What am I studying, and why?

I’ve written a lot about what it’s like to be here in Jerusalem, but relatively little about what its like to be studying at Pardes. I’m afraid there won’t be any pictures with this post — sorry! I wish I could show you the wonderful faces of my fellow students, but it’s a bit soon our relationship for me to be asking them for photos (I think — they are mostly children of social media, and might feel differently). As far as our classrooms, they couldn’t be more stripped down and boring — there’s nothing to see. There is a bit of a view from the third floor rooms (there are also some rooms on the first floor, which have no view at all because the windows are covered). The breeze blows through those upper rooms, and in the evening the sky turns pink behind the buildings on the surrounding hills of Jerusalem. But we are l peering at our texts, or watching the teacher frantically scribbling in Hebrew and English on the white board — or looking into the faces of our peers as they share in the process of struggle and discovery.

Pardes tries to structure its classes to reflect a traditional yehiva, but with a bit more breathing room. Morning davenning (prayer) starts at 7:10, or 7:25 if there is no Torah reading. (I have yet to make it to morning davenning!) Morning classes start at 8:30 and go to 11:30. We spend part of that time in the classroom and part in the Beit Midrash, the study hall or “house of discussion”. Yes, it’s a three hour class. Then we go to our next class, which lasts from 11:45-1. In this season of Elul we return to the Beit Midrash to hear the shofar blown and to recite Psalm 27, and then we go to our respective minyanim for Mincha (afternoon) davenning, which lasts about 20-30 minutes. Then we get an hour or so for lunch. I only take an afternoon class Mondays and Wednesdays — on those days, I go back into class from 2:30 to 5. Again, we always spend part of that time in the Beit Midrash, discussing text with our chevruta (learning partner). Generally I come home after this, but on Tuesday I have a class from 5:15-7:15. One could (and many students do) spend the whole five days engaged in study from morning to night — and beyond if you stay for “night seder” which is an open study session in the Beit Midrash on Monday nights.

All this studying is very intense, and not the best thing for what Frederick Alexander called “The psychophysical being”. We sit a lot. Fortunately, we have to get up and move to go to the Beit Midrash, which sometimes means going upstairs or grabbing a cup of tea. And I also walk to and from school every day –sometimes twice. But I want to tell you about my studies. I worry that you will not understand. What am I studying? And why bother?

I spend -T-Th mornings discussing Mishna and Gemara, and M-W only Mishna. The teacher talks to us about some of the background, and then we go to the Beit Midrash in pairs and wrestle with the text. In the more beginning class it’s a short piece of text — a mishna — and then our teacher, Rahel, gives us some supporting texts to consider — verses from the Hebrew Bible, things Rashi or other commentators have said. We have to try to understand what the text is saying, and also why, and where it came from and where it is going. She typically gives it to us only in Hebrew/Aramaic. In the more advanced class, we study the mishna and the gemara that comes after it, also untranslated and without nekudot (“vowels”). We have Rashi’s commentary, but it is in what is called “Rashi script”, a special Hebrew font that doesn’t look like normal Hebrew at all for some of the letters — so, hard to read for some of us! The latter part of both classes is spent with the teacher unpacking the text for us, and helping us to understanding that is going on.

My later morning classes are both Bible classes. One is looking at the early books of the Prophets — the ones that aren’t really by prophets at all, but are history: Joshua, Samuel, Judges, and Kings. We are reading the text in Hebrew or English according to our skills — so far, I’ve found I can understand the Hebrew almost entirely without reference to a dictionary. In the other, we read the weekly portion in Hebrew — or some bit of it — and discuss it in Hebrew. Today the teacher brought a number of texts — from Rambam (Maimonades), Ramban (Nashmanides), and others — to unpack the meaning of one line of Torah. The line was the one about how you should shoo a mother bird off the nest before taking her eggs to eat, and not kill her and take the eggs. You wouldn’t believe what could be derived from that one line…

My one afternoon class is also about Mishna and Gemara — we’re looking at a selection of great sugiyot, or chapters. In this class, thank G-d, we are given the translation as well. And what is the purpose of all this, you might ask? Why sit in a room for hours, studying these ancient texts that are discussing minutiae of practice? Why do we care what Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai said about whether you can blow the shofar on Rosh HaShanah if it’s Shabbat? What’s it to us if the rabbis declared that it was okay to eat food less than the size of a large date with its pit still in, when you are fasting on Yom Kippur? And how did we fall down this rabbit hole where we were talking about preserving human dignity and suddenly we’re reading stories about dirty old rabbis who hung around the mikveh ogling the naked women and claiming “Oh, it’s ok, they’re just so many white geese to me.”!?

