cellio | Entries tagged with study with my rabbis

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.

Questions to remember for next Talmud session:

The rabbis declare a death penalty for not saying the evening Shema. Are they really asserting that rabbinic decrees have that protection, or are they saying that the requirement for Shema is from Torah -- and if the latter, what's the citation for that particular Torah commandment being a capital case? They aren't all. (The gemara supplies several interpretations on the first question, but it's a little confusing.)

One earns a place in Olam ha-Ba (the world to come) by connecting the evening Shema and the Tefilah (Amidah, Shemona Esrei). One earns a place in Olam ha-Ba for all sorts of things; one also forfeits a place in Olam ha-Ba for all sorts of things. What's the operator precedence? Do you merely have to balance out on the good side, or are there show-stoppers? If there are show-stoppers, are there also guarantees?

The Olam ha-Ba question is similar to the idea that the sins of the father are visited onto the children, but kindness is remembered for a thousand generations. If that's true and grandpa was a lout, what is my state? (This question has actually been on the back burner for a while, and it'll probably stay there. But now I've recorded it.)

(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... )

We were supposed to study talmud again today, but never quite got there: when I walked in, my rabbi asked me what I thought of the new siddur. We talked about some of the issues there, and ended up on a hunt for the alternate R'tzei.

( liturgical research ahead )

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.

On my way out this morning, my rabbi said "it's fun studying with you". Yay! I certainly have fun studying with him, but sometimes fear that it's too close to one-way -- that I'm taking much more than giving. This would be the natural state of affairs in many ways; he is, after all, the teacher, while I am the student. I'm so glad to know that he's getting something out of this too, rather than just doing it out of some sense of obligation to a congregant or something.

Current Mood: bouncy

I've mentioned before that the Talmud tends to meander quite a bit. It'll be talking about something, and that'll remind one of the authors/commenters of something else, and so it'll talk about that for a while, and then that'll remind someone... and, as far as I know, no one has produced an index to the complete set of 63 tractates [1]. If you want to know where the Talmud discusses such-and-such topic, and you don't have either an expert or an electronic copy and a search engine, you're probably doomed.

But studying it -- on its terms, not to find out something specific -- can be amazingly cool, as I've said before.

Something did make me wonder today, though. (Note: you do not need to chase the following footnotes to understand the main part of this entry!) My rabbi and I are currently working through the beginning of Tractate Berachot, which begins with the question of how early one can say the evening Shema [2]. The mishna (earlier part of the Talmud) says "at the same time that kohanim who were tamei can eat t'rumah" [3]. Which happens to be "nightfall" [4], but it doesn't come out and say that.

Ok, so the gemara (commentary on the mishna) asks, "why didn't the mishna just say 'nightfall', instead of bringing t'rumah into it?". A good question, in my opinion. :-) Quite a bit of commentary then follows, rooted in the premise that "the mishna (or gemara, in some cases) must be trying to teach us something" (about t'rumah, in this case).

Um, must it? Must every comment be an effort to teach something? Are there really no asides, no oh-by-the-ways, no off-topic thoughts? I find that possibility astonishing.

The mishna was written down by someone who, basically, wrote down everything he had been taught -- I gather, in the order that he remembered it. Of course there are going to be digressions. The gemara seems to assume that every statement or answer that is not straightforward was deliberately round-about in order to make some other point. This seems odd to me; I know how people write, and how at least some people think, when they're doing data dumps. I don't understand why the gemara looks for motives. In some places the commentaries quibble over the order in which the mishna and gemara present topics, as if the order was completely planned. But I don't get the impression that it was.

Perhaps I'll ask my rabbi about this when we study on Monday.

( followup from a previous conversation )

( footnotes )

If you're in the SCA and interested in persona development, check out

sca_persona. It's an interesting experiment.

Tonight was fiannaharpar and lrstrobel's wedding. The local SCA choir was doing processional and recessional pieces, combined with their church choir. It went well, and all reports are that we sounded good. The accoustics of the place helped; so did having about 30 singers. (Our choir has around a dozen; the rest were from their church.)

Ray and Jenn had asked me to sing a psalm (in Hebrew). I ended up doing Psalm 29 ("Havu l-Adonai...") I was worried that the melody I know (which seems to be pretty common around here) would be too boring/repetitive, but when I tried it out on Ray and Jenn they liked it so we went with it. It went well, and I got a lot of compliments at the reception. I am also pleased that I did not need to use a microphone to make myself heard in the largish room. (Accoustics, support, and, um, natural loudness at work...)

Dani helpfully pointed out that most of the people there didn't actually know Hebrew, so I could have sung anything I wanted and no one would be the wiser (except lefkowitzga, I pointed out). Don't worry, Ray and Jenn; I didn't listen to him. :-) (Actually, we had this conversation at the reception.)

I got to meet celebrin at the reception. It's always nice to put faces and names together! I also got to meet Alper, finally. (I hope we didn't scare him off.) I also saw sk4p there; he read Psalm 27 (in English) during the ceremony. I don't think I've seen him since Don's new year's party last year, so it was nice to see him again. rani23 seemed to have the food under control. (Thanks for the fruit and veggies to offset the sugar!)

