Monica

The morning minyan has a particular person who always leads Hallel when it's included in the service (certain holiday seasons plus Rosh Chodesh, the first day(s) of every month). I lead the service on Thursdays, but if it's a Hallel day I turn it over to him at that point. A couple months ago he said "you need to start doing this"; I replied that I didn't want to usurp his role; he replied that I would do it next time. (Ok.) "Next time" is this Thursday, Rosh Chodesh Nissan. So I just ran through it; I'm comfortable with most of it, am unsure what melody to use in one place, and just plain don't know the melody he uses in one short place, but the world won't end if I just read that (and maybe I can get a quickie refresher before the service starts). Now, to see how this plan survives contact with the minyan. :-)

Err, yes, that does mean that Pesach is just over two weeks away. I'm looking forward to a seder with friends and singing. I should decide soon if I'm going to try to do something for the second night. (I don't hold it to be necessary, but it would be a learning opportunity. Hmm.)

Last week I co-led a workshop at my synagogue on a topic in prayer (the sh'ma and its blessings). Turnout was small and I felt kind of off the whole time, even though we prepared and I practiced. (The other person is a professional educator; I have no idea if she practiced, but if she didn't it didn't show.) I've received positive feedback from people who were there, but I still have the sense that I don't really know how to facilitate a discussion or teach an intimate class, though I'm a fine participant in either. (I don't know that I know how to present a lecture either, but I think I'd be on firmer ground -- but that's not what was called for here.) I'm not sure what to do about this -- the obvious answers being to teach more or teach less. (I'm leaning toward the latter but feeling like a bit of a coward for that leaning.)

Learning talmud with my rabbi and midrash with another of our rabbis continues to be quite nifty and engaging. For all that I can be nervous in a classroom (particularly if someone with superior knowledge is present), I really enjoy and hold my own in one-on-one study with people whose knowledge is vastly superior to mine. I wonder why that works like that. Sure, a lot of the comfort in one case comes from having studied with my rabbi (in various capacities) for more than ten years (!), but the other one is much newer so it's not just that. (I also wonder at what point I have the obligation to be the person with superior knowledge for someone else in a one-on-one setting.)

This is the second midrash we looked at in this session. (I previously knew this one, but reading it in Hebrew was still educational.)

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Last week I wrote about my first study session with our newest rabbi, but I didn't cover everything. After the midrash I previously wrote about we started a longer one.

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LJ tags are spiffy but not as fully-featured as I'd like, and I probably haven't figured out the best way to use them yet. So this entry is something of a cross-reference; if you got here via one of the tags on this entry you might also be interested in some of the others. I'll try to update this entry over time, and eventually will create similar entries for other tag families.

Judaism: education is a catch-all bucket. Sometimes things start here and then spin off into their own tags.

Sh'liach K'hilah (LJ swallows the first apostrophe for some reason) is (was) the Reform movement's para-rabbinic program. I attended in 2004 and 2005.

Open Beit Midrash (obm) at Hebrew College. I attended in 2007. I also have a more-general Hebrew College tag that includes entries about a program called Ta Sh'ma that I attended in 2006. One of these days I might give those their own tag.

Melton = Florence Melton Program, an international two-year program of which I completed the first year in 2006-2007. (My class session got cancelled the following year. Someday I will probably return, if the scheduling works.)

Study with my rabbi is for entries related to my one-on-one study. Midrash overlaps that, covering my midrash study in particular.

NHC is a tag for the chavurah program I attended in August 2008.

Kallah is a tag for the ALEPH kallah that I'm attending in 2009.

Shalom Hartman is a tag for the Shalom Hartman Institute, a program I considered in 2008 and 2009. I'll get there some year, I expect...

Today in our talmud study my rabbi and I reached the passage in B'rachot (16b) that records the concluding prayers of several sages. The t'filah, the central prayer, has a fixed text, but there is a place to insert personal words at the end. (Over time, some of these have in turn become fixed.) On this day before Yom Kippur, let me share some of these prayers that struck me most strongly.

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I think my rabbi and I have different perceptions of my language skills. I have homework for our next study session: a few passages from the Mishnah B'rurah, in Hebrew (I think Hebrew and not Aramaic; haven't looked closely), without vowels, in Rashi script. :-) I will do my best to rise to the challenge. Knowing that my rabbi has that much confidence in me helps, and I appreciate it when he pushes me.

A few months ago I was very surprised to find that I could usefully study g'mara (with partners) with just the Aramaic text, albeit with vowels. I didn't think I could do it without English. (The partners were essential; my vocabulary is still poor.) So it is possible that I will be able to do something with this commentary. We'll see!

