and yes, those are my clean dishes in the background:)
Saturday, February 17, 2007
new hair.
thought this might interest some of you, especially my ladies out there. i finally found time, after 5 months of trying, to get my hair cut. guess its not up there in my priorities. one person told me i look french. another funky. i can deal with that...i heart you all.
and yes, those are my clean dishes in the background:)
and yes, those are my clean dishes in the background:)
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The dog ate my underwear…and it was a very spiritual experience…
I live with Libby. Libby is a little black dog with silky long locks and pretty eyes. She likes to cuddle and play and would do just about anything to get a little lovin.
Libby eats my underwear if I forget to lock her out of my room when I go out for the day. Somehow the little (*&&^% manages to pick out my prettier and more expensive ones and chew a hole or two right in the crotch. It has been about 5 or 6 pairs now…I let it go for the first several pairs…but when I came home last Wednesday night after a long day to find one of my favorite pairs of tachtonim (yes, that is Hebrew for underwear) sitting on my desk, having been returned with considerably less fabric attatched – it was just one too many. I had had it. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BUY GOOD UNDERWEAR IN JERUSALEM!!! I was reminded of all the times in Montreal when I needed or wanted to buy something specific and had no clue where to do it. I went into a little bit of a….er….fit. Yes, I got angry over undies.
I didn’t go out of my room for the rest of the night because I was afraid I would say some rather uncouth things to my roommate. She tried to talk to me but I asked to be left alone through tight lips and a clouded head.
I went to school the next day and asked to speak to one of my rabbis. After explaining the ridiculousness of my situation and my relatively ridiculous reaction as well as my desire for reimbursement for damages he had a few suggestions. Put the dog in part of the house, have her figure out a way to keep Libby under wraps in some other way(s), etc. All were suggestions not including reimbursement…he didn’t think that was the most important thing…he kept telling me. The most important thing was to have a resolution that was respectful and re-created a sense of good feelings in our home. Resolve tension, not necessarily right all wrongs in minute-details-justice. He was right, I knew.
The next day we had a special 30 minute lecture type thing called a siyyum, a conclusion. This particular rabbi (who had tried to help me towards a resolution earlier in the day) lost his mother of 94 years a month before and the first period of his mourning – sh’loshim – 30 days following the death of the parent was coming to an end. In her memory different people in our community had volunteered to learn parts of mishna (oral law) dedicated to her memory. I learned a chapter from the masechet (division) on Shabbat. During the siyum he said a bit about the seder (order) we had all been learning from – mo’ed – special times. But more relevant for this post is what he said about his mother. I had already been lucky enough to hear about her at his home over sukkot (when I actually got to meet her), a holiday in the fall, at her funeral a month ago and when I went with about 60 other students to go visit him at his home while he was sitting shiva (the first seven days of mourning). There are themes that stand out: survival during WWII, dedication and resolve to see her family healthy and happy, devotion, endless caring for her family, love of Judaism and the Jewish people, her intelligence, and many others. But what stood out to me at the siyum was something that I knew my rabbis had mentioned before but had not stood out to me until this time hearing it – she always tried to ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬resolve conflict and not create it to begin with.
It dawned on me that maybe that was why he was so persistent in his message to me – resolve conflict. He, maybe, was trying to act in a way that mirrored the way his wonderful mother would have acted – both in himself and in his advice to me. What is more powerful than that – the intermixing of Torah and our lives until they blur and become one holy striving towards mercy and justice, learning and teaching, abstract and the tangible.
May her memory be for a blessing – for her children, her grandchildren (9), her great grandchildren(7), and all who were lucky enough to know her. Baruch dayan emet.
Libby eats my underwear if I forget to lock her out of my room when I go out for the day. Somehow the little (*&&^% manages to pick out my prettier and more expensive ones and chew a hole or two right in the crotch. It has been about 5 or 6 pairs now…I let it go for the first several pairs…but when I came home last Wednesday night after a long day to find one of my favorite pairs of tachtonim (yes, that is Hebrew for underwear) sitting on my desk, having been returned with considerably less fabric attatched – it was just one too many. I had had it. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO BUY GOOD UNDERWEAR IN JERUSALEM!!! I was reminded of all the times in Montreal when I needed or wanted to buy something specific and had no clue where to do it. I went into a little bit of a….er….fit. Yes, I got angry over undies.
