Shabbat Shalom, everyone!
First of all, shoutout to Alex Feldman for being the man. Just pointing that out, to anyone who didn't know. Also to Raymond Habbaz, for more or less the same reasons.
On Thursday at Drisha, we stopped our ordinary schedule of morning study of Talmud in order to perform some community service on the Lower East Side. After Shacharit, during which I had the honor of performing hagbah, the entire Drisha program packed onto the subway, and somehow made it to the Lower East Side of New York City without losing anyone. It was a little bit crazy. Anyway, we arrived at the Educational Alliance a little bit before 10:00 am, and were split into groups of four, to help out in various preschool classrooms. There were sixteen or seventeen 5-year-olds, mostly boys, in the classroom where I was working, all of them with tons and tons of energy. I had a somewhat difficult time getting any of them to pay attention to me, because they were almost all ESL, speaking (I think) Chinese as a first language. The instructor spoke to them in (again, I think) Chinese, but they were quasi-oblivious to my classmates and me. Although I have to say, Aviva did a fantastic job; she had three or four of the kids crawling over her, playing with playdough. Sharona, likewise, managed to get widespread attention when she read a story aloud, and one little boy cried when she left. I did my best to compliantly play with the children, but give myself a C+. These were all kids from families living below the poverty line of around $23,000 per year, the annual family income in this particular sample size averaging about $18,000 per year. It's really an excellent service that the Educational Alliance is serving. It also provides adult education programs; right in the entrance hallway is a poster specifically encouraging parents to attend higher education with the support of the organization. Although virtually nothing inside the classroom would mark this particular charity work as explicitly Jewish, when the children's lunch came in, I noted that the milk jugs were marked "חלב ישראל" on their caps. Clues like that tip you off. There were a few other "clues" to the fact that the students we were dealing with belonged to an economically underprivileged group. When Rivka used a puppet of a policewoman to speak to one of the children, the child referred to police officers' job as "putting you in jail." Likewise, the little boy who became attached to Sharona cried in a strange, quiet way when she left.
At 12:40 pm, my partners and I left the classroom. We were supposed to have left for a group meeting somewhat earlier, and due to a miscommunication, we missed a majority of the presentation on the functional role of the Educational Alliance. At the meeting's end, we were given time off until 5:45 pm Minchah, to explore, return to the Beit Midrash, or do anything else, as we pleased. I needed to run an errand, so although many of my classmates went to see an Israeli movie together, or to explore the Lower East Side (in the rain), I headed my own way, walking with Rivka most of the way, and eventually made my way back to Drisha, where I continued to study Bava Batra on my own. I also spoke to Alissa, whose program (not actually part of Drisha, but using their facilities) finished that day, and to Avital, who is a very, very intelligent person, and has bonded with Lani for being a linguistics major. Around 6:00 pm, Aaron taught a class comparing Biblical texts and archaeology to non-Jewish texts and structures of the same period, and, following this, the Rabbi led his weekly class in the Beit Midrash. I ended up taking the 9:51 pm train back to the Millburn station, where Eduardo picked me up.
Friday morning, I was up just before 6:00 am, walked to Millburn station, took the train to Penn Station, then walked from Penn to Drisha. Aaron's Talmud class plunged ahead, and we worked ourselves to the bottom of Sanhedrin 45a (although the middle third of 44b we still haven't read at all). During our chevruta time, Abbie and I finished the crazy Rashi story about the customs officer's funeral, that ends up really being an explanation of why a bunch of sorceresses' relatives conspired to sentence Shimon ben Shatach's son to the death penalty, but we also discussed the argument between Rabbi Yehudah and the other Rabbis about nakedness, which the editors of the Talmud had cross-referenced with a seemingly contradictory debate in the tractate of Sotah. Drisha had its typical weekly singing session, during which Jon played the guitar, we all sang happy birthday to a (very deadpan) Aaron, and Eli and Daniel showed themselves for the Chasidim they are by getting up and dancing with Jon. I walked back to Penn, for a bit of the way with Ranana, but ended up taking a fairly late train back to Millburn. This gave me time to finally finish Burke, who was beginning to bore me with his tireless tirade against Revolutionary French political economy, and pick up John Locke's Second Treatise on Government where I left it off last summer. The truth of the matter is, I don't think people actually read Locke any more. He's surprisingly conservative (at least, to my mind), given his reputation. For instance, he writes in Chapter 7, section 85 that "But there is another sort of servants,
which by a peculiar name we call slaves, who being captives taken in a just
war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and
arbitrary power of their masters. These men having, as I say, forfeited their
lives, and with it their liberties, and lost their estates; and being in the
state of slavery, not capable of any property, cannot in that state be
considered as any part of civil society; the chief end whereof is the
preservation of property." This is hardly the kind of progressive thinking that I was taught in High School to associate with Locke. Also, not in this work, but elsewhere, Locke proposes what is one of the strangest ever conceptions of the mind, a theory labeled by later philosophers as "property dualism."
It began to rain immediately after I arrived in New Jersey, so Eduardo picked me up again. I prepared for Shabbat, and even managed to take a brief run (note: running is terrible; the roads are not built for pedestrians). At around 7:45 pm, I left for Rabbi Bogomilsky's house.
The Rabbi had offered to host me this Shabbat, a favor for which I was very grateful (his family lives in the Chai Center, the makeshift synagogue). I felt welcome the moment that I walked in. I didn't know what to bring, so, just as I had with Eli's family, I had washed and cored two boxes of strawberries that I had bought in the city. The community is too small for a minyan for Kabbalat Shabbat, unfortunately. Shabbat dinner at the Rabbi's house consisted of the Rabbi and his wife Rivka (who works with Patricia, and remembers my attempt to buy a Gemara from her Judaica store), their daughters Hadassa and Luma and sons Eli Moshe and Yosef, and Hadassa's husband Yisroel. I slept very well that night, and was given the Third Aliyah in the morning. Most of Shabbat afternoon I spent reading and studying. Throughout my time, I heard extensively about the lawsuit against the congregation by a group of neighbors who are trying to block the construction of a synagogue. Too bad. Yosef and Eli Moshe are filled with energy, somewhat mischievous, and rather adorable. Hadassa and Yisroel also have a newborn baby, who was sick, and slept most of the day. After Havdallah, the Rabbi drove me home, a favor for which I was, again, very grateful.
OK, looking for a good week! Hope to see you soon!
~JD
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Third Week at Drisha
Monday was my last day staying at Victor's. I was up at 5:45 am, made the 6:30 train from Summit to Penn Station, and had a leisurely walk up to Drisha, on 65th street. Although it began to pour heavily during the day, the morning was clear. Continued to make my way through Burke on my Kindle, reviewing all his Francophobe fulminations. The man was clearly smart, but also had very different political opinions than I do.
Monday morning, we took a tangent to look at the history behind a single aggadic statement (אע״פ שחטא ישראל הוא) in our Talmudic passage, and how that had been interpreted (or ignored) variously by Geonim (Nitrai Gaon), Rishonim (Rashi's students), the Acharonim (the Avnei Nezer), and the Conservative movement. Abbie and I were both fascinated by how complicated the legal question had become, and, as the Conservative writer pointed out, the extent to which contemporary circumstances affected Rabbis' opinions. I did a very poor job leading Minchah, and then had my afternoon class with Jon, beginning to discuss the laws of burial, its relative importance, and its source, Biblical or Rabbinic, which even the Rabbis leave in an ambiguous state (assuming that we're not mis-reading the Talmud). Ranana Dine has become my regular chevruta in this class, which I very much enjoy; I think that she's sweet, and I'm already good friends with her older brother Elliot, who lived next door to me during the fall 2012 semester (he has been abroad since). I was able to leave relatively early in the afternoon because it was a Monday, and made it back to Summit a little bit before 7:00 pm. Victor picked me up in the downpour, and, after I packed my bags, he drove me to my next host house, 11 Fenton Drive, Short Hills, NJ. I'm staying with Victor's family friends, Patricia and Eduardo, to whom I'm very grateful for giving me a comfortable place to stay, and plenty of support (Eduardo is willing to drive me to and from the train station, which is otherwise about a 40-minute walk, when I need it, if he is awake). Monday night I skyped with Rachel Silverman (hooray!).
