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tikkun leil Shavuot
For the second time we had a community-wide tikkun from 10PM to 1AM. There were three sessions with a total of a couple dozen classes, with rabbis from across the spectrum. As I did last year, I set out to study with rabbis I'd never studied with (or met, as it turned out) before. It was a good experience; details of the classes will have to wait until after Shabbat.
In the last timeslot I attended a class taught by the rosh yeshiva (dean) of the Kollel, a local Orthodox institution that offers classes to adults. I've never been able to get a good read on Kollel -- in particular, I haven't been able to tell if women are welcome to study text there. (They have women-only classes on topics I'm not generally interested in, men-only classes on topics I am interested in, and under-specified opportunities for individual study.) So partly because of that, partly because of a recommendation, and partly because the topic sounded interesting, I went to the rosh yeshiva's class at the tikkun.
It was a good lecture (at that hour something a little more participatory might have been better), and at the end he said that people were welcome to go to Kollel after the community tikkun and continue studying. So I did that. They had several classes going (I saw mostly men); the rosh yeshiva was going to be studying the book of Ruth, so I opted for that. Apparently each year he's been spending all night (well, starting after the community tikkun last year and this) on one chapter of the book; this year was chapter 4. It kind of reminds me of our Shabbat morning torah study (20 years to complete the torah). :-) There were seven or eight students there (two other women). I held my own on prior knowledge (at least as expressed at the table). I only stayed until about 3:00 (too tired; hadn't been able to leave work early and get a nap). Next year I will try to go there again and stay longer. I may also try to find out what else the rosh yeshiva teaches throughout the year.
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Before I read on to see that you were welcome to go over to the Kollel for further study, and did (and weren't kicked out) I was going to comment from my own experience at the local Kollel here -- that being, that if nothing's said, the class is for men only; women-only classes are offered, but are few and hit only certain topics; and the women's classes are held in someone's house, not in the Kollel building itself. I've had several times business in the Kollel building -- to get tefillin fixed (Seth managed to demolish the shel rosh on a low pipe in our 1st apartment), to pick up loans from their tape library (situated outside the beis medrash), and to get an urgent niddah shaylah answered (the two local shul rabbeim being out of town, one of the Kollel rabbis was my 3rd choice). The first and the last brought me directly into the beis medrash area, and in both cases someone got up quite fast to find out --kindly, in a way that gave the impression that he urgently didn't want a moment of my precious time wasted, rather than that I wasn't supposed to be in the room-- what I needed as he walked with me back outside of the room. (It is unlikely this was because I wasn't dressed appropriately.)
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I figured since he made the invitation at the end of a lecture given to a mixed audience it would be ok, but I made sure to ask him a question about it after the lecture so he'd have a chance to say "um no, you misunderstood" if I did.
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Hey, good shabbas!