I didn’t go out of my room for the rest of the night because I was afraid I would say some rather uncouth things to my roommate. She tried to talk to me but I asked to be left alone through tight lips and a clouded head.
I went to school the next day and asked to speak to one of my rabbis. After explaining the ridiculousness of my situation and my relatively ridiculous reaction as well as my desire for reimbursement for damages he had a few suggestions. Put the dog in part of the house, have her figure out a way to keep Libby under wraps in some other way(s), etc. All were suggestions not including reimbursement…he didn’t think that was the most important thing…he kept telling me. The most important thing was to have a resolution that was respectful and re-created a sense of good feelings in our home. Resolve tension, not necessarily right all wrongs in minute-details-justice. He was right, I knew.
The next day we had a special 30 minute lecture type thing called a siyyum, a conclusion. This particular rabbi (who had tried to help me towards a resolution earlier in the day) lost his mother of 94 years a month before and the first period of his mourning – sh’loshim – 30 days following the death of the parent was coming to an end. In her memory different people in our community had volunteered to learn parts of mishna (oral law) dedicated to her memory. I learned a chapter from the masechet (division) on Shabbat. During the siyum he said a bit about the seder (order) we had all been learning from – mo’ed – special times. But more relevant for this post is what he said about his mother. I had already been lucky enough to hear about her at his home over sukkot (when I actually got to meet her), a holiday in the fall, at her funeral a month ago and when I went with about 60 other students to go visit him at his home while he was sitting shiva (the first seven days of mourning). There are themes that stand out: survival during WWII, dedication and resolve to see her family healthy and happy, devotion, endless caring for her family, love of Judaism and the Jewish people, her intelligence, and many others. But what stood out to me at the siyum was something that I knew my rabbis had mentioned before but had not stood out to me until this time hearing it – she always tried to ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬resolve conflict and not create it to begin with.
It dawned on me that maybe that was why he was so persistent in his message to me – resolve conflict. He, maybe, was trying to act in a way that mirrored the way his wonderful mother would have acted – both in himself and in his advice to me. What is more powerful than that – the intermixing of Torah and our lives until they blur and become one holy striving towards mercy and justice, learning and teaching, abstract and the tangible.
May her memory be for a blessing – for her children, her grandchildren (9), her great grandchildren(7), and all who were lucky enough to know her. Baruch dayan emet.
Monday, February 12, 2007
would you like some light racism with your cereal?
ok. i know the US has some race problems...but compared to the box of cereal i am about to show you, it is SO much more PC. Maybe i'm wrong, but i really don't think this would fly.
My day started with this box of cereal being offered to the group that comes in for morning prayers - my school is nice enough to provide free cereal breakfast.
The Hebrew says, "Cocoman" and has a black man helping you to greet the day. i don't know if you all will find this as rediculous as I do, but there it is.
My day started with this box of cereal being offered to the group that comes in for morning prayers - my school is nice enough to provide free cereal breakfast.
The Hebrew says, "Cocoman" and has a black man helping you to greet the day. i don't know if you all will find this as rediculous as I do, but there it is.
Israel and the Bomb...it's time to start thinking
"The nuclear ambiguity route"
By Avner Cohen
On May 30, 1961, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York a fateful meeting was held between Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy. At stake was the future of the Dimona project, the Israeli nuclear initiative, to which Kennedy was vehemently opposed. Ben-Gurion repeatedly promised, both publicly and privately, that the Dimona initiative was for peaceful purposes only, but Kennedy did not seem convinced.
The minutes of the meeting were classified for 30 years on both sides of the Atlantic; in the mid-1990s they were released for publication, first in the United States and afterward in Israel. Only the first 15 minutes of the meeting were devoted to the nuclear issue, the issue of Dimona, but it was the heart of the entire discussion.
Kennedy emphasized the importance of the Israeli promise that the atomic initiative was for peaceful purposes only, and the importance of this commitment being not only declared but seen as well. Ben-Gurion explained Israel's future energy problems, repeated his promise that the Dimona initiative was for peaceful purposes, but concluded his words in a somewhat vague manner: "They are asking us if it [Dimona] is for peaceful purposes. And in fact, at the moment the only purposes are peaceful, but we do not know what will happen in the future ... It does not depend on us ... Maybe Russia won't give bombs to Egypt, but maybe Egypt will be able to develop them on its own." There is no doubt that he wanted to leave himself and Israel a way out of his commitment.