Tuesday morning, I had early-morning class beginning at 7:30 am, so I needed to be up by 4:45 am in order to catch the 5:45 am train from Millburn station. This was not fun, but I made it, surprisingly without getting lost. Early morning class on Tuesdays is led by Aaron, describing the Shemoneh Esrei, and this week, we reviewed the basic structure, highlighting many of the ambiguities between nationalism and universalism present in the first three berakhot. I find that every time I learn something new about Shemoneh Esrei, directly or indirectly, it permanently affects my recitation. Morning class was tragically cut short when an instructor burst into the Beit Midrash asking if anyone knew CPR. A man in an adjacent building had jumped out of his 14th-story window, and landed on the roof of the apartment building next to Drisha's. Cheryl, Marissa, and Aaron, who all know CPR, gave the man what first aid they could until the ambulance could arrive. The medics needed to pass through Drisha in order to find and carry away the victim, who was not responding. This whole sequence of events, which, all told, lasted under thirty minutes, affected the rest of the day; I only hope that it does not affect the rest of the term. Several of the girls cried, and many people were distressed. The staff invited us to share our feelings. Everyone since then has been acutely conscious of how much death has been appearing in our curriculum. I realize that my early-morning class had discussed the phrase "mechayei hameitim," both my Talmud class and my Mishnah class on Sanhedrin discuss capital punishment, and my last class deals exclusively with Jewish rituals of death and mourning. Furthermore, my individual chevruta with Josefin, on Hilchot Teshuva, ended last week with discussions of death. Mishnah class on Tuesday with Yaffah went on as scheduled, much to my relief (I may seem callous to you, but I never met this man who jumped, do not know his name, and there is absolutely no way I can do anything for his benefit by continuing to brood on his death). Talia and I worked our way through the fourth and fifth chapters of Sanhedrin, and the class ended with a manuscript comparison of a very famous passage in Sanhedrin 4:3; the question was whether the word מישראל had originally been in the Mishnah, and when it had been deleted or added. It seems most likely to me, given our review, that the word was absent in the original Mishnah, added sometime during the middle ages, and then censored out again among some editions of the Talmud in the 19th century. I'm only about 60% certain about this, though. Before Devorah's night lesson on Aggada began, I had about an hour in the Beit Midrash with Josefin, continuing to study Hilchot Teshuvah. Mishneh Torah must be one of the easiest Jewish books ever written. With the exception of an occasional unusual word, Josefin and I can read fairly fluently. Eli showed up, too, and spent most of his time with Raymond, Isaac, and (I think) Ezra. Devorah's night lesson described the tradition of Rabbi Yehushua discussing with his students Elazar ben Azaryah's innovative lectures, and how that tradition fit with the subsequent narrative describing Rabbi Eliezer, and last week's narrative (about the confrontation between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehushua). Again, Devorah is excellent, and did a fantastic job, trying to show how a narrative had essentially been plundered for its elements, that had been scattered across Rabbinic writings. I got home quite late on Tuesday night.
This morning (Wednesday), I was up at 5:45 am, easily making the 6:57 express train to Penn Station. Most of the morning's Talmud lesson was taken up by discussions of the unfortunate event of Tuesday, as well as students' individual thoughts and feelings regarding studying Talmud. Personally, I have felt the same pleasure that I feel when decoding a page of Talmud somewhere else -- when I was first able to read books written in French. The idea is the same: what was before just paper and ink becomes a transmission of thought from human mind to human mind across time and space, which is pretty incredible, when you think about it. (The fact that I'm able to make sense of a language written in script other than the Roman alphabet is an added bonus, a phenomenon Willard Spiegelman brings up in his essay on the joy of reading in Seven Pleasures.) Eventually, though, we sat down with our Talmud again, and began to read an interesting narrative, told differently in the Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, and Tosefta, regarding one convict's last words. We also began a very long Rashi passage, but ran out of time. I lead Minchah, somewhat better than I had on Monday. I'm trying very hard to improve. The truth of the matter is, my principal obstacle is my own stagefright and nervousness, and I know that only through repetition can I learn to stop tripping over my consonants (and swallowing my final-kafs). In Jon's class, Ranana and I surprisingly successfully struggled through a few responsa regarding reburial, including a very challenging Gaonic one in Aramaic. We make a good team, and I'm very glad to be able to study with her; she has only slightly better linguistic skills, but we otherwise have complementary study skill sets. Devorah then gave a fantastic (but rather long) class on egalitarian tefillah, and two and a half different approaches to reach the conclusion that women should count towards making a minyan for tefillah. I thought that she made a very good argument. Following this was a continuation of last week's lesson on Judaism as art (bringing up the rather unusual aggadah of Moshe's visit to Rabbi Akiva), and, after this, a presentation about human dignity as presented by Sanhedrin 4:3 by Yitz Greenberg, a guest speaker. Apparently, Rabbi Greenberg is a very big deal, and there was a sense of awe among some of my fellow students. I had never heard of him before I came to Drisha. I thought that he made some interesting points, but I nothing terribly incredible. I barely made the 9:51 pm train back to Millburn, where Eduardo picked me up from the station. On Tuesday night, I had felt unsafe walking down the busy road after dark, and even though Patricia was already in bed, Eduardo graciously drove me back to their house.
Tomorrow, it's supposed to rain. We're going to be outside, unfortunately, on a service learning trip. Unfortunate because, meteorologically speaking, today would have made such a better day to spend walking the East Side.
~JD
Monday morning, we took a tangent to look at the history behind a single aggadic statement (אע״פ שחטא ישראל הוא) in our Talmudic passage, and how that had been interpreted (or ignored) variously by Geonim (Nitrai Gaon), Rishonim (Rashi's students), the Acharonim (the Avnei Nezer), and the Conservative movement. Abbie and I were both fascinated by how complicated the legal question had become, and, as the Conservative writer pointed out, the extent to which contemporary circumstances affected Rabbis' opinions. I did a very poor job leading Minchah, and then had my afternoon class with Jon, beginning to discuss the laws of burial, its relative importance, and its source, Biblical or Rabbinic, which even the Rabbis leave in an ambiguous state (assuming that we're not mis-reading the Talmud). Ranana Dine has become my regular chevruta in this class, which I very much enjoy; I think that she's sweet, and I'm already good friends with her older brother Elliot, who lived next door to me during the fall 2012 semester (he has been abroad since). I was able to leave relatively early in the afternoon because it was a Monday, and made it back to Summit a little bit before 7:00 pm. Victor picked me up in the downpour, and, after I packed my bags, he drove me to my next host house, 11 Fenton Drive, Short Hills, NJ. I'm staying with Victor's family friends, Patricia and Eduardo, to whom I'm very grateful for giving me a comfortable place to stay, and plenty of support (Eduardo is willing to drive me to and from the train station, which is otherwise about a 40-minute walk, when I need it, if he is awake). Monday night I skyped with Rachel Silverman (hooray!).
Tuesday morning, I had early-morning class beginning at 7:30 am, so I needed to be up by 4:45 am in order to catch the 5:45 am train from Millburn station. This was not fun, but I made it, surprisingly without getting lost. Early morning class on Tuesdays is led by Aaron, describing the Shemoneh Esrei, and this week, we reviewed the basic structure, highlighting many of the ambiguities between nationalism and universalism present in the first three berakhot. I find that every time I learn something new about Shemoneh Esrei, directly or indirectly, it permanently affects my recitation. Morning class was tragically cut short when an instructor burst into the Beit Midrash asking if anyone knew CPR. A man in an adjacent building had jumped out of his 14th-story window, and landed on the roof of the apartment building next to Drisha's. Cheryl, Marissa, and Aaron, who all know CPR, gave the man what first aid they could until the ambulance could arrive. The medics needed to pass through Drisha in order to find and carry away the victim, who was not responding. This whole sequence of events, which, all told, lasted under thirty minutes, affected the rest of the day; I only hope that it does not affect the rest of the term. Several of the girls cried, and many people were distressed. The staff invited us to share our feelings. Everyone since then has been acutely conscious of how much death has been appearing in our curriculum. I realize that my early-morning class had discussed the phrase "mechayei hameitim," both my Talmud class and my Mishnah class on Sanhedrin discuss capital punishment, and my last class deals exclusively with Jewish rituals of death and mourning. Furthermore, my individual chevruta with Josefin, on Hilchot Teshuva, ended last week with discussions of death. Mishnah class on Tuesday with Yaffah went on as scheduled, much to my relief (I may seem callous to you, but I never met this man who jumped, do not know his name, and there is absolutely no way I can do anything for his benefit by continuing to brood on his death). Talia and I worked our way through the fourth and fifth chapters of Sanhedrin, and the class ended with a manuscript comparison of a very famous passage in Sanhedrin 4:3; the question was whether the word מישראל had originally been in the Mishnah, and when it had been deleted or added. It seems most likely to me, given our review, that the word was absent in the original Mishnah, added sometime during the middle ages, and then censored out again among some editions of the Talmud in the 19th century. I'm only about 60% certain about this, though. Before Devorah's night lesson on Aggada began, I had about an hour in the Beit Midrash with Josefin, continuing to study Hilchot Teshuvah. Mishneh Torah must be one of the easiest Jewish books ever written. With the exception of an occasional unusual word, Josefin and I can read fairly fluently. Eli showed up, too, and spent most of his time with Raymond, Isaac, and (I think) Ezra. Devorah's night lesson described the tradition of Rabbi Yehushua discussing with his students Elazar ben Azaryah's innovative lectures, and how that tradition fit with the subsequent narrative describing Rabbi Eliezer, and last week's narrative (about the confrontation between Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehushua). Again, Devorah is excellent, and did a fantastic job, trying to show how a narrative had essentially been plundered for its elements, that had been scattered across Rabbinic writings. I got home quite late on Tuesday night.
