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.

Introductions are in order

We are Jeremy and Miri, two British students at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We are being funded by JHub, incubator of Jewish social action projects in the UK. We will be studying Talmud in this open, egalitarian, academically rigourous and religiously committed institution all year. We will also be volunteering and teaching in the community.

Throughout the year, we will share our reactions to what we've been studying or what we've experienced in the American Jewish community of New York City. We will be having an ongoing conversation, and this is where we will post it.

We've come a long way, from West End Lane to Broadway, to explore our rich Jewish tradition.

Welcome to the Upper West Side.

Miri & Jeremy