I recalled that discussion in the wake of the words of Ali Larijani, the secretary general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and the head of its nuclear negotiating team, who recently declared that Iran's nuclear program is presently for peaceful purposes only, but as far as the future is concerned, he said, nobody knows what is in store; and if Iran is threatened, everything is open.
It is difficult not to see a certain historical similarity between Iran's nuclear situation today and Israel's nuclear situation in the early 1960s: countries in the midst of an ambitious national nuclear initiative designed to create a nuclear option, but which do not yet have a clear idea of what its nature will be in the future. Clearly they will have something, some kind of nuclear capability, but in spite of their determination nobody can prophesy what they can achieve: the technological capability to produce fissionable material, a bomb in the basement, or perhaps, in the case of Iran, a manifest bomb. Everything depends on the world's determination to oppose and confront their nuclear ambitions.
But there are also historical differences in the situation of the two countries. In terms of technology, today it is far easier to attain nuclear weapons than it was then, when only four countries had such weapons. Politically speaking, today there is a nuclear arrangement, whose legal and normative heart is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which did not exist then. At the time Israel was free, in terms of the law and international norms, to pursue its nuclear activity. That is not true of Iran, which is a signatory to the NPT - in other words, it has a legal obligation not to develop nuclear weapons.
All the signs point to the fact that Iran wants to achieve nuclear capability in a manner very similar to the way Israel achieved it; in other words, quietly and under a cover of ambiguity. It will apparently attempt to achieve a situation that gives it "a bomb in the basement," but if the world makes it hard for Iran, for the time being, it will make do with less. For example, constructing a nuclear option based on industrial production of fissionable material. The political differences between the two options are not significant for a country that chooses the route of ambiguity; and in any case, it is difficult to locate activity related to the preparation of weapons.
The route of ambiguity is very convenient for Iran precisely because it is a signatory to the NPT. It will gain the political advantages of having a nuclear option, deterrence and prestige, and it will attempt to reduce its friction with the outside world. Iran will continue to claim that its program is for peaceful purposes only, and it has a right according to the NPT to control all the components for producing nuclear fuel, but at the same time it will encourage the rumors that it is on the verge of producing weapons (or even that it has a bomb in the basement), and therefore it should be considered a nuclear nation for all extents and purposes.
Iran's choice of nuclear ambiguity will be a political challenge for the international nuclear system, but a far greater challenge to Israel, which granted legitimacy to such ambiguity. There is an important difference between Israel and Iran: Israel's nuclear ambiguity succeeded as an international phenomenon because the world, and particularly the U.S., decided to accept it as a country maintaining such a policy. Israel received a kind of exemption from the international community, which closed its eyes to the nuclear issue for political, legal and even ethical reasons unique to Israel. Israel's ambiguity succeeded because the world preferred it to all the other options.
But that is why the Iranian challenge is so powerful: Is it preferable to remove the mask from Iranian ambiguity and to call it by name, or is a vague Iran preferable to an openly nuclear Iran? At what point in time should we remove the masks and insist on international nuclear transparency? And what will be the future of Israeli ambiguity in such a world? These are all questions that until now have hardly been asked, but they demand a great deal of thinking, both worldwide and in Israel.
The writer is a senior researcher at the University of Maryland, and the author of "Israel and the Bomb."
By Avner Cohen
On May 30, 1961, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York a fateful meeting was held between Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy. At stake was the future of the Dimona project, the Israeli nuclear initiative, to which Kennedy was vehemently opposed. Ben-Gurion repeatedly promised, both publicly and privately, that the Dimona initiative was for peaceful purposes only, but Kennedy did not seem convinced.
The minutes of the meeting were classified for 30 years on both sides of the Atlantic; in the mid-1990s they were released for publication, first in the United States and afterward in Israel. Only the first 15 minutes of the meeting were devoted to the nuclear issue, the issue of Dimona, but it was the heart of the entire discussion.
