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.

You may not have guessed it, but this all happened while I was staying with the JLI (Jewish Learning Initiative) rabbi at Queens College, similar to Chaplaincy in the UK. He's a revolutionary, in his own way. And while our goals are extremely similar—we both want Jews to love living a life of Torah—our audiences are rather different.

He explained to me his three set-ups over the shabbat: Friday night is for the classical rabbinic intellectual role, giving a sermon; Saturday after services is more relaxed and his wife gives a shiur (discussion) about the weekly Torah portion; Saturday evening, as shabbat goes out, he acts as the rebbe that so many of the Queens College students remember from their yeshiva days, singing and teaching practical kabbalah to enrich their daily practice.

This was one element of the Hillel that I saw in detail. I led the alternative discussion during the Friday night service and joined over 200 people for free shabbat dinner. I slept through the morning service but made it for a much cosier lunch of only 50 people, followed by afternoon service. Then the third meal at the JLI rabbi's house.

They have the problem everyone has: they can get the Orthodox Jews to come to Hillel events but trying to grab the attention of the unaffiliated—or even the committed Conservative or Reform—is incredibly difficult. This is possibly exacerbated by the reputation of this area of Queens as a stronghold of the very Orthodox—there is basically a synagogue on every street—and, as I was told several times, the fact that Queens College is often considered the cheaper alternative to Yeshiva University, one of the major institutions training people in a Modern Orthodox environment.

Miri

The shabbat after Jeremy's foray to Queens, we all went to Teaneck, a heavily populated Jewish enclave just the other side of the George Washington Bridge in—chas v'shalom—New Jersey. (New Yorkers are honour-bound to look down upon their New Jersey, bridge-crossing, toll-paying counterparts, much like us and the Welsh). Rav Shai, one of the founders of Hadar, spoke on shabbat morning about Friday night and the strange phenomenon of Jews beginning the holy day of the week at dusk. Usually, in secular culture, the day begins at sunrise and ends with night, but in Jewish time, dusk signals the end of the previous day and the beginning of a new one. In the wake of the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, Rav Shai expounded that we should use the symbol of the beginning of shabbat as our defiance of the darkness in the world.

Jeremy

In that vein, I began opening shabbat with paninis using our host-family's new panini maker. Nothing defies the darkness like American cheese and basil with the four teenage boys of the house!

Miri

It was so lovely to experience spending shabbat with host families and seeing regular Americans (or New Jersians at any rate).

Jeremy

We saw a lot of New Jersians at services over the whole weekend. On Friday night, I was really impressed that we filled a room, with people and sound, of 40-50 people at the conservative synagogue in Teaneck. Except I realised that on Saturday morning they filled the upstairs hall with over 300 people! It made me really question the attendance of the previous night.

And a lot of those 300 people seemed pretty wealthy—we ended up with 2 lunches by accident because the kiddush was so ridiculous! I also went for a walk around the area and saw the massive houses. I myself was staying in a basement suite just for me...

Miri 

I was lucky enough to be staying with the family of one of the students I teach at Schechter Bergen County—the school is almost in Teaneck. We arrived on the last night of chanukah and the family had 6 menorahs all fully lit up in the kitchen, which brought to mind the machloket rishonim (argument amongst the earliest commentators on the Talmud) about how many lights should be lit on chanukah; should each person light candles for each day of chanukah, or should there be one menorah for each house? The question is about how clear it is that the lights of the menorah are known to be about publicising the miracle of chanukah. If each person lights for each day, by the end of the 8 days of chanukah there are so many lights that a person walking by the outside of a house might not notice that there is specifically a menorah at all!

Jeremy

Linking some of this together, Rav Shai brought in a recent commentator who gave an explanation for Abraham's blessing in Genesis 15 that his descendents would be like the stars. Normally, this is understood to be referring to the number of the Jewish people, but here it was taught that it is really about the quality of stars to light up the darkness but not to eliminate it. This is the Jewish destiny: to light up the dark places with strong ethics and good deeds. But if anyone thinks that they are able to eliminate the darkness entirely, this way leads to either delusion or insanity in the face of an impossible task.

Miri

After a couple of weeks of winter break, we're just getting back into the routine of yeshiva life, with a bunch of college students here for a 2-week intensive on the topic of Israel. Everything's incredibly busy at the moment, so can't chat for long, but looking forward to telling you all about our encounters with Israel soon enough!