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livI mentioned I spent Sunday at online Limmud with my partners. And I learned loads of cool stuff so let me put some notes here so I don't forget.
There were two really good things about this Limmud. Firstly that they had a bunch of the sort of really interesting text study from really good teachers that is always my favourite Limmud thing. And most importantly, that they had taken seriously that this is the year of serious anti-racist action, and invited not just one token POC, but had multiple sessions by different people and orgs about different aspects of racial justice.
Basically I made a list of the most interesting looking talks in each slot (only had one real FOMO clash), and then I ruthlessly cut out 4 of the 10 because 10 back-to-back Zoom webinars is too many. So I listened to:
Kolot haKeshet [Rainbow voices]. This is an amazing organization run by youthful activists, which started with a Moishe House retreat in November, turned into a fledgling org, and then ran headfirst into the pandemic. In very adverse circumstances, they're putting together a whole bunch of training and advocacy materials and teaching communities about inclusion of all parts of the rainbow.
They are not very good speakers yet but I loved that they started out by explaining intersectionality, with careful references to Crenshaw's original work, and that they're one of the most broadly inclusive activist groups I've yet encountered. They have a big section on intersex people as well as lots of more obvious varieties of trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people, and are clear that people can belong to multiple categories. They mention poly, albeit briefly! And they have a massive focus on LGBTQ+ Jews of Colour, not just theoretical but represented among their leadership. They care about and have thoughtful answers about antisemitism in lefty progressive spaces, they include interfaith as part of inclusivity, and I was so impressed, I really think they are going to change the anglo-Jewish community from the roots up. They did not talk a whole lot about disability but I'm hopeful they're not going to forget about it.
R' Chaim Wiener talked about whether an online minyan (religious quorum) can be valid. I've learned laws pertaining to minyan with him before so it wasn't entirely new to me, but he gave an amazing 1 hour summary of all the relevant Talmudic material. Basically his thesis is that the early Rabbinic community in Palestine thought that the you needed a minyan to do things with a high level of holiness, but the later and Babylonian scholars thought that you need a minyan to do things that are inherently public. So by the time you get to the redaction of the Talmud, they're trying to explain early rulings about holiness as if they were about community.
We theoretically agreed that we follow the Babylonian approach, except that vestiges of the original Palestinian practices still persist, especially among Ashkenazi Jews. Such as the custom of having 9 adults plus a child holding a Chumash, a printed book of Torah – there are sources more than a thousand years old ranting about how this is a halachically meaningless superstition and there are communities that still do this in 21st century Britain. But basically we had a whistlestop tour through sources about what you should do if you really need a minyan but only have nine people, and the Palestinian sources say that you can count an Ark (containing Torah scrolls) or the Sabbath, but Babylonian sources say don't be silly, you can only count a partial person, such as a minor (perhaps if they're exceptionally precocious, or close to the age of 13), or a slave, or even a group of 9 people standing close together (and some say: far apart) so they look more like 10.
So WRT online services, if we think a minyan has to be public, then most post-Talmudic sources are quite clear that you only count as a congregation if you are all present in the same room. (This is partly for legal reasons; if different judges are in different places, you can't completely rely on them all coming to a consensus without intervening transmission of information.) But if we go back to the Mishnaic / Palestinian approach that a minyan is about God's presence hallowing a communal act, we can at least ask the question, is God present among a congregation who are all in the same video call?
Stephen Bush & Yavilah McCoy, a trans-Atlantic conversation about racial justice. Bush is a Black British secular Jew who is in charge of the Board of Deputies' commission on evidence about racism within the Jewish community. I'm delighted to discover that such a thing exists, since the Board have been a bit squirrelly about addressing racism lately, so yay progress. And McCoy is an African-American (she described herself as Black but I think in America that's an insider-only term) mostly-Orthodox anti-racism educator, and a seriously amazing speaker.
McCoy had some really fascinating observations about racism as an embodied experience and the historical commonalities between Jews and African-Americans. Such as, African-Americans are descended from enslaved people whose labour was stolen growing crops and making profit for white plantation owners, and European Jews are descended from people who were not allowed to own land and whose labour was therefore stolen for white Christian landowners. Both groups were / are considered to have tainted blood, and there's a whole pseudoscience that makes us racially other and inferior and all the consequences of that. If we really understand racism in our bodies, not an intellectual thing that we 'ought to' oppose, we won't make mistakes like thinking that employing more armed police is a good way to protect the Jewish community from racist violence, or that "Black anti-Semitism" is somehow more of a threat than anti-Semitism by the actual power-holding establishment. Some really good stuff about dealing with the tension that race is a completely false, (anti)-socially constructed category, while at the same time racism and racial violence are very real.