This morning (Wednesday), I was up at 5:45 am, easily making the 6:57 express train to Penn Station. Most of the morning's Talmud lesson was taken up by discussions of the unfortunate event of Tuesday, as well as students' individual thoughts and feelings regarding studying Talmud. Personally, I have felt the same pleasure that I feel when decoding a page of Talmud somewhere else -- when I was first able to read books written in French. The idea is the same: what was before just paper and ink becomes a transmission of thought from human mind to human mind across time and space, which is pretty incredible, when you think about it. (The fact that I'm able to make sense of a language written in script other than the Roman alphabet is an added bonus, a phenomenon Willard Spiegelman brings up in his essay on the joy of reading in Seven Pleasures.) Eventually, though, we sat down with our Talmud again, and began to read an interesting narrative, told differently in the Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, and Tosefta, regarding one convict's last words. We also began a very long Rashi passage, but ran out of time. I lead Minchah, somewhat better than I had on Monday. I'm trying very hard to improve. The truth of the matter is, my principal obstacle is my own stagefright and nervousness, and I know that only through repetition can I learn to stop tripping over my consonants (and swallowing my final-kafs). In Jon's class, Ranana and I surprisingly successfully struggled through a few responsa regarding reburial, including a very challenging Gaonic one in Aramaic. We make a good team, and I'm very glad to be able to study with her; she has only slightly better linguistic skills, but we otherwise have complementary study skill sets. Devorah then gave a fantastic (but rather long) class on egalitarian tefillah, and two and a half different approaches to reach the conclusion that women should count towards making a minyan for tefillah. I thought that she made a very good argument. Following this was a continuation of last week's lesson on Judaism as art (bringing up the rather unusual aggadah of Moshe's visit to Rabbi Akiva), and, after this, a presentation about human dignity as presented by Sanhedrin 4:3 by Yitz Greenberg, a guest speaker. Apparently, Rabbi Greenberg is a very big deal, and there was a sense of awe among some of my fellow students. I had never heard of him before I came to Drisha. I thought that he made some interesting points, but I nothing terribly incredible. I barely made the 9:51 pm train back to Millburn, where Eduardo picked me up from the station. On Tuesday night, I had felt unsafe walking down the busy road after dark, and even though Patricia was already in bed, Eduardo graciously drove me back to their house.
Tomorrow, it's supposed to rain. We're going to be outside, unfortunately, on a service learning trip. Unfortunate because, meteorologically speaking, today would have made such a better day to spend walking the East Side.
~JD
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Drisha Shabbaton
On Wednesday, I was quite exhausted, not having slept much. Again, I crawled out of bed at six, slept on the train to the city, and staggered my way to Drisha. There was a lot of learning action: Abby and I struggled through the end of the second page of Talmud that we're learning, around a quarter of which was censored out, and contained some interesting passages. We ended up cross-referencing the sugyot with other mishnayot, as well as extensive Biblical citations. I noticed that one of Ulla's statements in the censored section seemed to contradict, or at least create an exception for, one of Abbaye's statements made towards the end of the censored section, regarding the reasoning behind the need for public announcements of convictions of capital crimes. I kind of hoped that there might be something brought down in the halakhah about this, but there wasn't, which either means that Ulla wasn't saying what I thought he was saying, or that the law is not in accordance with his statements. That's just Talmud for you, I guess. Also, on the third page, I really didn't understand one of Yehoshua ben Levi's statements. Again, I suppose that that's just Talmud.
During lunch (which Drisha provided), the vice-dean of Drisha gave a talk on the week's Haftorah's heroine, Rachav. I thought that it was kind of dull, but this might have been because I was tired. Throughout the whole day, in fact, I was rather lethargic. Following Minchah was my afternoon lesson on honor of death in Judaism, which was my most painful class at Drisha yet, because I was losing focus so quickly, and barely understood what we were reading, despite spending a fair amount of time poring over it. There were several quasi-contradictory opinions in the midrash, the Mishnah, and the Bavli concerning tzitzit and the dead. I at least partially understood the quotes from Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, but the sections from the Tosafot, the 12th-century French commentators, were rather opaque to me. I was very glad when that class ended, and I could return to some solo study reviewing the day's Gemara, as well as continuing to read the Mishnayot of Bava Batra (I finally finished the third chapter). At 7:00 pm, the Beit Midrash opened to the community at large, and some speakers gave some very interesting talks. One was about Judaism-as-art, which I thought was just a little bit hokey, but still OK (it brought up some significant details of the narrative of Alexander the Great's encounter with Shimon ha-Tzaddik that I hadn't heard before). Much better, though, was a very tightly-organized and well-delivered class on the clout and judicial significance of community rules and regulations, which brought up a series of very interesting medieval sources that I had never seen before. After Ma'ariv, it was around 9:30 pm, and Eli (who attended the community learning night) walked to Penn Station together, much to my pleasure. I took the train back, and did my laundry in preparation for the next few days.
Thursday was a long day. It began with my falling asleep on the train to Penn Station again, but managing, somehow, to make it through my Torah reading with only one error in pronunciation (perhaps a few more in cantillation). I survived -- and then had one of my best Talmud lessons yet. We sped through more than a page, reading through the Talmudic description of the episode of Achan and Yehoshua, and wound up in a certain episode that I recognirzed from the opening pages of tractate Megillah; as far as I could tell, the two passages were identical. I've heard about such repetitions in the Talmud before, but I've never encountered any before. The purpose of the story was to midrashically (exegetically) prove that the study of Torah is more important than the daily sacrifices made in the Temple, through a cryptic conversation that Yehoshua has in Yehoshua 5:13-15. Abbie and I also reviewed the relevant Biblical narratives.
In the afternoon, I had my Mishnah class with Yafah, in which we read the third chapter of Mishnah Sanhedrin (the tractate that all of Drisha is studying in our separate Talmud classes). The third chapter discusses the qualifications for judges, witnesses, and evidence. Talia and I worked together studying this chapter -- her Hebrew is much better than mine, but I think that we made a fairly good team. Something that rather surprised me is that various kinds of gamblers (dice-players, pigeon-racers, etc.) were singled out as being ineligible, not for any concern that they might have vested interest in the trial (for example, betting on the outcome), but, demonstrably, because the Rabbis considered them to be morally corrupt people. The theme of the day was Tosefta; we discussed whether the Tosefta can be read as an alternative Mishnah compiled by another Rabbinic school, a pre-existing Rabbinic codex of laws, or even an early commentary on the Mishnah (Yafah seems to agree with this list opinion). The evening's classes ended with Rabbi Silbur, Drisha's head instructor, giving another lecture to the students.
Afterwards, my classmate Daniel and I took the subway, through the rain, to 100th street, to the Anschei Chesed synagogue, where we were participating in service learning, i.e. volunteering. Anschei Chesed runs a homeless shelter for ten carefully-screened employed men working their way out of homelessness. It is the job of two volunteers to be there to ensure that they go to sleep and wake up on time (5:00 am), and are all outside waiting for the bus by 6:00 am. It was really a very easy job, and Daniel and I had a chance to speak to each other for a time, and, a little bit, to the men, although I was hesitant to distract them. They were very gracious and grateful people, but had also clearly been through more hardships in their lives than we two volunteers could probably imagine. It isn't easy being down-and-out in city, in this country, or anywhere, for that matter. Right as our shift began, three of the men walked into the volunteers' room, and began to have a serious talk with the previous two volunteers, who apparently had nearly begun a fight, because they had taken a very accusatory tone when inquiring about something that one of the other men might (or might not) have done. The problem had been that, after voicing open accusations, they tried to speak to some of the other men privately, making it seem as if some of the men had been acting as tattletales. This was our introduction to Anschei Chesed, but nothing negative came of the encounter, for us, anyway. Daniel and I couldn't turn off the lights, and the men were awake before us, but we made certain that they had everything that they needed, helping them put their bunks back, disposing of dirty laundry, etc.