Kennedy emphasized the importance of the Israeli promise that the atomic initiative was for peaceful purposes only, and the importance of this commitment being not only declared but seen as well. Ben-Gurion explained Israel's future energy problems, repeated his promise that the Dimona initiative was for peaceful purposes, but concluded his words in a somewhat vague manner: "They are asking us if it [Dimona] is for peaceful purposes. And in fact, at the moment the only purposes are peaceful, but we do not know what will happen in the future ... It does not depend on us ... Maybe Russia won't give bombs to Egypt, but maybe Egypt will be able to develop them on its own." There is no doubt that he wanted to leave himself and Israel a way out of his commitment.
I recalled that discussion in the wake of the words of Ali Larijani, the secretary general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and the head of its nuclear negotiating team, who recently declared that Iran's nuclear program is presently for peaceful purposes only, but as far as the future is concerned, he said, nobody knows what is in store; and if Iran is threatened, everything is open.
It is difficult not to see a certain historical similarity between Iran's nuclear situation today and Israel's nuclear situation in the early 1960s: countries in the midst of an ambitious national nuclear initiative designed to create a nuclear option, but which do not yet have a clear idea of what its nature will be in the future. Clearly they will have something, some kind of nuclear capability, but in spite of their determination nobody can prophesy what they can achieve: the technological capability to produce fissionable material, a bomb in the basement, or perhaps, in the case of Iran, a manifest bomb. Everything depends on the world's determination to oppose and confront their nuclear ambitions.
But there are also historical differences in the situation of the two countries. In terms of technology, today it is far easier to attain nuclear weapons than it was then, when only four countries had such weapons. Politically speaking, today there is a nuclear arrangement, whose legal and normative heart is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which did not exist then. At the time Israel was free, in terms of the law and international norms, to pursue its nuclear activity. That is not true of Iran, which is a signatory to the NPT - in other words, it has a legal obligation not to develop nuclear weapons.
All the signs point to the fact that Iran wants to achieve nuclear capability in a manner very similar to the way Israel achieved it; in other words, quietly and under a cover of ambiguity. It will apparently attempt to achieve a situation that gives it "a bomb in the basement," but if the world makes it hard for Iran, for the time being, it will make do with less. For example, constructing a nuclear option based on industrial production of fissionable material. The political differences between the two options are not significant for a country that chooses the route of ambiguity; and in any case, it is difficult to locate activity related to the preparation of weapons.
The route of ambiguity is very convenient for Iran precisely because it is a signatory to the NPT. It will gain the political advantages of having a nuclear option, deterrence and prestige, and it will attempt to reduce its friction with the outside world. Iran will continue to claim that its program is for peaceful purposes only, and it has a right according to the NPT to control all the components for producing nuclear fuel, but at the same time it will encourage the rumors that it is on the verge of producing weapons (or even that it has a bomb in the basement), and therefore it should be considered a nuclear nation for all extents and purposes.
Iran's choice of nuclear ambiguity will be a political challenge for the international nuclear system, but a far greater challenge to Israel, which granted legitimacy to such ambiguity. There is an important difference between Israel and Iran: Israel's nuclear ambiguity succeeded as an international phenomenon because the world, and particularly the U.S., decided to accept it as a country maintaining such a policy. Israel received a kind of exemption from the international community, which closed its eyes to the nuclear issue for political, legal and even ethical reasons unique to Israel. Israel's ambiguity succeeded because the world preferred it to all the other options.
But that is why the Iranian challenge is so powerful: Is it preferable to remove the mask from Iranian ambiguity and to call it by name, or is a vague Iran preferable to an openly nuclear Iran? At what point in time should we remove the masks and insist on international nuclear transparency? And what will be the future of Israeli ambiguity in such a world? These are all questions that until now have hardly been asked, but they demand a great deal of thinking, both worldwide and in Israel.
The writer is a senior researcher at the University of Maryland, and the author of "Israel and the Bomb."
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
eilat - city of hotels and talmudei torah
talmudei torah = students of Torah
well, we were there anyway:)
Here are some pics from my tiyul a few weeks ago to eilat - in the southern tip of Israel. You can see Aqaba from Eilat - it is the only port of Jordan. Eilat is on the Red Sea, and you bet your ass I went in. Cold, but it was delicious.
