shabbaton

[cellio]

This week was my congregation's annual shabbaton. We take over a cabin in the "suburbs" of Zelienople and have a grand time. This year was the largest I've seen at 42 people, and all of them seemed to be engaged in it. It was great.

When nobody feels pressure (got to get upstairs to the bar mitzvah, got to beat the lunch guests home, whatever), we can relax and just take our time with services. I don't get that very often and I treasure it. We had kabbalat shabbat out on the porch in the fading sun (plus there were porch lights). Saturday morning after the service we had an energetic discussion of part of the parsha (Tazria [1]), interrupted only by our need to walk up to the main building for lunch (but it continued later in smaller pockets).

Speaking of which: the torah says that when a woman gives birth she is ritually impure for some time, but how long depends on whether the child is a boy or a girl. We read a feminist Orthodox commentary on this that a lot of people weren't buying. Pointers to commentaries on this difference would be welcome. There are actually two time periods, a week (for a boy) or two weeks, followed by 33 (for a boy) or 66 days. I don't quite understand this second period of time. For the first, I was struck by a thought that is probably unrelated, but what the heck: when someone dies soon before a holiday, the seven-day period of shiva is terminated when the holiday starts. I wonder if this first period is "supposed" to be two weeks, but the circumcision on day 8 terminates it. Just a random thought.

Friday night we had a study session around the second chapter of Pirke Avot (teachings of the fathers, where a lot of the sayings we "all know" come from). We broke into pairs or trios to study for a while and then each group shared something it learned. We've used this study method before and I find it works well; it's harder to do in-depth study with 42 people all together, but by doing it this way I learned things both from my group and the larger group.

Saturday afternoon we tried something new. My rabbi asked a few of us to prepare chugim, short sessions to run concurrently, so people could learn what they want. I taught (well, lead a study of) a section of talmud -- how various rabbis concluded their individual prayer at the end of the t'filah. (B'rachot 16b-17a, for anyone following along at home.) I approached this from the prayer context, not the talmud context -- we have this fixed text that we say every service and then we're supposed to say our own prayer, but maybe not everybody is comfortable doing that. The idea was to present a range of things that are recorded in our tradition; maybe people would get some new ideas.

I had not realized, and did not think to ask at the beginning, that no one there other than me had actually studied any talmud before -- maybe they'd seen material that came from the talmud, but they'd never looked at a page of talmud before. I, not knowing this, gave only the scantest of introductions to talmud itself (here's what the full page looks like, here's where we are, here's an interlinear translation to follow 'cause nobody here including me is going to read the Aramaic straight from the page). When I learned at the end that this was new to everybody, part of me wondered if I should have given more of an intro -- but I think not, on reflection. I helped a group of people just dive in to something that many consider intimidating; I think that probably left them all feeling better, and more confident, than a "talmud 101 using this text as an example" class would have been. I am becoming a big fan of the "just do it" school of teaching.

[1] Orthodox and many Conservative congregations outside of Israel read Sh'mini this week (the one before Tazria). This is because the seventh day of Pesach was a Friday, so those who follow the rule to add an extra day to holidays outside Israel had a holiday reading last week and got to Sh'mini this week. Our minyan decided to minimize the time out of sync by splitting the double portion Tazria-Metzora that others will read next week, so we'll be caught up next week. The Reform movement apparently suggests instead splitting Sh'mini into two parts (half last week and half this week), I guess because that works every year and splitting Tazria-Metzora only works when they've been combined (which is most years). Meanwhile, I learned recently, Israel, which like Reform does not have an extra day of holiday, is doing something different -- they read Tazria-Metzora this week and we won't all be in sync again until mid-May.

Comments

[fauxklore]

I assume the feminist reading you are referring to was Rachel Adler's explanation of nida in general? In short, the logic connects menstruation to loss of potential life and the longer nida after the birth of a girl is an extended period of mourning for the potential lives she will lose.

[cellio]

Judith S. Antonelli, from a book called In the Image of God: A Feminist Commentary on the Torah. (Neither the book nor the author is otherwise known to me.) Her argument seems to be: (1) the tumah (the first week/two weeks) comes from contact with the baby's soul, which enters sometime well after conception but before birth (no explanation for the different time periods here); (2) the whole thing gives her a medically-important break from sex soon after birth; and (3) 66 days for a girl vs 33 for a boy is because parents naturally pay more attention to boys so this is to make up for that. I'm neither a parent nor a psychologist, but that last part sounds strained to me.

We got only excerpts from one chapter in the book, so not really enough to evaluate the work. (It was enough to provide ample starting points for a discussion, which was the point.)