On Friday morning, it finally looked as if everything was going to end smoothly at 6:30 am, until, while locking up, the loft key became jammed in the lock, and would not budge. We had no choice but to explain to the janitorial staff what had happened, and leave. Daniel left for his apartment, and I left for Drisha (where else was I going to go), where I fell asleep reviewing the previous day's Talmud lesson, and then we had the morning lesson taught by D'vorah, who explained the Achan narrative, and why the Talmud reads it the way it does (Achan as the worst human being possible, but also with very particular misdeeds ascribed to him). We then packed our bags onto the bus, and left for Camp Moshava, where we stayed for Shabbat. I sat next to Raffi on the bus, but fell asleep over my Kindle (I was reading Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France) while "V for Vendetta" played on the bus's video system. Falling asleep at inopportune moments seems to be a motif of this blog post, doesn't it?
When we arrived, it was raining; it continued to rain all through the afternoon and evening, and remained in the 50s all day. Camp Moshava is an overnight Jewish summer camp with a very religious-Zionist bent. I've never been to camp, and was in the minority. Throughout my stay, the other students referred to their summers at overnight and day camp, some of them spent at Moshava.
After some much-needed lunch, I ended up playing dodgeball and, later, basketball with a few of the other students. Ariel was particularly amused when, stepping off court for a moment to take off my hoodie, I had my back turned when a teammate passed the ball to me. I've never gotten to be particularly good at basketball, mostly because I play so infrequently (same goes for soccer and baseball), but I was impressed with how good some of my classmates were. I expected Raymond to be good, but I hadn't expected Ariella or Aviva to have as much speed and agility as they displayed. before I took a welcome hot shower (I was getting chilly), and dressed for Shabbat. We welcomed in Shabbat, and then had a communal Shabbat dinner, somewhat reminiscent (to me) of dinners in 104 West! I sat in the corner, near Lani, Ahuva, Raymond, Batsheva, Sharona, and Ariel (who seems to be in all of my classes, and around me all the time). After dinner, we all all congregated in the camp's Beit Midrash, where some people shared divrei Torah that they had prepared, alternating with singing of traditional songs, and where we ended up sharing name stories. I told the story behind my double name, and heard some very fascinating accounts of the legacies and expectations many of my classmates inherited with their names. I stayed up a little bit later learning a few Mishnayot in Bava Batra (finishing chapter 5), and then went to bed around 1:00 am. I was warm thanks only to the excellent sleeping bag provided to my by the Feldmans.
I woke up on time on Saturday for 8:30 am prayer. I did not need to read Torah or lead, Wendy, Raymond, and Rabbi Silber did an excellent job reading. We also recited a very fun communal Pesukei D'zimra, in which each person led one or more of the Tehillim; I read 148, which, thank goodness, I at least quasi-know. I also lifted the Sefer Torah in Hagbah; it was easily the heaviest Sefer Torah I've ever lifted, and I nearly dropped it (thank you to everyone who physically supported it). Wendy led an Aggada class before lunch on the accounts of Yehudah ha-Nasi's death given in the Talmud Yerushalmi and Talmud Bavli, respectively. Wendy is the reason that I'm studying at Drisha right now, is really a fantastic instructor. We ate together, and were encouraged to sit with instructors with whom we don't have any classes. So I sat with Esther, who lives in Israel, and, coincidentally, Abbie was at the same table. Neesa joined us, too; we talked a little bit about ourselves, our educations, our plans for the future, etc. Throughout the entire Shabbaton, I got to know my classmates all a little bit better.
Throughout the afternoon, we alternated between free time, and time spent in fairly relaxing lessons in the Beit Midrash, and, because it was sunny, on benches outside, too. At one point, when Jon was talking, Stu walked over with his baby, and I could feel the thirty-some pairs of eyeballs around me all swivel in their sockets to follow the baby. I ended up with a little bit of time in the Beit Midrash, where I used a Steinsaltz Talmud to review the opening pages of Megillah, which I studied with Rav Ami last semester. I thought that I would be able to read through it without difficulty, but ended up needing to refer to an Artscroll study aid for a few passages whose meanings I just couldn't recall. Late in the afternoon, we had a panel discussion from some of Drisha's instructors about approaches to study of Torah. Because of the nature of the program, we spoke about the (closing but still extant) gap between men's and women's Jewish education in the (Orthodox) Jewish world. However, Rabbi Silber also had an opportunity to discuss his motivations for founding Drisha. Much to my surprise, he complained of a lack of foundation in Mikra, explaining that he had mostly just studied Talmud in his early year. Which is fascinating to me, because although I rarely hear him reference the Talmud, he (and D'vorah) seem to know Mikra backwards and forwards! Following this was se'udah shlishit, where there was, as I have come to expect, more singing and divrei Torah.
After a musical Havdallah, Shabbat was over, and some people watched a movie, and other of us found other ways to occupy ourselves. We were scheduled to have a bonfire later that evening and, tired as I was, I realized that it would be stupid and antisocial to act on my impulses and go to bed early. So after finding the (well concealed) bonfire with Amy, the two of us directed the rest of the Drisha group to its location, I ended up staying up until around 2:00 am or so singing with my classmates, Raffi and Shoshana accompanying on their guitars. It was a medley of pop songs, traditional Jewish melodies, and Zionist songs. Some of these songs I knew; others I did not. I had a good time, though, and walked back to my bunk with Lani, who is staying in one of the two women's bunks.
I was up for 7:15 am morning prayer on Sunday, and opened the ark for the Torah service (it was Rosh Chodesh Tammuz). After a quick breakfast, we packed ourselves back on to the bus (except for those driving, such as Lani, who drove Meir and some others to a friend's wedding). We arrived at Drisha a little bit before noon. I dropped off some belongings, then walked to Penn Station. It was significantly warmer in New York City than it had been in Pennsylvania. I arrived back at Victor's house in Summit, and Peter let me in. Within an hour or so, after a shower, I had fallen asleep, waking up briefly between 9:30 pm and 10:00 pm, and then falling asleep again until I got out of bed at 5:45 am Monday morning. Very welcome rest!
I'm now living in a new location; I have my housing figured out. However, now I need to get to bed! Again, apologies to any typos due to my lack of proofreading.
~JD
During lunch (which Drisha provided), the vice-dean of Drisha gave a talk on the week's Haftorah's heroine, Rachav. I thought that it was kind of dull, but this might have been because I was tired. Throughout the whole day, in fact, I was rather lethargic. Following Minchah was my afternoon lesson on honor of death in Judaism, which was my most painful class at Drisha yet, because I was losing focus so quickly, and barely understood what we were reading, despite spending a fair amount of time poring over it. There were several quasi-contradictory opinions in the midrash, the Mishnah, and the Bavli concerning tzitzit and the dead. I at least partially understood the quotes from Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, but the sections from the Tosafot, the 12th-century French commentators, were rather opaque to me. I was very glad when that class ended, and I could return to some solo study reviewing the day's Gemara, as well as continuing to read the Mishnayot of Bava Batra (I finally finished the third chapter). At 7:00 pm, the Beit Midrash opened to the community at large, and some speakers gave some very interesting talks. One was about Judaism-as-art, which I thought was just a little bit hokey, but still OK (it brought up some significant details of the narrative of Alexander the Great's encounter with Shimon ha-Tzaddik that I hadn't heard before). Much better, though, was a very tightly-organized and well-delivered class on the clout and judicial significance of community rules and regulations, which brought up a series of very interesting medieval sources that I had never seen before. After Ma'ariv, it was around 9:30 pm, and Eli (who attended the community learning night) walked to Penn Station together, much to my pleasure. I took the train back, and did my laundry in preparation for the next few days.
Thursday was a long day. It began with my falling asleep on the train to Penn Station again, but managing, somehow, to make it through my Torah reading with only one error in pronunciation (perhaps a few more in cantillation). I survived -- and then had one of my best Talmud lessons yet. We sped through more than a page, reading through the Talmudic description of the episode of Achan and Yehoshua, and wound up in a certain episode that I recognirzed from the opening pages of tractate Megillah; as far as I could tell, the two passages were identical. I've heard about such repetitions in the Talmud before, but I've never encountered any before. The purpose of the story was to midrashically (exegetically) prove that the study of Torah is more important than the daily sacrifices made in the Temple, through a cryptic conversation that Yehoshua has in Yehoshua 5:13-15. Abbie and I also reviewed the relevant Biblical narratives.
