Things that work...

Jeremy

Today, we thought we would write about the Hadar Alumni Shabbaton. This involved over 100 former and current students of Yeshivat Hadar descending on the Stamford Hilton (as the sign outside the town said: "Stamford—the city that works"). I wanted to start by reminiscing on the awesomeness of almost constant eating and/or davening. A room full of really committed, experienced people doing the shabbat morning service was something really not to be missed.

Miri

You're right, the davening throughout the weekend was really fantastic! I've never been at a more enthusiastic, engaged and song filled Sunday morning shacharit. It was also great to see the diversity and strength of the Hadar alumni community. People flew in from all over the country (which in America means they came a really long way). The faculty came without their families seemingly to spend the weekend almost continuously answering halakhic, religious and personal questions from their alumni.

Marbim beSimcha?

Miri

We, like everyone else in the Jewish world, 'had' Purim this weekend. I had a wonderful time. Jeremy, did not. He doesn't like Purim. He says this is because he doesn't like the things about Purim that are 'fun'. But I think it's something more significant and important, that can tell us something about the nature of Purim itself.

Jeremy

This is true, there are many things about Purim that I don't like: things like fun, gift-giving and -receiving, drunkenness, dressing up and a general lack of structure. I like structure. I had a lovely time on the Sunday morning at the sedate Kehilat Hadar megillah reading. Not too much fun, just a good service and good reading.

Israel and peoplehood

Jeremy

We've been rather busy recently. But we've finally managed to be in the same place at the same time for long enough (without our Talmuds on our tables) to talk about the College Winter Learning Seminar that happened at the beginning of this semester.

Miri

It was really great to be back and learning in depth on a really contentious topic: Israel. We had around 20 college students join us for 2 weeks. They were here for davening, for learning and for chilling out. And there was quite a lot of diversity of opinion about the topic at hand. The goal was not to have political conversations but to put together a shared canon of sources around which the conversation could be framed, from Tanakh to Talmud to modern religious Zionists.

Teaneck and Queens

Jeremy

We moved seamlessly from discussing the state of the Jewish community to the good and bad points of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. We talked about the anti-kabbalah culture of Yeshiva University, we talked about my ideas on God, Torah and mythology. He recommended I read Planetary; I recommended he finish The Sandman. He gave chassidic wort (i.e. a word of Torah) about the kabbalistic significance of the dreidel, while I the previous night had been discussing how one can simultaneously hold that the universe began in a Big Bang and was created by God in seven days, without contradiction.

Ruminations on Talmud

Well, we're still here, and so is the city. We thought this time we would talk about the main thing we're doing with our time: studying Talmud. Woo! Yeah!

Jeremy

Four mornings a week we are studying the eighth chapter of Pesachim ('Passover offerings'). We've done like 3 pages in the several weeks we've been here.

Yeah.

3 pages. (well actually 4 as of this morning)

 

Strangely, tractate Pesachim is not as much about Pesach (Passover) as you might think. In fact, we've barely touched on it so far.

 

Miri

Since we got here, we've realised that this actually isn't strange at all! It's totally normal for the Talmud to go off on tangents that seem unrelated to the specific legal questions at hand. In another section of Talmud I'm studying at the moment in tractate Brachot (Blessings), there's this really fascinating section about whether a good dream is better than a bad dream, on the principle that the majority of most dreams are unlikely to come true. They conclude that it might be better to wake up from a bad dream, basically because your day is going to be better than the dream, whereas the opposite is true if you wake up from a bad dream.

 

Jeremy

Right. The Talmud often gets sidetracked into other issues as linguistic or thematic parallels present themselves, for ease of memorisation.

Sandy, Schechter and Students

Jeremy

From the Upper West Side, without any communications with the rest of the city or the internet, we would have no idea that Sandy had been such a disaster. Round here, it was windy, it was stormy, and it was rainy. And some trees fell down. But we've all seen the pictures of devastation Downtown.

Looking out my apartment window, I watched the lights in New Jersey go out—they were only turned back on a week later, or so. We've heard horror stories of Long Island, particularly Long Beach and Rockaway where whole streets were destroyed, army personnel are guarding the streets and giving out aid, and they might not get power back for six months.

Miri

But there's something amazing about New York city's reactions.

Before moving from New Haven to New York I really thought that 'New-Yorkerness' was grossly exaggerated. But, as it turns out, New Yorkers are incredibly resilient. Much of the city went back to work whilst the bottom third of the island was without power or water. People walked through streets with no traffic lights (or 'stop lights') to shower at offices above 40th Street as though it were just another item on a long to-do list. And the snow storm just over a week after Sandy hardly phased anyone. What still troubles and confuses me is the question of how to characterise the reaction of this city to the hurricane. On the one hand New Yorkers came together  in extraordinary ways; volunteering, donating food, blankets, money and even blood.

HHD@NYC

Jeremy

So we’ve been in New York since early September, and we’ve finished our orientation, survived the chaggim, and even our first two weeks of proper yeshiva. We thought it was certainly time to blog about our experiences. As we mentioned in our introduction, we’re hoping to have this as a conversation. And I’ve got the unenviable task of beginning. I'll be writing like this.

Miri will be writing like this.