She was also really good on being sensitive to different contexts and different history. In South Africa it makes no sense to talk about the North Star as a symbol of liberation, since not only do South Africans not have that Underground Railroad mythos, they don't even have the literal North Star in their sky. In the UK it makes no sense to talk about 'BIPOC' since there aren't any indigenous people of colour here, never have been (and it also isn't a very good idea in Australian anti-racism since most indigenous people are themselves Black). There was a particularly striking example that in the US, she is afraid of anti-Black violence in the street while her white-passing Jewish fellows are basically safe, but in France she is basically safe because she's assumed to be a Christian North African, but her white Jewish friends are at risk because they look like an anti-Semite's idea of a target.
Daniel Boyarin on Satan in the Talmud. This was surprisingly coherent for Boyarin! Basically he talked about how by the later Talmudic period, Babylonian thought completely rejected any sort of dualism. The idea of an evil counterpart to God / the Devil / Satan is common in Mishnaic era Palestine and probably the same sorts of concepts influenced the Christian theology of Satan. But the Babylonian Talmud sees evil and suffering as a much more natural part of the world order (in spite of what one might assume about the influence of Zoroastrianism which is even more explicitly dualist).
We mostly read a midrash from Shabbat 88b - 89a, where the angels are initially jealous of Moses and eventually fall in love with him, ask for his forgiveness and give him gifts. Including the Angel of Death, they all repented, there is no figure who carries on being against humanity. Generally the message is that in Babylonian thought, there are 'daemons' everywhere, they are a kind of spirit, possibly mischievous but not actively malicious.
Also some sources where the inclination to evil is described in positive terms, such as Yoma 69b where in the time of Nehemiah the elders imprison the inclination to evil and discover that without it, lots of important things don't work, from chickens laying eggs (which depends on sex) to people starting businesses (which depends on competitiveness). This is somewhat of a commonplace in Reform circles but Boyarin seemed to find it surprising or radical. Lots of other midrash on a similar theme but Boyarin forgot to tell us the references; I would like to track down a story about Satan kissing Job's feet. Likewise a proverb to the effect that 'All trouble, and all achievement, spring from people envying each other'.
Boyarin's summary was something like: there is only one desire: to create, to invent, to build communities, and also to be greedy and envious and commit sexual sins. There's no cosmic battle between good and evil, and evil can't be eradicated because it's part of life.
Judith Hauptman, who is an absolutely amazing teacher and I would have considered the whole day a success if I just got to sit at her feet. She was talking about mini-anecdotes in the Talmud concerning women, and gave four examples where the halacha was altered because of women's intervention.
Women are supposed to perform certain domestic tasks for their husbands, they may delegate some to servants, but not intimate personal ones like preparing a nightcap and turning down the bed. Yes, this is incredibly patriarchal, but the interesting thing is that the Mishnah forbids women during menstrual impurity from performing these intimate tasks, but Gemara says that Shmuel's, Abbaye's and Rav Pappa's wives found ways round this prohibition, and consequently the halacha is more lenient than it might be.
Mishnah forbids cleaning out ovens on festivals, but in Gemara R' Chiya's wife Judith came to him with a problem that a brick had fallen into her oven, so she couldn't bake any bread. He said, 'I want tasty bread (if you know what I mean)' and consequently the ruling is that you can clean out the oven if there's no other way to bake at all. So again, she's doing fairly menial domestic labour for her husband, but she's also asking him a halachic question just as any male disciple might.
A slightly odd halacha about how you can hull a small amount of barley without tithing or without breaking Shabbat, but if it's a substantial amount you have to tithe and you have to do it on a weekday. However, rabbis objected to R' Eleazar's ruling on this because they reported that the wives of earlier rabbis, R' Chiya and Rav, hulled loads of barley on Shabbat. So because of the actions of these women, it's concluded that R' Eleazar must have been talking about wheat only, not barley, or possibly about tithing only, not Shabbat labour.
And finally, there's a whole series of laws in Bava Kama about not buying from women because they might be effectively cheating their husbands by selling property behind the husbands' backs. And a few examples of women who are an exception to this rule, such as the rich, generous women of Bei Mehoza who could give fancy jewellery to a charity collector since it was cheap by their standards.
