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.