blogs/masa

Last week I had the opportunity to spend four days studying at Queer Talmud Camp, a program of Svara, “a traditionally radical yeshiva.” The camp, and the yeshiva, were founded by Rabbi Benay Lappe. She explains that every culture has a “master story,” which people use to understand the world. But every master story eventually crashes, leaving people with three choices: To build walls around the original story, and insist that nothing has changed; to decide the original story was the wrong one, and switch fully into a new story; or to create something new, combining elements of the original story and things that account for changes in the world.

Rabbi Lappe explains this in her Crash talk. Judaism experienced just this sort of crash about two thousand years ago. The world of the Temple and priestly Judaism had fallen apart, and a group of people came together to create something new out of the rubble. This group added the Talmud to the Torah, and moved the focus from priests and the Temple to Rabbis and learned people, coming together in homes and places of study. It grew from the roots of the old Judaism, but was able to cope with the changes that had occurred.

Rabbi Lappe argues that the form of Judaism that has been active for the past several hundred years is once again crashing. Svara was founded as one of the possible solutions, to give people the tools to help reshape a new Jewish narrative that accounts for the world we live in today.

Svara welcomed students at all ability levels. Even those who only knew their alef-bet were able to understand and discuss a passage of Talmud by the end of the week! We spent time digging in, with the help of our dictionaries, our chevruta (study) partners, and of our teachers. We spent at least six hours a day studying, sometimes in the formal space of the Beit Midrash (literally, house of study), and sometimes reading from laminated pages of Talmud out in the lake!

I was grateful for the chance to spend time learning, and inspired by the teaching--both as a student and as a teacher! I hope that I can bring some of the ways of encouraging students to accomplish challenging goals into our programming at Masa!

This coming year in Masa, we will be studying passages from Pirkei Avot (literally, the Chapters of the Fathers, more commonly known as The Ethics of the Fathers). This is a part of the Mishnah, the first part of the Talmud. You may be familiar with sayings from Pirkei Avot, such as Hillel’s sayings, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” or “A fearful person cannot learn, nor can an impatient person teach.”

I am looking forward to digging into these texts with the children of our community, and I invite parents to spend some time learning along with us!