The last talk was both about anti-racism and text study, but it was quite hard to capture the essence of it and also it's late, so I'm going to post these five and see if I can come back to R' Rivera.
There were two really good things about this Limmud. Firstly that they had a bunch of the sort of really interesting text study from really good teachers that is always my favourite Limmud thing. And most importantly, that they had taken seriously that this is the year of serious anti-racist action, and invited not just one token POC, but had multiple sessions by different people and orgs about different aspects of racial justice.
Basically I made a list of the most interesting looking talks in each slot (only had one real FOMO clash), and then I ruthlessly cut out 4 of the 10 because 10 back-to-back Zoom webinars is too many. So I listened to:
Kolot haKeshet [Rainbow voices]. This is an amazing organization run by youthful activists, which started with a Moishe House retreat in November, turned into a fledgling org, and then ran headfirst into the pandemic. In very adverse circumstances, they're putting together a whole bunch of training and advocacy materials and teaching communities about inclusion of all parts of the rainbow.
They are not very good speakers yet but I loved that they started out by explaining intersectionality, with careful references to Crenshaw's original work, and that they're one of the most broadly inclusive activist groups I've yet encountered. They have a big section on intersex people as well as lots of more obvious varieties of trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people, and are clear that people can belong to multiple categories. They mention poly, albeit briefly! And they have a massive focus on LGBTQ+ Jews of Colour, not just theoretical but represented among their leadership. They care about and have thoughtful answers about antisemitism in lefty progressive spaces, they include interfaith as part of inclusivity, and I was so impressed, I really think they are going to change the anglo-Jewish community from the roots up. They did not talk a whole lot about disability but I'm hopeful they're not going to forget about it.
R' Chaim Wiener talked about whether an online minyan (religious quorum) can be valid. I've learned laws pertaining to minyan with him before so it wasn't entirely new to me, but he gave an amazing 1 hour summary of all the relevant Talmudic material. Basically his thesis is that the early Rabbinic community in Palestine thought that the you needed a minyan to do things with a high level of holiness, but the later and Babylonian scholars thought that you need a minyan to do things that are inherently public. So by the time you get to the redaction of the Talmud, they're trying to explain early rulings about holiness as if they were about community.
We theoretically agreed that we follow the Babylonian approach, except that vestiges of the original Palestinian practices still persist, especially among Ashkenazi Jews. Such as the custom of having 9 adults plus a child holding a Chumash, a printed book of Torah – there are sources more than a thousand years old ranting about how this is a halachically meaningless superstition and there are communities that still do this in 21st century Britain. But basically we had a whistlestop tour through sources about what you should do if you really need a minyan but only have nine people, and the Palestinian sources say that you can count an Ark (containing Torah scrolls) or the Sabbath, but Babylonian sources say don't be silly, you can only count a partial person, such as a minor (perhaps if they're exceptionally precocious, or close to the age of 13), or a slave, or even a group of 9 people standing close together (and some say: far apart) so they look more like 10.
So WRT online services, if we think a minyan has to be public, then most post-Talmudic sources are quite clear that you only count as a congregation if you are all present in the same room. (This is partly for legal reasons; if different judges are in different places, you can't completely rely on them all coming to a consensus without intervening transmission of information.) But if we go back to the Mishnaic / Palestinian approach that a minyan is about God's presence hallowing a communal act, we can at least ask the question, is God present among a congregation who are all in the same video call?
Stephen Bush & Yavilah McCoy, a trans-Atlantic conversation about racial justice. Bush is a Black British secular Jew who is in charge of the Board of Deputies' commission on evidence about racism within the Jewish community. I'm delighted to discover that such a thing exists, since the Board have been a bit squirrelly about addressing racism lately, so yay progress. And McCoy is an African-American (she described herself as Black but I think in America that's an insider-only term) mostly-Orthodox anti-racism educator, and a seriously amazing speaker.