Wednesday my rabbi and I started on Tractate B'rachot. It was great! My rabbi absolutely rocks. Maybe I'll write more about that later. Anyway, partly because of this tractate, I decided that it was time to re-read Donin's To Pray as a Jew (well, reread some and skim other parts), so I started to do that this afternoon. My rabbi is right: the part about the evening (ma'ariv) service originally being optional, and never requiring a chazan's repetition of the Amidah, is in there. I missed it when I first read the book about four years ago.

My rabbi is on his way to Jerusalem for some sort of solidarity mission. I pray he returns safely. I'm somewhat saddened to realize that if he were going to DC a week ago, I wouldn't have made that comment.

We were supposed to study Talmud yesterday, but the combination of 9/11 and rabbinic obligations did that in. So we studied today. But neat as that always is, that wasn't the neatest part today.

( Lots and lots of stuff about prayer, obligation, and interpretation. )

Ok, maybe not. But it would explain some things.

Wednesday I met with my rabbi again to study talmud. We've been working our way through the 39 categories of forbidden work on Shabbat. A unifying principle is that everything on this list is a kind of work that was done to build the Mishkan (the portable sanctuary that travelled in the desert). That's important, actually; the reason these types of work are forbidden is that right after we get the instructions for building the Mishkan God says "keep the Sabbath". So the rabbis interpreted that as meaning "don't build the Mishkan on Shabbat".

(There are a few explicit directives, like not kindling fire, but most are derived from Mishkan-building.)

Ok, so one of the categories is writing (and its inverse, erasing in order to write). Specifically, it is forbidden to write two letters together; a lone letter is fine. Why?

Because the various poles and things that held up the walls in the Mishkan were labelled. And we thought "insert tab A into slot B" was a modern construct. Who'd've thought?

I guess IKEA is the wrong model, though. IKEA never gives you anything as straightforward as text. "Insert the thing that looks kind of like this doohicky into the hole that isn't quite in the right place but is your best guess" would be more the IKEA style.

lj bug

Sometimes when I meet with my rabbi we have these very-high-bandwidth discussions that turn out to have only been 20 minutes when they felt like an hour -- not because they dragged but rather because there is so much content. It's pretty nifty when that happens. (The first meeting I ever had with him, when I was shopping for a congregation and a rabbi, was like that too.)

( Read more... )

Well, all right. Maybe I will write more tonight. (I was going to watch West Wing, but Dani has already gone to sleep.)

I suspect that most people who believe in God believe in a God who intervenes, who (potentially) responds to individual prayer, who involves himself at least a little bit in each person's life. I'm not really any different here except to the extent that we might differ in degree. But there are problems with believing this.

( Read more... )

I've been studying talmud with my rabbi (for an hour or so every couple weeks; he's got a busy schedule). It's really nifty, as I've gushed about elsewhere.

One thing that's particularly neat for me is that I'm starting to anticipate the arguments before they're made. No, I am not reading ahead. I think I'm actually starting to learn to analyze problems the way they do! And I've got enough random bits of knowledge tucked away that occasionally I can make a connection, sometimes even to something my rabbi hadn't thought about.

Yeah, I'm a beginner, but I'm an enthusiastic beginner. :-)

In the mishna discussion of the 39 melachot (forbidden labors on Shabbat), there are some paired opposites -- e.g. tying and untying knots, writing and erasing two letters, sewing and ripping stitches out, etc. In most, but not all, cases, the mishna casts this as follows: doing the destructive act in order to do the constructive act is forbidden. Erasing isn't inherently wrong; it's just wrong if you're doing that so you can write in that space.

I will be interested to see how this plays out in the gemara. I'll also be interested in studying the cases where this isn't the case more closely, to see what distinguishes them.

And I'll be especially interested in seeing how the discussion of extinguishing a flame plays out, as the mishna qualifies it as "so you can make charcoal" (i.e. a destructive act leading to a constructive act). I think extinguishing a flame is prohibited regardless of intent, but either it's elsewhere or the gemara is going to expound on this.

One-on-one talmud study is a fantastic experience (at least with the right person, which I have).

Current Mood: high

I'm going to try to gather up some of the other loose ends from my conversation with my rabbi, though I wasn't taking (many) notes and it's now been a few days, so this'll be vague in places.

He recommended that I become familiar with the works of Leopold Zunz, a 19th-century scholar, though I failed to note why. (Presumably related to the whole question of reforms/innovations in halacha, as that was the main topic of conversation.) One of these days I'll get myself a copy of Encyclopedia Judaica so I can look up the bare-bones info on pointers like this.

We talked about how reforms to halacha go all the way back. He believes that the Reform movement follows the process, though because its interpretations are different, when you build on those things can seem to get kind of far afield. An example from me (that we didn't discuss): if you have made a case for egalitarian reforms in most things, as Reform and some Conservative have done, then I have to grant that you can make a case for patrilineal descent. (I still think this is a bad idea, however, as it really divides the Jewish people on the question of who is a Jew, and it's not like children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers can't convert fairly trivially if they're raised in the religion.) We didn't go very far down this path; I think I disagree with his claim, because at least historically there have been cases where Reform just plain threw out halacha, but maybe he's talking current practice and not history.