In the afternoon, I had my Mishnah class with Yafah, in which we read the third chapter of Mishnah Sanhedrin (the tractate that all of Drisha is studying in our separate Talmud classes). The third chapter discusses the qualifications for judges, witnesses, and evidence. Talia and I worked together studying this chapter -- her Hebrew is much better than mine, but I think that we made a fairly good team. Something that rather surprised me is that various kinds of gamblers (dice-players, pigeon-racers, etc.) were singled out as being ineligible, not for any concern that they might have vested interest in the trial (for example, betting on the outcome), but, demonstrably, because the Rabbis considered them to be morally corrupt people. The theme of the day was Tosefta; we discussed whether the Tosefta can be read as an alternative Mishnah compiled by another Rabbinic school, a pre-existing Rabbinic codex of laws, or even an early commentary on the Mishnah (Yafah seems to agree with this list opinion). The evening's classes ended with Rabbi Silbur, Drisha's head instructor, giving another lecture to the students.
Afterwards, my classmate Daniel and I took the subway, through the rain, to 100th street, to the Anschei Chesed synagogue, where we were participating in service learning, i.e. volunteering. Anschei Chesed runs a homeless shelter for ten carefully-screened employed men working their way out of homelessness. It is the job of two volunteers to be there to ensure that they go to sleep and wake up on time (5:00 am), and are all outside waiting for the bus by 6:00 am. It was really a very easy job, and Daniel and I had a chance to speak to each other for a time, and, a little bit, to the men, although I was hesitant to distract them. They were very gracious and grateful people, but had also clearly been through more hardships in their lives than we two volunteers could probably imagine. It isn't easy being down-and-out in city, in this country, or anywhere, for that matter. Right as our shift began, three of the men walked into the volunteers' room, and began to have a serious talk with the previous two volunteers, who apparently had nearly begun a fight, because they had taken a very accusatory tone when inquiring about something that one of the other men might (or might not) have done. The problem had been that, after voicing open accusations, they tried to speak to some of the other men privately, making it seem as if some of the men had been acting as tattletales. This was our introduction to Anschei Chesed, but nothing negative came of the encounter, for us, anyway. Daniel and I couldn't turn off the lights, and the men were awake before us, but we made certain that they had everything that they needed, helping them put their bunks back, disposing of dirty laundry, etc.
On Friday morning, it finally looked as if everything was going to end smoothly at 6:30 am, until, while locking up, the loft key became jammed in the lock, and would not budge. We had no choice but to explain to the janitorial staff what had happened, and leave. Daniel left for his apartment, and I left for Drisha (where else was I going to go), where I fell asleep reviewing the previous day's Talmud lesson, and then we had the morning lesson taught by D'vorah, who explained the Achan narrative, and why the Talmud reads it the way it does (Achan as the worst human being possible, but also with very particular misdeeds ascribed to him). We then packed our bags onto the bus, and left for Camp Moshava, where we stayed for Shabbat. I sat next to Raffi on the bus, but fell asleep over my Kindle (I was reading Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France) while "V for Vendetta" played on the bus's video system. Falling asleep at inopportune moments seems to be a motif of this blog post, doesn't it?
When we arrived, it was raining; it continued to rain all through the afternoon and evening, and remained in the 50s all day. Camp Moshava is an overnight Jewish summer camp with a very religious-Zionist bent. I've never been to camp, and was in the minority. Throughout my stay, the other students referred to their summers at overnight and day camp, some of them spent at Moshava.
After some much-needed lunch, I ended up playing dodgeball and, later, basketball with a few of the other students. Ariel was particularly amused when, stepping off court for a moment to take off my hoodie, I had my back turned when a teammate passed the ball to me. I've never gotten to be particularly good at basketball, mostly because I play so infrequently (same goes for soccer and baseball), but I was impressed with how good some of my classmates were. I expected Raymond to be good, but I hadn't expected Ariella or Aviva to have as much speed and agility as they displayed. before I took a welcome hot shower (I was getting chilly), and dressed for Shabbat. We welcomed in Shabbat, and then had a communal Shabbat dinner, somewhat reminiscent (to me) of dinners in 104 West! I sat in the corner, near Lani, Ahuva, Raymond, Batsheva, Sharona, and Ariel (who seems to be in all of my classes, and around me all the time). After dinner, we all all congregated in the camp's Beit Midrash, where some people shared divrei Torah that they had prepared, alternating with singing of traditional songs, and where we ended up sharing name stories. I told the story behind my double name, and heard some very fascinating accounts of the legacies and expectations many of my classmates inherited with their names. I stayed up a little bit later learning a few Mishnayot in Bava Batra (finishing chapter 5), and then went to bed around 1:00 am. I was warm thanks only to the excellent sleeping bag provided to my by the Feldmans.
I woke up on time on Saturday for 8:30 am prayer. I did not need to read Torah or lead, Wendy, Raymond, and Rabbi Silber did an excellent job reading. We also recited a very fun communal Pesukei D'zimra, in which each person led one or more of the Tehillim; I read 148, which, thank goodness, I at least quasi-know. I also lifted the Sefer Torah in Hagbah; it was easily the heaviest Sefer Torah I've ever lifted, and I nearly dropped it (thank you to everyone who physically supported it). Wendy led an Aggada class before lunch on the accounts of Yehudah ha-Nasi's death given in the Talmud Yerushalmi and Talmud Bavli, respectively. Wendy is the reason that I'm studying at Drisha right now, is really a fantastic instructor. We ate together, and were encouraged to sit with instructors with whom we don't have any classes. So I sat with Esther, who lives in Israel, and, coincidentally, Abbie was at the same table. Neesa joined us, too; we talked a little bit about ourselves, our educations, our plans for the future, etc. Throughout the entire Shabbaton, I got to know my classmates all a little bit better.
Throughout the afternoon, we alternated between free time, and time spent in fairly relaxing lessons in the Beit Midrash, and, because it was sunny, on benches outside, too. At one point, when Jon was talking, Stu walked over with his baby, and I could feel the thirty-some pairs of eyeballs around me all swivel in their sockets to follow the baby. I ended up with a little bit of time in the Beit Midrash, where I used a Steinsaltz Talmud to review the opening pages of Megillah, which I studied with Rav Ami last semester. I thought that I would be able to read through it without difficulty, but ended up needing to refer to an Artscroll study aid for a few passages whose meanings I just couldn't recall. Late in the afternoon, we had a panel discussion from some of Drisha's instructors about approaches to study of Torah. Because of the nature of the program, we spoke about the (closing but still extant) gap between men's and women's Jewish education in the (Orthodox) Jewish world. However, Rabbi Silber also had an opportunity to discuss his motivations for founding Drisha. Much to my surprise, he complained of a lack of foundation in Mikra, explaining that he had mostly just studied Talmud in his early year. Which is fascinating to me, because although I rarely hear him reference the Talmud, he (and D'vorah) seem to know Mikra backwards and forwards! Following this was se'udah shlishit, where there was, as I have come to expect, more singing and divrei Torah.
After a musical Havdallah, Shabbat was over, and some people watched a movie, and other of us found other ways to occupy ourselves. We were scheduled to have a bonfire later that evening and, tired as I was, I realized that it would be stupid and antisocial to act on my impulses and go to bed early. So after finding the (well concealed) bonfire with Amy, the two of us directed the rest of the Drisha group to its location, I ended up staying up until around 2:00 am or so singing with my classmates, Raffi and Shoshana accompanying on their guitars. It was a medley of pop songs, traditional Jewish melodies, and Zionist songs. Some of these songs I knew; others I did not. I had a good time, though, and walked back to my bunk with Lani, who is staying in one of the two women's bunks.
I was up for 7:15 am morning prayer on Sunday, and opened the ark for the Torah service (it was Rosh Chodesh Tammuz). After a quick breakfast, we packed ourselves back on to the bus (except for those driving, such as Lani, who drove Meir and some others to a friend's wedding). We arrived at Drisha a little bit before noon. I dropped off some belongings, then walked to Penn Station. It was significantly warmer in New York City than it had been in Pennsylvania. I arrived back at Victor's house in Summit, and Peter let me in. Within an hour or so, after a shower, I had fallen asleep, waking up briefly between 9:30 pm and 10:00 pm, and then falling asleep again until I got out of bed at 5:45 am Monday morning. Very welcome rest!
I'm now living in a new location; I have my housing figured out. However, now I need to get to bed! Again, apologies to any typos due to my lack of proofreading.
~JD
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Israel Day Parade weekend
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
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
Monday, June 3, 2013
Drisha Orientation
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
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
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
From Ithaca to Summit
Another chapter of this travel blog commences!