I studied with my rabbi today. When I got there he said that if it's ok with me he wants to study a different section of talmud than where we are right now. Fine with me, I said. After we laid the foundation, he raised an issue of practical application. We've done that before, but this time we argued about it more. It's a real unsettled issue in our community, he said, and he had me arguing both sides -- "ok, then if you say X, the logical response to that would be Y, and the logical response to that would be Z, and...". I don't think I came up with anything he hadn't already come up with, but he was definitely working me harder than usual, and I appreciate it.

He also asked me to do a shiva minyan tonight, and asked if I'd like to chant torah for the high holy days. (Woot!)

I feel like I've moved up to a new level. Nifty! It's not that any one of those would have been all that unusual on its own (well, maybe high-holy-day torah reading...), but the combination of them all in one 45-minute meeting was novel.

(Yes, he agreed that learning high-holy-day trope in this timeframe would be impractical, and I should use the trope I already know.)

Yet again, talmud study provides a jumping-off point for interesting conversation.

We were talking about why people do or don't come to services, and more broadly, why we pray. That is, do we feel directly commanded to pray a certain liturgy three times a day, the way our traditional friends do? Do we feel that this is our only method of connecting with God? If yes (to either), where is everyone? (Mind, some of our traditional friends may ask the same question.) Why does the weeknight minyan so often consist of just my rabbi and me, and what would we be doing otherwise?

My rabbi believes, and I tend to agree, that people, by and large, come to our Friday-evening services for events, not for prayer. They come for a bar mitzvah, or a baby naming, or to hear a particular speaker. There is a dedicated core, people who come nearly every week as part of the community, but at any given service they are the minority.

Contrast this, I said, with our Saturday-morning service -- the real one, not the bar-mitzvah service. We have an established community; it's pretty much the same people every week, and we're there for the service and for each other, and not for external factors like on Friday night. I asserted that people who don't come for events come for community -- maybe also for prayer, but it's the community that dominates. (After all, you can pray at home.)

(Speaking for myself, I am there on Friday nights and weekdays for both prayer and community support. While I will seek out Shabbat services if I'm away from my own synagogue, I'm not diligent about weekdays. I mean, even in town, I don't go every day. If we were to declare our weekday evening service a failure and shut it down, I wouldn't start going elsewhere. But because we have one, I support it. Our Shabbat morning service, on the other hand, is something that really means a lot to me, and if something were to threaten its existence I'd be in for the fight.)

My rabbi believes that people -- by which I think he mainly means modern Reform Jews -- are looking for three things in a prayer experience: intimacy, intensity, and authenticity. Our Shabbat morning service certainly has all three characteristics, but I think that can only happen in a strong community. I don't think you'd get that at the bar-mitzvah service. While our service does get visitors who seem to fit right in to the community (it appears to me -- some may be reading this and I invite you to speak up), it's because there is a strong foundation of an established community. Friday night also has an established community, but it's not large enough to provide intimacy and intensity for everyone.

We ended up talking a little about the question I raised here a while back of how do rabbis pray?. He pointed out the irony -- that those who are most motivated end up being the least able to actually pray in a community. This is another reason our Shabbat morning service is so valuable -- while yes, the rabbi is in charge, the service can practically run itself, and he's much freer to be "just a congregant" there.

This is going to be kind of rambly. I'm trying to record a thought stream, not make an explicit point.

Launch point: B'rachot 8a, where the Amoraim are discussing places for torah study versus places for prayer and (later commenters) whether it is appropriate to suspend study in order to pray with a minyan. That is, if you're already in the study hall and there's no minyan and it's time to pray, do you pray there or go join the minyan? Some argue that study is more important than supporting the community in the minyan. This led us to a more general discussion: the tension between supporting community values and partaking of community offerings. ( Read more... )

Saturday's D&D game was a lot of fun. It was a sub-group (two characters are currently elsewhere), and we got to do a lot of role-playing and story, and some nice little character bits came out. It was quite nifty. I think being (largely) unconstrained by time helped, too -- most sessions are on weeknights and people have to worry about getting to bed at a reasonable hour. Here, we could just play until a natural stopping point. (We're at the point where we need the other two players now.)

I talked with my parents yesterday. I enthused about some of the recent loot, particularly the scanner. They said that my nephew, who had seemed utterly indifferent to the DVD we bought him, went home, watched it, and was happy. That's good to hear. The kid still needs to learn some basic manners, though, like "thank you" and at least feigning interest in gifts.

I was surprised to learn that my parents knew basically nothing about the show 1776, either stage or movie. (I said this to a friend last night who said he didn't know it either, but he didn't grow up in a musicals-intensive house in one of the 13 colonies, so that's not surprising.) I remember seeing the movie as a kid; I mistakingly thought my parents had taken me. (We also saw it on a school outing.) The CLO is doing it this summer, which is what brought this up, and now I'm thinking that Dani and I, and maybe some friends, should go. I've never seen the stage version. I worry a bit about having my illusions shattered -- some other things I remember fondly didn't work out so well on more recent viewing, and maybe I should leave well enough alone. But it's probably safe.