Remember, though, that Reform does not believe that the oral law (or, necessarily, the written law, i.e. Torah) came directly from God at Sinai, so this is presumably more about respecting the tradition than anything else. It seems obvious to me that my rabbi respects the halachic tradition far more than average in Reform (probably a lot of why we click so well), but one rabbi does not a movement make.

We drifted into the question of just how a modern Reform Jew goes about making decisions, and we kept ending up on Shabbat topics. We talked about electricity; I said I use timers for lights and the crock pot and am fairly rigid there and more lenient elsewhere (though I try to avoid issues rather than making explicit decisions; I'm a wuss). He asked detailed questions about the crock pot; not sure why. Somewhere in there I said that I don't unscrew the fridge light, though as a practical matter I know where in the fridge the things I'm going to need on Shabbat are, and occasionally (read: at night when the room is otherwise dark) I've been known to close my eyes and just grab the Coke anyway. He thought this was excessive, and this led to a discussion of intent vs. side-effect. He's right; I already believe that side-effects are not transgressions if I didn't want the results anyway. (We also talked about motion-sensor lights in this context. Summary: the (now-hypothetical) neighbor's lights are not my problem. Putting one in myself would be.)

We talked some about the get issue, and the Orthodox solution of editing history and how offensive I found that idea. I've mentioned this before.

We didn't really talk about what I describe as "rules hacks" in the halachic system. Another time. (I still have stuff I want to say about this, but haven't gotten it written down yet.)

At the end of the hour he asked whether I wanted to keep studying philosophy or instead begin to tackle talmud, and I opted for the latter. During the Shabbat discussion we had already started into that, so we're going to just start with the 39 melachot (forbidden categories of work) and go from there. Just as soon as the book I ordered comes in and I make a first pass through the first bit on my own to acclimate. Yay! I can't wait!

Aronson Press has a short-term offer for a few selected volumes of the Steinsaltz Talmud cheap ($10 per, instead of the usual $45-50 per). There's not much selection though -- two volumes of Bava Metzia (basic civil law), two of Ketubot (marriage law), and two of Ta'anit (laws of sacrifices; whee). The offer expires sometime today.

I went ahead and ordered the Bava Metzia on general principles, and to be able to compare for myself Steinsaltz' approach and Schottenstein's.

I met with my rabbi this morning. More about our rambling philosophical conversation later, but one outcome is that we're going to study talmud together. (This arose from my saying that in order to make informed decisions I need to develop the tools, and how do I do that?) I know it's traditional to start with Bava Metzia, but most of the issues I brought up in passing, to illustrate points, were about Shabbat, so we're going to start there.

I've never done one-on-one talmud study before; this will be neat. I've taken a couple classes with Rabbi Staitman over at Rodef (where I was by far the most engaged person in the class, to the point of feeling self-conscious about it), and I receive "classes" via the net that are not very interactive at all (lectures, really, though questions are taken). But this will be much better, and will let us ramble in whatever direction seems most appropriate.

Current Mood: chipper

I met with my rabbi this morning. We talked about a bunch of things. I told him I really miss the regular meetings that we had back when I was studying with him.

He asked what I've been learning lately and I told him about the online mishna class (from the Masorti folks in Israel) and the miscellaneous other stuff (parsha commentaries and the like), and that it's been pretty self-directed and haphazard. He asked what I want to learn and my broad answer is "most things"; I realized during the course of the conversation that what I *really* want is a study partner, and the specific topics of study are less important than the process of learning how to learn, so to speak. He knows that I've had a long-standing interest in liturgy, so we talked about that for a while.

I mentioned the study-partner thing, thinking that maybe he could suggest someone else in the congregation who I could team up with, and he said he'd be happy to study with me. Wow! This would be order of once or twice a month; I'm supposed to call his secretary, schedule something, and tell her what we're going to study. :-) (He lent me a book on liturgical history, so we'll start there.)

We also talked about my desire to be more involved in leading services. (I didn't quite have the guts to say "hey, how about getting rid of the paid soloists and letting some of us do that music instead?") He said I'm already on his short list for people to call with little notice when things come up and he appreciates that I'm willing to help. Then he asked how my Torah-reading is. I said "unskilled now but I want to change that", and told him that I've been trying to learn trope from a book. He's putting together a small group of people -- some adults, some post-b'nei-mitzvah teenagers -- who want to do this again, and he'll teach us and assign portions with a few months' notice. I said to definitely count me in. He's going to start this in January, he said.

We ran out of time (I thought I had a longer slot than I did), so I had to cram in the "oh by the way I've been leading services over at Tree occasionally; hope you don't mind" bit at the end, when I had hoped to not just spring it on him. He didn't seem to have a problem with this, which is good.

Current Mood: ecstatic

Monica

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The Mishkan came from IKEA

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how involved is God?

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more from Thursday's meeting

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