Monday morning, after a brief final trip up McGraw Tower with Eli, Harry, Josefin, and Rachel, I packed up the last of my belongings still in 106 West Ave., loaded them into my family's car, and brought them back to 309 Salem Drive with the help of both of my parents. Although my main task throughout Monday afternoon involved unpacking my bags and putting my clothes and books back in storage, I ended up cleaning out large portions of my room, especially my desk. I realized that I needed to begin to remove the piles of detritus that have accumulated over the years as a result of my laziness in deciding what to do with so many of my possessions. I ended up finding old postcards and caches of foreign currencies that I had forgotten, or had believed were lost. I found three years' worth of High School student IDs, as well as the journal that I kept during the months that I lived in England at the end of 8th grade. I never realized it before, but that journal was probably the earliest prototype of this blog. I wrote essays about the places I had visited, and the about things that I did, so that I could practice writing, and would be able to remember them after the fact. I found essays about the London Underground, the Tower of London, Kew Botanic Gardens, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, British cheeses (especially Wensleydale and Yarg), and more. The essays were shorter than my blog entries, and written by a middle school version of JD (who still went almost universally as "Jonathan"), but still recognizably my own.
On Monday night, I had finished unpacking all of the things that I had brought home from college, and proceeded to pack up many of them again, in a smaller suitcase, in preparation for my trip to New York City. For those of you who don't know, I'm spending this June studying at Drisha Institute, where I hope to familiarize myself with traditional Jewish texts, and to improve my Hebrew (and, if I'm lucky, my Aramaic). I'm planning to stay in the dorms at CUNY Hunter, which do not open until June 10th, so I'll be staying with my friend Victor's family in Summit, New Jersey until then. It will be a a moderately long commute to 37 West 65th Street by foot and train and then foot again, but I don't really have much of a choice. I'm extremely grateful to Victor, his mother, and his brothers for being such good hosts, and not just letting me sleep in their house, but also chauffeuring me, spending time with me, allowing me to use the Wi-Fi necessary to write and publish this blog post, etc.
First, though, I needed to get to New Jersey. That is why, on Tuesday afternoon, Eli Shaubi and I began the drive from Ithaca to Summit. Eli, who lives in the Five Towns in Long Island, was willing to give me a ride on his own journey back to the tri-state area. He even made a substantial detour in order to drive me right to Victor's front door, rather than simply dropping me off in New York City, and hoping that I could find my own way to Summit by train via Penn Station. For those of you who know the two of us, I'll just say that we spoke about exactly the things that you would expect the two of us to discuss on a 4-5 hour road trip. Sushi-making, the discovery of the Higgs Boson, Saint Augustine's Confessions, the advent of Judeo-Arabic, and problems in our respective theses that we'd like to correct were all topics of conversation. We made it to Victor's house rather late at night, not until around 9pm, so Eli ended up sleeping at Victor's house, too, in the bed next to mine.
After seeing Eli off in the morning, I spent a fair amount of today, Wednesday, reading my copy of The Landmark Herodotus, finishing all of Book I. The Landmark Herodotus is an exhaustively-annotated edition of the Greek historian's famous work; there's also a Landmark Thucydides (which I've read), a Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika (which I hope to read soon), and a Landmark Arrian (which I plan on reading sometime). I highly recommend these editions to anyone interested in delving into Classical Greek history. These editions give the reader extensive background information, confirmations and repudiations of the writers' claims, maps that help those unfamiliar with Mediterranean and Anatolian geography make sense of what is happening when and where, and relevant archaeological images. I also spent time today trying to find a Judaica shop that sold copies of the Babylonian Talmud. I was unsuccessful, although Victor did manage to find a mezuzah that he will need for his new apartment in Philadelphia, where he will be teaching high school chemistry and attending U Penn grad school next year. I was specifically hoping to find a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin, which I will be studying at Drisha, as well as Tractate Makkot, which I hope to be studying with a friend during the coming months.
Victor and his mother also took me out to a kosher vegetarian restaurant near their house, where I got a rather good falafel with Israeli salad and Spanish eggplant salad.
I'm very excited for my orientation tomorrow. My only two worries are that I will accidentally become lost on the way to class tomorrow and therefore be late, and that I won't have a chance to purchase a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin before I need to have one of my own.
Looking forward to class tomorrow, and (for a few of you) seeing you soon in NYC!
~JD
"If you think yourself an immortal and that you command an immortal army, no opinion of mine will mean anything to you. But if you realize that you are human and command an army of human beings, consider first that there is a cycle in human affairs, and as it goes around it does not permit the same person to enjoy good fortune forever" (Herodotus, Histories, I.207.2).
Monday morning, after a brief final trip up McGraw Tower with Eli, Harry, Josefin, and Rachel, I packed up the last of my belongings still in 106 West Ave., loaded them into my family's car, and brought them back to 309 Salem Drive with the help of both of my parents. Although my main task throughout Monday afternoon involved unpacking my bags and putting my clothes and books back in storage, I ended up cleaning out large portions of my room, especially my desk. I realized that I needed to begin to remove the piles of detritus that have accumulated over the years as a result of my laziness in deciding what to do with so many of my possessions. I ended up finding old postcards and caches of foreign currencies that I had forgotten, or had believed were lost. I found three years' worth of High School student IDs, as well as the journal that I kept during the months that I lived in England at the end of 8th grade. I never realized it before, but that journal was probably the earliest prototype of this blog. I wrote essays about the places I had visited, and the about things that I did, so that I could practice writing, and would be able to remember them after the fact. I found essays about the London Underground, the Tower of London, Kew Botanic Gardens, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, British cheeses (especially Wensleydale and Yarg), and more. The essays were shorter than my blog entries, and written by a middle school version of JD (who still went almost universally as "Jonathan"), but still recognizably my own.
On Monday night, I had finished unpacking all of the things that I had brought home from college, and proceeded to pack up many of them again, in a smaller suitcase, in preparation for my trip to New York City. For those of you who don't know, I'm spending this June studying at Drisha Institute, where I hope to familiarize myself with traditional Jewish texts, and to improve my Hebrew (and, if I'm lucky, my Aramaic). I'm planning to stay in the dorms at CUNY Hunter, which do not open until June 10th, so I'll be staying with my friend Victor's family in Summit, New Jersey until then. It will be a a moderately long commute to 37 West 65th Street by foot and train and then foot again, but I don't really have much of a choice. I'm extremely grateful to Victor, his mother, and his brothers for being such good hosts, and not just letting me sleep in their house, but also chauffeuring me, spending time with me, allowing me to use the Wi-Fi necessary to write and publish this blog post, etc.
First, though, I needed to get to New Jersey. That is why, on Tuesday afternoon, Eli Shaubi and I began the drive from Ithaca to Summit. Eli, who lives in the Five Towns in Long Island, was willing to give me a ride on his own journey back to the tri-state area. He even made a substantial detour in order to drive me right to Victor's front door, rather than simply dropping me off in New York City, and hoping that I could find my own way to Summit by train via Penn Station. For those of you who know the two of us, I'll just say that we spoke about exactly the things that you would expect the two of us to discuss on a 4-5 hour road trip. Sushi-making, the discovery of the Higgs Boson, Saint Augustine's Confessions, the advent of Judeo-Arabic, and problems in our respective theses that we'd like to correct were all topics of conversation. We made it to Victor's house rather late at night, not until around 9pm, so Eli ended up sleeping at Victor's house, too, in the bed next to mine.
After seeing Eli off in the morning, I spent a fair amount of today, Wednesday, reading my copy of The Landmark Herodotus, finishing all of Book I. The Landmark Herodotus is an exhaustively-annotated edition of the Greek historian's famous work; there's also a Landmark Thucydides (which I've read), a Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika (which I hope to read soon), and a Landmark Arrian (which I plan on reading sometime). I highly recommend these editions to anyone interested in delving into Classical Greek history. These editions give the reader extensive background information, confirmations and repudiations of the writers' claims, maps that help those unfamiliar with Mediterranean and Anatolian geography make sense of what is happening when and where, and relevant archaeological images. I also spent time today trying to find a Judaica shop that sold copies of the Babylonian Talmud. I was unsuccessful, although Victor did manage to find a mezuzah that he will need for his new apartment in Philadelphia, where he will be teaching high school chemistry and attending U Penn grad school next year. I was specifically hoping to find a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin, which I will be studying at Drisha, as well as Tractate Makkot, which I hope to be studying with a friend during the coming months.