Study with my rabbi today was very good, in a hard-to-summarize way. Maybe there'll be a separate entry later. (Aside: according to the talmud, God prays. This prompted me to say "what and to whom?" before my rabbi could continue. We've looked at "what", and then had to stop. In a sense, that's the less-interesting question.)

Most people were back at work today. Naturally, the single person who understands the part of the software that is currently getting in my way is out for a few more days. Oops. Tomorrow I begin plaintively asking not-so-random developers "do you know anything about [module]?". :-) (It's got to be pilot error; no one gets this right on the first try near as I can tell. If I figure out what that error is, then not only can I move past it but I can also improve the documentation.)

Today while studying with my rabbi I encountered some "interesting" reasoning patterns in the talmud.

We often see comments of the form "one who does such-and-such is worthy of a place in the world to come", or, conversely, "one who does such-and-such forfeits his place". But we don't hold that a single action either guarantees your spot or dooms you forever, so what gives?

One common approach is to view oneself -- and, perhaps, the entire world -- as teetering on a balance point at all times. A single mitzvah tips the balance for good; a single aveira (sin) tips the balance for bad. If you were to be judged at that time, that single action would have determined your fate. So each time you commit a sin you're betting on getting a chance to compensate for it. (My rabbi explained the basic argument; the conclusions are mine, so don't blame him for them.)

I saw another approach today. Tractate B'rachot (4b, page 4b4 in Shottenstein) says that one who recites Ashrei three times a day earns a place in the world to come. Why? Because, as it's explained in the gemara and later works, one who does this will surely come to understand its deep significance, and given that understanding will act accordingly, and thus will by his actions earn a place in the world to come.

I find the style of reasoning suspect. Why not just say that one who truly understands these words and acts accordingly earns a place in the world to come? Wouldn't that be more direct and more accurate?

We have a couple references to chase that might shed light on this, but we ran out of time. Next time, then.

At the end of the session he told me he enjoys studying with me, which makes me happy. I really enjoy studying with him, and would hate for it to be too one-sided. I'm looking forward to Thursday night's tikkun, too. We don't go all night, but we'll probably go until about 2am. A few years ago I went to another tikkun afterwards with the goal of going all night, but the style wasn't to my taste and going to it broke the mood that we'd achieved, so I don't do that any more. When my rabbi's done, I go home.

(I've been writing this in dribs and drabs over a few days, so sorry if it's choppy.)

Last week's Torah study produced an interesting conversation (which I predict will continue this week). What do we do when confronted with a Torah commandment we find distasteful? (The triggering issue isn't really important for this discussion, though we kept coming back to it.) ( Read more... )

This thought was queued up in the back of my brain when I met my rabbi Thursday to study and he asked me what I think of the war. ( Read more... )

Then we went on to study. When last we left our heroes, Rabbi Yose was standing in the ruins of the Temple having a conversation with the prophet Eliyahu. (And you thought the talmud was dry!) ( Read more... )

Somehow we wandered onto the subject of studying Torah for its own sake -- that God desires this behavior, and so it is salvivic even if we gain nothing practical from it. (Ah yes, I remember how we got there: there is a discussion, after the Yose part, about the prayer/study habits of King David, who some say studied all night. Some Chasidim strive to emulate him.) We then discussed why we study, as this is not the theology that either of us follows. I'm not going to share my rabbi's reasons here, but I will share my own. (Hey, he knows about this journal, though I don't know if he reads. If he wants to share his reasons, he will. :-) )( Read more... )

I think talmud study has a lot in common with solving multi-variable equation sets. Today we attempted to follow a particularly twisty chain of reasoning that involved a lot of "this case equals that case" instances. We were both having trouble, and we're going to (independently) try to lay it out on paper before next time.

To give an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about, though you should assume that the details are ficticous:

Question: when is the correct time to say a certain evening prayer?
Rabbi Chanina: when priests can eat trumah (special meat).
Rabbi Akiva: when a poor man eats dinner.
Rabbi Yonatan: when a priest goes to the mikvah, which he has to do before eating trumah.
Rabbi Chanina: Yonatan is wrong, because it's not dark yet then.
Rabbi Yehoshua: when Shabbat starts.
Rabbi Meir: When a priest eats trumah and when a poor man eats dinner are the same time.
Rabbi Chanina: No it's not. When a poor man eats dinner and when Shabbat starts are the same time.
Rashi: These are all different times.

And so on. In this particular case there ended up being a lot of layers to wind and unwind, and I'm still confused by the outcome. (Yes, the subject is the time of the evening shema, and most of the positions I gave are in the discussion somewhere, though not necessarily with those names attached.)

On my way out my rabbi said that with my internet skills I can probably find someone who can tell me the answer, but I'd actually prefer the challenge of working it out. I don't need the answer; I do need to develop the skill.