A sign up outside of the date palm field at Kibbutz Ketorah where we stayed - notice the sign is in english, hebrew and thai. Welcome to one of the many signs of the end of idealistic zionism - even on kibbutzim.
a photo of the date palms. they pick them with a fleet of lifts.
one of my fellow students and mechina year buddies.
two of my closest friends at pardes - one is adorable canadian and one is just adorable...none of us is perfect:)
another one of my good friends. the rocks were pretty. we wanted a picture of us too. we decided to take a picture of both at the same time...cute, no?!
this was julie and i doing adopt-a-family:) this is a family that brought their whole clan over for the year to live in israel/study at pardes for a year.
a picture of the sandstone - one of the common stones to find in the eilat mountains. it is very maleable and soft and so it gets into wild shapes from the windy and rough terraine.
this was very high up on a mountainface - it is a Nabataean door carved by the same people as created Petra, the ancient city in Jordan. It is claimed to represent a door to the next world. Anyone up for a ride?:)
that was my tiyul, for the most part - aside from a few late night activities like a campfire, climbing the only sand dunes in israel as the sun set (which i also did when i was 16 and came with NFTY:), and spending the last day sleeping on the bus cause i got sick:( But it was a nice time and it was amazing to be out and about in the holy land and take a break from 12 hours days learnin the toirah!
Hugs, kisses and the like.
well, we were there anyway:)
Here are some pics from my tiyul a few weeks ago to eilat - in the southern tip of Israel. You can see Aqaba from Eilat - it is the only port of Jordan. Eilat is on the Red Sea, and you bet your ass I went in. Cold, but it was delicious.
A sign up outside of the date palm field at Kibbutz Ketorah where we stayed - notice the sign is in english, hebrew and thai. Welcome to one of the many signs of the end of idealistic zionism - even on kibbutzim.
a photo of the date palms. they pick them with a fleet of lifts.
one of my fellow students and mechina year buddies.
two of my closest friends at pardes - one is adorable canadian and one is just adorable...none of us is perfect:)
another one of my good friends. the rocks were pretty. we wanted a picture of us too. we decided to take a picture of both at the same time...cute, no?!
this was julie and i doing adopt-a-family:) this is a family that brought their whole clan over for the year to live in israel/study at pardes for a year.
a picture of the sandstone - one of the common stones to find in the eilat mountains. it is very maleable and soft and so it gets into wild shapes from the windy and rough terraine.
this was very high up on a mountainface - it is a Nabataean door carved by the same people as created Petra, the ancient city in Jordan. It is claimed to represent a door to the next world. Anyone up for a ride?:)
that was my tiyul, for the most part - aside from a few late night activities like a campfire, climbing the only sand dunes in israel as the sun set (which i also did when i was 16 and came with NFTY:), and spending the last day sleeping on the bus cause i got sick:( But it was a nice time and it was amazing to be out and about in the holy land and take a break from 12 hours days learnin the toirah!
Hugs, kisses and the like.
Monday, February 05, 2007
veggie food for a meat eater.
this summer i told my dad that i only want to date vegetarians. this made him unhappy. he didn't think i should be so restrictive. well. pops, you win.
i cooked my first dinner tonight for the man i have been dating now for about a month. he eats meat. i don't. Here is the menu:
salad: beets and fennel with an orange juice based dressing
soup: minestrone
main: quiche with endive, broccoli and zucchini
I was nervous. I have this idea in my head that all meat eaters are like my parents - they never feel like they have eaten unless they eat meat. this was the first time since my wonderful years in montreal with a wonderful (vegetarian:) guy that i have cooked a meal for my boyfriend. Let me try to explain why this is significant...
I love cooking for shabbat because i know it will go to feeding good people with good food and add to the good spirit of shabbat. i like feeding people. i liked feeding my ex-boyfriend. a lot. i think it was the first time i realized that i really am like my mother as we were always told we would be. My momma likes watching me eat. She likes watching my pops eat. It was when i cooked for my ex that i realized how happy it made her by my own joy the act elicited. it was like nothing else. For one because i was in shock that i could cook at all considering my house growing up of take out and microwaveable goods because my parents were working hard and what time they had to spend with me i think they didn't want to spend cooking. But really the feeling is indescribable.
I love watching my friends and more-than-friends eat my food and feel jolly and full after.
So, I fed him. He ate, and ate, and ate. I ate with him. all the while I could feel the my-mother-in-me eyeing his plate every time it was almost empty...hoping he would want another serving.
I like him...I don't know where it will go. But i am trying to keep in mind that I never can. But for the time being he is adorable.