Victor and his mother also took me out to a kosher vegetarian restaurant near their house, where I got a rather good falafel with Israeli salad and Spanish eggplant salad.
I'm very excited for my orientation tomorrow. My only two worries are that I will accidentally become lost on the way to class tomorrow and therefore be late, and that I won't have a chance to purchase a copy of Tractate Sanhedrin before I need to have one of my own.
Looking forward to class tomorrow, and (for a few of you) seeing you soon in NYC!
~JD
"If you think yourself an immortal and that you command an immortal army, no opinion of mine will mean anything to you. But if you realize that you are human and command an army of human beings, consider first that there is a cycle in human affairs, and as it goes around it does not permit the same person to enjoy good fortune forever" (Herodotus, Histories, I.207.2).
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Parallel Dialectics
Since beginning to study halakhah at Cornell, I've been surprised by the degree of similarity between rabbinic dialectics and scholarly historiographical dialectics. To those of you unfamiliar with the term "dialectic," I mean by it a method of transmission of information or argumentation. One dialectic that many of you may know is the Socratic Method. The speaker begins with a strong assertive statement (such as that each of the five virtues are distinct from each other, or that a poet's skill is his ability to speak well), and methodically asks simple, straightforward questions that eventually reduce the original statement to logical absurdity. The form of the Socratic argument was that of a dialogue.
The arguments by such Medieval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, are in the form of a treatise, in which the writer raises a question, brings all possible assertive and negative arguments to bear, and then unerringly answers each of his own contentions, in defense of his assertive thesis (such as that truth is the same as being).
For those of you unfamiliar with rabbinics, a typical lesson (shiur) leads readers through a series of sources (mekorot), typically arranged quasi-chronologically, that are all relevant to a particular law (halakha), such as the obligation to light candles on Shabbat, the prohibition on spreading rumors, etc. If there is a basis for the law in the Torah, or in the books of the Prophets (Nevi'im) of Writings (Ketuvim), this is typically brought first. If the passage has important commentary from the Rishonim (mostly Rashi, but also the Ibn Ezra, the Sforno, the Ramban, etc.), this is listed next. Next come the Rabbinic sources, such as the Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, Mechilta, Sifra, Sifre, the various Aggadic Midrashim, etc., which typically make up the core of the argument, and which are also sometimes accompanied by elucidating (or, occasionally, obfuscating) commentaries of the Rishonim, such as Rashi, the Tosafot, the Rif, and the Rambam's Mishneh Torah (which for most intents and purposes serves as an interpretation of Rabbinic sources). Following this is a list of how the law was interpreted in early law codes. The line between commentary and codification is sometimes quite blurry, but interpretations firmly in the category of codification include the opinions of the Rosh and the lawcode of his son the Ba'al ha-Turim. A part of almost any halakha shiur is Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch, the most influential and second most important book since the sealing of the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 C.E.). The Shulchan Aruch, published in 1565, historically divides the Rishonim, the medieval commentaries, from the Acharonim. The Shulchan Aruch consciously cites varying opinions within the halakhic discourse, in contrast to such earlier works as the Mishneh Torah, which provide only one possible answer to each halahkhic question. Since the publication Shulchan Aruch, many of the major halakhic compilations have taken the form of commentaries and glosses to the Shulchan Aruch, and it is common for a shiur to include these commentaries near the very end of the mekorot. These sources include the Rema, the Shakh, the Pri Chadash, the Biur Halakhah and Mishnah B'rurah (same author), and the Arukh ha-Shulchan. Usually a shiur ends with the most recent (i.e. late 20th-century) commentaries, especially, in my experience, those of Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Ovadia Yosef, and the the Tzitz Eliezer. These last few sources tend to be quoted at length, and take up more space than any of the other sources, often because the authors feel the need to justify their opinions, and to supply detailed explanations.
Although much more drawn-out in length, historiography also sifts through generation by generation of scholarship. Primary sources are brought (from Thucydides to the Venerable Bede to Isaac Babel), and used to support or refute the thoughts of various historians and schools of historians since their times. Because shiurim are delivered orally with mekorot as study aids, whereas historiographical essays do not have separate oral and written sections, the oral components of shiurim often provide the commentary on original sources, while the bulk of a historiographical essay, is the explanation of why historians make the arguments that they do. Historiography isolates theses and innovations from the work or works of other historians, and although it makes use of direct citations, these usually make up a small minority of the text on a page. Usually, historiographers explain what led historians to particular conclusions. In the 1980s, for instance, American historians of the Soviet Union tended to explain the USSR in the context of how it had endured so long, because very few people (famous exception: Benedict Anderson's in his 1983 Imagined Communities) thought that the USSR's end was near. In the 1990s, historians tended to need to explain the reasons for the Soviet Union's recent collapse. These historians felt the need to explain the foundations of the whole Soviet political structure as fundamentally unstable, because the implosion of the USSR refuted, in their minds, the possibility that the Bolshevik experiment was sustainable. Likewise, historiographers take into account individual historians' political, socioeconomic, and personal prejudices. C.L.R. James wrote his (Marxist) account of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, in order to inspire leftist revolutions in Africa, and Sidney Fay's famous 1928 study of the origins of World War I was written in the spirit of interwar reconciliation (known by some as "appeasement"), and deliberately avoided placing too much blame for the war on Germany.
Likewise, no shiur would be complete without explaining why particular rabbis have adhered to certain ideas. A friend of mine had a teacher who argued, for instance, that all law codes and their commentaries are more a product and expression of their authors' own personalities than anything else. Historical context is also important. Certainly, Rambam's living in a Muslim-dominated society affected his opinions regarding women's modesty and the use of imagery in places of worship. Likewise, the rise of the Reform movement certainly influenced such 19th-century Orthodox figures as Rabbi Akiva Eiger and the Chatam Sofer in their writing. Historiography and rabbinics frequently remain highly conscious of these contexts, aware that the producers of history (and halakhah) are themselves products of history (and halakhah). Interestingly enough, there is even a rough similarity between the quasi-arbitrary time-frames assigned by historians and by rabbis to time periods. The Tannaitic and Amoraic periods (lasting until 500 C.E.), end at roughly the same time as the period of "ancient" history in the western world (lasting until a little bit after the crossing of the Rhine by German barbarians on December 31, 406 C.E.). The Gaonic period corresponds with the "early middle ages" or "dark ages," and the Rishonic period approximately ends (with the publication of the Shulchan Aruch in 1565) with the end of the middle ages and beginning of the Renaissance. Even more interesting is that the book that coined the term "Renaissance" to define the period of artistic and intellectual rebirth that occurred (mostly in Italy) in the 15th and 16th centuries, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, was published only 15 years before the Shulchan Aruch, and only around 150 miles away. Place, I think, is even less of a coincidence than time.
Throughout these observations, it may seem as if I'm stretching comparisons, and deliberately making two of my interests seem more similar than they are. In fact, I think I'm being entirely honest, because, from my own experience, I know that there are other ways in contemporary scholarship in the humanities to analyze a text or series of texts (the main task of both historians and Jewish halakhic educators). For example, in the Classics Department, it would be theoritically possible to follow through the same multi-generational analysis, of, say, Homer's Odyssey, beginning with selections of the text, describing Roman analyses, followed by the great 18th- and 19th- century German literary critics, and ending with the 20th-century philology. However, this is not done; most frequently, I see 20th-century sources cited, and nothing seems more recent than the work of Perry and Lord. Likewise in analytic philosophy, I've never seen anyone ever, for example, line up the works of five or six canonical philosophers on a single subject. This was done in the Middle Ages; writers such as Rabelais loved to cited eleven different classical authors' differing opinions on some single obscure topic. There is a much greater emphases on contemporary scholarship in both philology and analytic philosophy, at least in my own experience.
Does this similarity in care and respect for traditional sources and chronology really reflect anything more significant, though? I think that it might. It seems to me that what history and halakhah share in common is their consciousness of historical change and historical continuity. This question of change and continuity is, of course, the main object of historical inquiry, and it is to the detriment to other fields that they sometimes lack this (see Gaddis's The Landscape of History for a very self-congratulatory essay on how historians write history). Anthropological studies are sometimes limited because they lack consciousness of historical change: Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, did not always take into account that a group studied in the 20th century was probably culturally very different in the 19th or 18th centuries, in the same way that Americans living in 2013 differ significantly from Americans living in 1913. Cultures change, generation by generation. The codification and formal ruling of halakhah, by contrast, requires consciousness of writers and movements of various past periods, consciousness of their schools of thought (or "traditions," as is more commonly used), and skepticism as to their validity and various levels of authority. Rabbi Akiva had a very different kind of authority than, say, the Chafetz Chaim. In the same way, nobody can say that the a secondary source can contradict all existing primary sources, because secondary sources are all based upon primary sources. It's of course a point of debate as to whether anything has changed in halakhah since the sealing of the Talmud in c. 500 C.E. That question, however, is for a different time.