It happens that the woman who teaches my afternoon Talmud class, Nechama, is the one I find the most helpful. (BTW, all my Talmud teacher are women, and how cool is that?!) She really brings it all alive, and help you to see how these long ago discussions of seemingly small things can lead to real shifts in Jewish thought and practice which are still unfolding today. She also is of the firm belief that Orthodox Judaism has lost track of its right to innovate. The rabbis of the Talmud innovated like crazy. Today, for instance (before we fell down that rabbit hole into #MeToo with the rabbis), we were talking about how the Talmudic rabbis made a decision to totally change the laws, and did it pre-emptively with a bit of extremely fancy footwork based on one verse taken out of context from Torah. Or consider R. Yochanan, who decided that the first year after the Temple had fallen that they would blow the shofar in Yavneh (the town where the remaining learned Jews had holed up) on Shabbat Rosh HaShanah. When his rabbinic colleagues protested, “Wait, we should discuss this,” he said, “We’ll discuss it later,” and after they had blown the shofar he said, “Well, that was such a success, there’s nothing to discuss!”

Many of my classmates are Orthodox — generally Modern Orthodox — although many others are Conservative, and a few are Reform. To an Orthodox or even Conservative Jew, these questions are still of great relevance today. There’s a young man on one of my classes whose family (or possibly their rabbi) misinterpreted halakhah and did not take him to get a broken arm fixed until after Shabbat (the law is quite clear that to save a life — which include the remote possibility that the arm gets infected or doesn’t set right ,etc etc.– you can always break Shabbat.) He had lasting nerve damage in that hand. Today my chevruta, a young woman who has grown up in a modern Orthodox family in South Africa, was wrestling with the shock of knowing that the rabbis — the Sages, the great ones — also were ordinary, fallible men who in some cases behaved reprehensibly toward women. At the other end of the spectrum, as a liberal Jew I find myself fascinated by how much some of these Talmudic stories can sound like today’s news. A year or two ago, for instance, there was a rabbi who was found to have been secretly video-taping women when they went into the mikveh for conversion. (To be clear, you are totally naked in the mikveh, or ritual bath.) Yesterday I was reading a New Yorker article an Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Epstein, and today I’m reading about a Talmudic rabbi who grabbed the clothes off a non-Jewish woman in the marketplace because, he claimed, he thought she was Jewish and she was wearing a prohibited mixture of linen and wool. (He was fined four year’s salary — quite a fair judgement, I thought.)

All this study brings me close to my fellow students in a way I never would be in “regular school.” I remember this from Hebrew College as well. When I had a chevruta, I learned to appreciate how smart and intersting in that classmate was, whom I might have previously even actively disliked. Here, I am getting to know people from other parts of the world, and sharing stories and background in a non-competitive atmosphere. (This is different from a traditional yeshiva!!) But more, I feel close to my Jewishness. I may be out of my depth sometimes, baffled, struggling, but I also feel the power of learning about the laws and traditions and stories on which my Judaism stands. And every day, every hour, I learn more — more Hebrew, more rabbinic terminology, more nuanced readings of Torah, more stories, more laws, more reasons, more exceptions to laws, more sources, more roots. It’s hard, this kind of study, and tiring, and yet deeply satisfying. I hope to keep sharing more, as I learn more.

By the way, I won’t give the whole lesson about that line about the bird and her next, but in later life the Rambam wrote that the lesson is that G-d was compassionate to animals, and Ramban said that the lesson is that every mitzvah is designed to teach us to be more compassionate, period. As we reflect on our mistakes during this season of Elul, I hope that we can be compassionate with ourselves and with each other.