The new man, the few days of being sick in bed, a trip with school, planning an open-mic for school, etc, etc. these are the reasons i haven't written in a while. They are not good excuses, I know. What good is this damn thing if i don't post!:)
I miss all of you sweet people on the other side of the Atlantic. Israel is cold and rainy days. But it is made warmer not only by the friends and the new special someone over here, but also by your e and phone love i get everyday. Chag sameach btw, we are in tu'beshvat season now! I have a mini-post to tell you about some things i experienced over this past shabbat regarding the festive holiday of trees we just had.
i hope this was coherent. i watched the superbowl for much of last night and was up at 7am for morning praying with my community. i am entirely exhausted. be well and happy, ya'll.
The Talmud was written by men…
Sometimes about women and sometimes about their vagina’s too. I figure I will write about this now since V-Day is fast approaching and I don’t think there is a show here in Jerusalem so I feel I should do my part to give props to the ladies…and their vaginas.
(I thought I would catch you off guard with that first bit so you might not notice that I haven’t written in a month. Sorry. I suck.)
So. With the change of semesters my class in mishna has now switched to gemara. What that means is that we were studying a compilation of oral law which was codified between 200BCE and 200CE and is the first building block, essentially, of the oral law in the larger sense. The Talmud (oral law) is made up of two main parts: the mishna which I just explained and the gemara which is discussion around the mishna. I hope that was clear.
Now my class, instead of studying mishna, is working on applying the mishnayot (plural of mishna) that we learned in the first part of the year and learning gemara on a selected few of them. We have had four classes so far in the new semester and it was a big change for the class. This brings me to the topic we discussed at the end of last class that I’m sure would weigh on anyone’s mind once they figure out what the *&%%^$ Talmud is. Why the HELL would we want to study it today?
Some reasons provided by the class:
Historical – it is a very detailed document that gives a lot of insight into the world of Jews throughout the centuries first with the mishna, then the gemara and then later and later commentaries on the gemara.
Social – it sheds light on society’s challenges and realities both within the Jewish community and between Jews and non-Jews, and how we reacted and dealt with these.
Talmud teaches the method of how we learn as Jews – in large part the Talmud is a recording of conversations between students and teachers and between one generation and another. Studying Talmud shows the way of Jewish learning that has been so vital to our survival and thriving over the centuries. (One of my classmates mentioned that for periods in time when Jewish books were burned in anti-Jewish events it was the Talmud which most targeted because it is so vital to our lives as Jews.)
Understand how Jewish law came to be – it is from Talmud that our law codes are developed, codified, commented on and codified again. The process does not exist without the Talmud
Understand the tools used so we can use them ourselves – empowerment, which I will get into in my own answer as to why study talmud
Now, my answer is:
For most of rabbinic Judaism – which was established, or at least developed, after the fall of the second temple in 70 CE – this was a text only available for the most part to men. It was also a text written by men. Female characters occasionally appear but this is rare. Women learning was an exception to the rule although this, as with most norms in Jewish society, moved along a pendulum throughout the centuries. Some even said to teach a women was to teach her tiflut – or light headedness. Therefore this was a document created by men – but for men and women. Now women were surely of some impact – women and men tend to impact one another – but their voices are absent and their wisdom leaves a pitifully large, cavernous, starkly barren gap – next to the wisdom of our [male] sages. I hate to say it is about power – but it sort of is. Empowerment is one of those words that I used in development classes in university. That is what I feel like I am striving towards when I engage the text with my chevruta (study partner) and partner in crime. I am inserting my voice, my needs, my understandings of the world as me, mincha chava. I know that it seems like a text that isn’t applicable. It was written by about 500CE and has men talking at length about many things that are out of place in our own time contextually or are about organs that the male authors don’t have – for example the ever confounding vagina. I don’t always understand my own body – how did they expect to?!
It’s not that I expect them to have perfect and ever-applicable and meaningful answers and discussions. I don’t. And I don’t expect to find all the answers to my questions in it either. But I do hope to find inspiration and guidance in its mish mash of Aramaic and Hebrew complete with never ending abbreviations and Talmudic personalities fighting it out on a page studied by countless before me. I guess that is my reason for why I came to Israel to study – I want to be part of the tradition. I don’t want it to be kept out of my hands either by ultra-orthodox or by the Reform movement which while it gave me many things, did not give me the skills to learn about my people’s books before I decide whether or not they apply to me. Or by any other party. It has sustained my people. It has provided us a way to remain honest and dedicated to our pursuit of being better people and to struggle towards davekut (cleaving) to God. It belonged to every generation of Jews before me and it belongs to me too. I just want to own it, is all.