Also, remember when I used to end all of my entries with quotes from books that I've been reading that don't have anything to do with the subject? I'm going to begin that again.
~JD
"Charlie. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I just want you to know that you're very special... and the only reason I'm telling you is that I don't know if anyone else ever has" (Steven Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower).
The arguments by such Medieval philosophers as Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, are in the form of a treatise, in which the writer raises a question, brings all possible assertive and negative arguments to bear, and then unerringly answers each of his own contentions, in defense of his assertive thesis (such as that truth is the same as being).
For those of you unfamiliar with rabbinics, a typical lesson (shiur) leads readers through a series of sources (mekorot), typically arranged quasi-chronologically, that are all relevant to a particular law (halakha), such as the obligation to light candles on Shabbat, the prohibition on spreading rumors, etc. If there is a basis for the law in the Torah, or in the books of the Prophets (Nevi'im) of Writings (Ketuvim), this is typically brought first. If the passage has important commentary from the Rishonim (mostly Rashi, but also the Ibn Ezra, the Sforno, the Ramban, etc.), this is listed next. Next come the Rabbinic sources, such as the Mishnah, Tosefta, Babylonian Talmud, Jerusalem Talmud, Mechilta, Sifra, Sifre, the various Aggadic Midrashim, etc., which typically make up the core of the argument, and which are also sometimes accompanied by elucidating (or, occasionally, obfuscating) commentaries of the Rishonim, such as Rashi, the Tosafot, the Rif, and the Rambam's Mishneh Torah (which for most intents and purposes serves as an interpretation of Rabbinic sources). Following this is a list of how the law was interpreted in early law codes. The line between commentary and codification is sometimes quite blurry, but interpretations firmly in the category of codification include the opinions of the Rosh and the lawcode of his son the Ba'al ha-Turim. A part of almost any halakha shiur is Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch, the most influential and second most important book since the sealing of the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500 C.E.). The Shulchan Aruch, published in 1565, historically divides the Rishonim, the medieval commentaries, from the Acharonim. The Shulchan Aruch consciously cites varying opinions within the halakhic discourse, in contrast to such earlier works as the Mishneh Torah, which provide only one possible answer to each halahkhic question. Since the publication Shulchan Aruch, many of the major halakhic compilations have taken the form of commentaries and glosses to the Shulchan Aruch, and it is common for a shiur to include these commentaries near the very end of the mekorot. These sources include the Rema, the Shakh, the Pri Chadash, the Biur Halakhah and Mishnah B'rurah (same author), and the Arukh ha-Shulchan. Usually a shiur ends with the most recent (i.e. late 20th-century) commentaries, especially, in my experience, those of Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Ovadia Yosef, and the the Tzitz Eliezer. These last few sources tend to be quoted at length, and take up more space than any of the other sources, often because the authors feel the need to justify their opinions, and to supply detailed explanations.
Although much more drawn-out in length, historiography also sifts through generation by generation of scholarship. Primary sources are brought (from Thucydides to the Venerable Bede to Isaac Babel), and used to support or refute the thoughts of various historians and schools of historians since their times. Because shiurim are delivered orally with mekorot as study aids, whereas historiographical essays do not have separate oral and written sections, the oral components of shiurim often provide the commentary on original sources, while the bulk of a historiographical essay, is the explanation of why historians make the arguments that they do. Historiography isolates theses and innovations from the work or works of other historians, and although it makes use of direct citations, these usually make up a small minority of the text on a page. Usually, historiographers explain what led historians to particular conclusions. In the 1980s, for instance, American historians of the Soviet Union tended to explain the USSR in the context of how it had endured so long, because very few people (famous exception: Benedict Anderson's in his 1983 Imagined Communities) thought that the USSR's end was near. In the 1990s, historians tended to need to explain the reasons for the Soviet Union's recent collapse. These historians felt the need to explain the foundations of the whole Soviet political structure as fundamentally unstable, because the implosion of the USSR refuted, in their minds, the possibility that the Bolshevik experiment was sustainable. Likewise, historiographers take into account individual historians' political, socioeconomic, and personal prejudices. C.L.R. James wrote his (Marxist) account of the Haitian Revolution, Black Jacobins, in order to inspire leftist revolutions in Africa, and Sidney Fay's famous 1928 study of the origins of World War I was written in the spirit of interwar reconciliation (known by some as "appeasement"), and deliberately avoided placing too much blame for the war on Germany.
Likewise, no shiur would be complete without explaining why particular rabbis have adhered to certain ideas. A friend of mine had a teacher who argued, for instance, that all law codes and their commentaries are more a product and expression of their authors' own personalities than anything else. Historical context is also important. Certainly, Rambam's living in a Muslim-dominated society affected his opinions regarding women's modesty and the use of imagery in places of worship. Likewise, the rise of the Reform movement certainly influenced such 19th-century Orthodox figures as Rabbi Akiva Eiger and the Chatam Sofer in their writing. Historiography and rabbinics frequently remain highly conscious of these contexts, aware that the producers of history (and halakhah) are themselves products of history (and halakhah). Interestingly enough, there is even a rough similarity between the quasi-arbitrary time-frames assigned by historians and by rabbis to time periods. The Tannaitic and Amoraic periods (lasting until 500 C.E.), end at roughly the same time as the period of "ancient" history in the western world (lasting until a little bit after the crossing of the Rhine by German barbarians on December 31, 406 C.E.). The Gaonic period corresponds with the "early middle ages" or "dark ages," and the Rishonic period approximately ends (with the publication of the Shulchan Aruch in 1565) with the end of the middle ages and beginning of the Renaissance. Even more interesting is that the book that coined the term "Renaissance" to define the period of artistic and intellectual rebirth that occurred (mostly in Italy) in the 15th and 16th centuries, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, was published only 15 years before the Shulchan Aruch, and only around 150 miles away. Place, I think, is even less of a coincidence than time.
Throughout these observations, it may seem as if I'm stretching comparisons, and deliberately making two of my interests seem more similar than they are. In fact, I think I'm being entirely honest, because, from my own experience, I know that there are other ways in contemporary scholarship in the humanities to analyze a text or series of texts (the main task of both historians and Jewish halakhic educators). For example, in the Classics Department, it would be theoritically possible to follow through the same multi-generational analysis, of, say, Homer's Odyssey, beginning with selections of the text, describing Roman analyses, followed by the great 18th- and 19th- century German literary critics, and ending with the 20th-century philology. However, this is not done; most frequently, I see 20th-century sources cited, and nothing seems more recent than the work of Perry and Lord. Likewise in analytic philosophy, I've never seen anyone ever, for example, line up the works of five or six canonical philosophers on a single subject. This was done in the Middle Ages; writers such as Rabelais loved to cited eleven different classical authors' differing opinions on some single obscure topic. There is a much greater emphases on contemporary scholarship in both philology and analytic philosophy, at least in my own experience.
Does this similarity in care and respect for traditional sources and chronology really reflect anything more significant, though? I think that it might. It seems to me that what history and halakhah share in common is their consciousness of historical change and historical continuity. This question of change and continuity is, of course, the main object of historical inquiry, and it is to the detriment to other fields that they sometimes lack this (see Gaddis's The Landscape of History for a very self-congratulatory essay on how historians write history). Anthropological studies are sometimes limited because they lack consciousness of historical change: Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, did not always take into account that a group studied in the 20th century was probably culturally very different in the 19th or 18th centuries, in the same way that Americans living in 2013 differ significantly from Americans living in 1913. Cultures change, generation by generation. The codification and formal ruling of halakhah, by contrast, requires consciousness of writers and movements of various past periods, consciousness of their schools of thought (or "traditions," as is more commonly used), and skepticism as to their validity and various levels of authority. Rabbi Akiva had a very different kind of authority than, say, the Chafetz Chaim. In the same way, nobody can say that the a secondary source can contradict all existing primary sources, because secondary sources are all based upon primary sources. It's of course a point of debate as to whether anything has changed in halakhah since the sealing of the Talmud in c. 500 C.E. That question, however, is for a different time.
Also, remember when I used to end all of my entries with quotes from books that I've been reading that don't have anything to do with the subject? I'm going to begin that again.
~JD
"Charlie. Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm not trying to make you feel uncomfortable. I just want you to know that you're very special... and the only reason I'm telling you is that I don't know if anyone else ever has" (Steven Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower).
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