayed again at the end of Shabbat, and walked back to Eli's house. I went to bed early that night, around 11:00 pm, after practicing my Torah reading for Monday morning.
Sunday was the day of the Israel Day Parade. After picking up some books (Bavli tractate Sanhedrin for Drisha, Bavli tractate Makkot for a chevruta with Josh, and a full Mishnah set for my own purposes), Eli and I drove to the train station in Hewlett, where we met Rachel Blady, and took the train back to New York City. We walked to the appointed street where we had all been told to gather. There were other University Hillel organizations there; Cornell's representation was quite small, and I did not know most of the other students (mostly Hillel affiliates) and alumni. We began marching late, around 2:20 pm, and somehow, I ended up as the only student carrying the two-person banner, because there was nobody else to carry. This was rather ironic, because I was not only wearing my backpack, but also carrying my Shabbat clothes in a bag, and was rather weighed down otherwise. The parade was loud, fun, and full of excitement, though, and I really appreciated an opportunity to carry the Cornell banner. The parade ended near Central Park, and I wound up walking to Matt's farewell picnic, which was a happy coincidence. Matt will be moving to Cincinnati, and I'll probably see him in a little over a year, after I return from Israel, whenever I next visit Andrew and Allison. Matt is the first of his siblings to move away from the Northeastern U.S., and I took it upon myself to allay some of his mother's concerns. I explained that my mother had also had her first son move to Cincinnati a couple of years ago, and that although the distance was far, it is not impossibly so.
After Matt's picnic, I walked through the park with Eli, after which we met up with Sarah, Josefin, and Rina, Rachel having already gone home. I peeled off from the rest of the group, because I needed to return to New Jersey. I walked to Penn Station, hopped on the train for Summit, and made it to Victor's house in the still-early evening, a little bit after 7:00 pm. This was Sunday night, and I ended up wasting time instead of simply reviewing my Torah reading and getting into bed early, as I should have. I did, however, have the opportunity to make write the last blog update.
Monday morning, I got up around 5:50 am for my commute to the city. I read Torah during Shacharit, and give myself a C in quality. I was not good and knew I was not good, as did everyone else in the minyan. I had my first real Gemara shiur, too, following breakfast, which was amazing. Really, amazing. Morning shiur lasts for around three and a half hours, most of which is taken up with study with a chevruta. My chevruta, Abby, knows a lot more than I do, and has a much wider Aramaic vocabulary than I do. Still, I'm putting a lot of effort in, and feel at least capable of struggling through the Talmudic text, with the help of the instructor's comments beforehand. These passages contain mostly halakhic (legal) material, without any of the famous aggadata (narratives), which makes comprehension significantly easier. The arguments are very technical, with multiple speakers proving the same point using different arguments.
I ended up leading minchah, perhaps for the first time ever during a weekday. I certainly wasn't expecting this, but the gabbai approached me a short time before minchah, and I didn't want to disappoint. I give myself a C+ on this; I stumble over my words quite frequently, especially during kaddish, and I think that everyone, especially the gabbai, knew that I was a little bit shaken. However, as I was leaving, I spotted Wendy, the Drisha instructor who visited Cornell and convinced me to try applying to Drisha, and I was really overjoyed by this. I took a few minutes to speak to her, telling her how much I was enjoying myself, and letting her know my plans next year. It turns out that she has family in Ramle, where I will be spending next year. This an amazingly happy coincidence. Because of this, I was a little bit late for Jon's afternoon lesson on Kavod HaMet, honor for the dead. We read the Talmudic passage from tractate Berachot that details the proper respect due to a human corpse. We found some interesting ambiguities. It's unclear, for instance, when people are exempt from performing certain commandments when they have a corpse that they need to bury, whether they have this exemption because burial is a special obligation, or because it is an activity resulting in mental duress. Interestingly, the laws for transporting a body are the same as those for transporting a Torah scroll. My chevruta in this was Ranana Dine, the younger sister of my friend Elliot. She's very sweet, and the two of us are more or less equal in our textual skills.
Drisha ends in the late afternoon on Monday, and I took the train back to Summit, arriving before it was fully dark out. I began writing this post, and got to bed relatively early, but also spoke with Rachel Silverman over the phone. She's working at a geothermal energy company this summer, and living in a cabin the middle of the woods.
I was awake this morning at 5:00, and made it to my 7:30 Wednesday morning class on the Shemoneh Esrei with time to spare. I had another excellent Gemara session this morning, finishing the second page of the chapter. There were, again, some rather obscure discussions, but nothing too difficult to understand. The memories preserved in the Talmud are sometimes surprising. For instance, wealthy women of Jerusalem apparently found themselves a charitable cause in providing cups of wine to convicted criminals walking to their place of execution (these cups of wine were meant to ease the pain and distress caused by impending death). This rather reminded me of the beginning of The Sorrow and the Pity, which describes wealthy Parisian women providing money to plant rosebushes in the trenches in the Maginot Line of fortresses. I guess wealthy unemployed people will find all sorts of causes that they think should be supported.
There was also, unfortunately, a disagreement at the end of my Gemara class between a student and the instructor. The instructor quoted a 19th-century German rabbi who challenged Maimonides's ruling on the subject described in the (rather ambiguous) passage. The student objected, stating that the 19th-century rabbi had no right to dispute a ruling that Maimonides had made with his full understanding of the early Arabic-language commentaries of the Talmud. The instructor responded that the student was giving the early commentators and Maimonides too much credit for having a received tradition to a singular solution to each and every Talmudic teaching, especially those that ended in overt ambiguity. I felt rather bad for the student, because I understood his outlook, but did not get involved.
I had a rather disappointing Mishnah lesson on the second chapter of Sanhedrin (dealing with the laws of the King and High Priest in Israel). I think that our instructor's preoccupation with particular commentaries and forms of commentary was the cause of this. While she was more interested in literary style and historic compilation of Rabbinic documents, I tend to prefer legal insights as to the ramifications of the laws in question. This is really too fascinating a chapter to waste, in my opinion, on speculations as to the differences in style in certain parts of the Mishnah.
Drisha fed us dinner (yay!), and then, some Cornell friends showed up. I studied with Josefin, and we found that we can, together, with a bit of help, read Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. At 7:30 pm began the first of a series of weekly Drisha lectures on narrative passages describing the life of the Rabbis at Yavneh. The instructor did a really fantastic job, and I was very glad that I attended.
I didn't get back to Victor's house until around 11:00 pm. I spend so much time on public transportation that I'm really getting good use out of my Kindle; I just finished another Shakespeare play, "As You Like It," this evening on the train. I'm quite tired, and need to sleep (so please excuse errors in spelling and grammar, as well as sloppy writing). I did get some unfortunate e-mails; it looks as if I will not be staying in the CUNY Hunter dorms this summer.
~JD
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