Wish me luck. I wish for myself that the question of why study gemara at all, is a question which is always changing and growing in its dynamic answer flowing out of me into….
(I thought I would catch you off guard with that first bit so you might not notice that I haven’t written in a month. Sorry. I suck.)
So. With the change of semesters my class in mishna has now switched to gemara. What that means is that we were studying a compilation of oral law which was codified between 200BCE and 200CE and is the first building block, essentially, of the oral law in the larger sense. The Talmud (oral law) is made up of two main parts: the mishna which I just explained and the gemara which is discussion around the mishna. I hope that was clear.
Now my class, instead of studying mishna, is working on applying the mishnayot (plural of mishna) that we learned in the first part of the year and learning gemara on a selected few of them. We have had four classes so far in the new semester and it was a big change for the class. This brings me to the topic we discussed at the end of last class that I’m sure would weigh on anyone’s mind once they figure out what the *&%%^$ Talmud is. Why the HELL would we want to study it today?
Some reasons provided by the class:
Historical – it is a very detailed document that gives a lot of insight into the world of Jews throughout the centuries first with the mishna, then the gemara and then later and later commentaries on the gemara.
Social – it sheds light on society’s challenges and realities both within the Jewish community and between Jews and non-Jews, and how we reacted and dealt with these.
Talmud teaches the method of how we learn as Jews – in large part the Talmud is a recording of conversations between students and teachers and between one generation and another. Studying Talmud shows the way of Jewish learning that has been so vital to our survival and thriving over the centuries. (One of my classmates mentioned that for periods in time when Jewish books were burned in anti-Jewish events it was the Talmud which most targeted because it is so vital to our lives as Jews.)
Understand how Jewish law came to be – it is from Talmud that our law codes are developed, codified, commented on and codified again. The process does not exist without the Talmud
Understand the tools used so we can use them ourselves – empowerment, which I will get into in my own answer as to why study talmud
Now, my answer is:
For most of rabbinic Judaism – which was established, or at least developed, after the fall of the second temple in 70 CE – this was a text only available for the most part to men. It was also a text written by men. Female characters occasionally appear but this is rare. Women learning was an exception to the rule although this, as with most norms in Jewish society, moved along a pendulum throughout the centuries. Some even said to teach a women was to teach her tiflut – or light headedness. Therefore this was a document created by men – but for men and women. Now women were surely of some impact – women and men tend to impact one another – but their voices are absent and their wisdom leaves a pitifully large, cavernous, starkly barren gap – next to the wisdom of our [male] sages. I hate to say it is about power – but it sort of is. Empowerment is one of those words that I used in development classes in university. That is what I feel like I am striving towards when I engage the text with my chevruta (study partner) and partner in crime. I am inserting my voice, my needs, my understandings of the world as me, mincha chava. I know that it seems like a text that isn’t applicable. It was written by about 500CE and has men talking at length about many things that are out of place in our own time contextually or are about organs that the male authors don’t have – for example the ever confounding vagina. I don’t always understand my own body – how did they expect to?!
It’s not that I expect them to have perfect and ever-applicable and meaningful answers and discussions. I don’t. And I don’t expect to find all the answers to my questions in it either. But I do hope to find inspiration and guidance in its mish mash of Aramaic and Hebrew complete with never ending abbreviations and Talmudic personalities fighting it out on a page studied by countless before me. I guess that is my reason for why I came to Israel to study – I want to be part of the tradition. I don’t want it to be kept out of my hands either by ultra-orthodox or by the Reform movement which while it gave me many things, did not give me the skills to learn about my people’s books before I decide whether or not they apply to me. Or by any other party. It has sustained my people. It has provided us a way to remain honest and dedicated to our pursuit of being better people and to struggle towards davekut (cleaving) to God. It belonged to every generation of Jews before me and it belongs to me too. I just want to own it, is all.
Wish me luck. I wish for myself that the question of why study gemara at all, is a question which is always changing and growing in its dynamic answer flowing out of me into….
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