McCoy had some really fascinating observations about racism as an embodied experience and the historical commonalities between Jews and African-Americans. Such as, African-Americans are descended from enslaved people whose labour was stolen growing crops and making profit for white plantation owners, and European Jews are descended from people who were not allowed to own land and whose labour was therefore stolen for white Christian landowners. Both groups were / are considered to have tainted blood, and there's a whole pseudoscience that makes us racially other and inferior and all the consequences of that. If we really understand racism in our bodies, not an intellectual thing that we 'ought to' oppose, we won't make mistakes like thinking that employing more armed police is a good way to protect the Jewish community from racist violence, or that "Black anti-Semitism" is somehow more of a threat than anti-Semitism by the actual power-holding establishment. Some really good stuff about dealing with the tension that race is a completely false, (anti)-socially constructed category, while at the same time racism and racial violence are very real.
She was also really good on being sensitive to different contexts and different history. In South Africa it makes no sense to talk about the North Star as a symbol of liberation, since not only do South Africans not have that Underground Railroad mythos, they don't even have the literal North Star in their sky. In the UK it makes no sense to talk about 'BIPOC' since there aren't any indigenous people of colour here, never have been (and it also isn't a very good idea in Australian anti-racism since most indigenous people are themselves Black). There was a particularly striking example that in the US, she is afraid of anti-Black violence in the street while her white-passing Jewish fellows are basically safe, but in France she is basically safe because she's assumed to be a Christian North African, but her white Jewish friends are at risk because they look like an anti-Semite's idea of a target.
Daniel Boyarin on Satan in the Talmud. This was surprisingly coherent for Boyarin! Basically he talked about how by the later Talmudic period, Babylonian thought completely rejected any sort of dualism. The idea of an evil counterpart to God / the Devil / Satan is common in Mishnaic era Palestine and probably the same sorts of concepts influenced the Christian theology of Satan. But the Babylonian Talmud sees evil and suffering as a much more natural part of the world order (in spite of what one might assume about the influence of Zoroastrianism which is even more explicitly dualist).
We mostly read a midrash from Shabbat 88b - 89a, where the angels are initially jealous of Moses and eventually fall in love with him, ask for his forgiveness and give him gifts. Including the Angel of Death, they all repented, there is no figure who carries on being against humanity. Generally the message is that in Babylonian thought, there are 'daemons' everywhere, they are a kind of spirit, possibly mischievous but not actively malicious.
Also some sources where the inclination to evil is described in positive terms, such as Yoma 69b where in the time of Nehemiah the elders imprison the inclination to evil and discover that without it, lots of important things don't work, from chickens laying eggs (which depends on sex) to people starting businesses (which depends on competitiveness). This is somewhat of a commonplace in Reform circles but Boyarin seemed to find it surprising or radical. Lots of other midrash on a similar theme but Boyarin forgot to tell us the references; I would like to track down a story about Satan kissing Job's feet. Likewise a proverb to the effect that 'All trouble, and all achievement, spring from people envying each other'.
Boyarin's summary was something like: there is only one desire: to create, to invent, to build communities, and also to be greedy and envious and commit sexual sins. There's no cosmic battle between good and evil, and evil can't be eradicated because it's part of life.
Judith Hauptman, who is an absolutely amazing teacher and I would have considered the whole day a success if I just got to sit at her feet. She was talking about mini-anecdotes in the Talmud concerning women, and gave four examples where the halacha was altered because of women's intervention.
Women are supposed to perform certain domestic tasks for their husbands, they may delegate some to servants, but not intimate personal ones like preparing a nightcap and turning down the bed. Yes, this is incredibly patriarchal, but the interesting thing is that the Mishnah forbids women during menstrual impurity from performing these intimate tasks, but Gemara says that Shmuel's, Abbaye's and Rav Pappa's wives found ways round this prohibition, and consequently the halacha is more lenient than it might be.
Mishnah forbids cleaning out ovens on festivals, but in Gemara R' Chiya's wife Judith came to him with a problem that a brick had fallen into her oven, so she couldn't bake any bread. He said, 'I want tasty bread (if you know what I mean)' and consequently the ruling is that you can clean out the oven if there's no other way to bake at all. So again, she's doing fairly menial domestic labour for her husband, but she's also asking him a halachic question just as any male disciple might.
A slightly odd halacha about how you can hull a small amount of barley without tithing or without breaking Shabbat, but if it's a substantial amount you have to tithe and you have to do it on a weekday. However, rabbis objected to R' Eleazar's ruling on this because they reported that the wives of earlier rabbis, R' Chiya and Rav, hulled loads of barley on Shabbat. So because of the actions of these women, it's concluded that R' Eleazar must have been talking about wheat only, not barley, or possibly about tithing only, not Shabbat labour.
And finally, there's a whole series of laws in Bava Kama about not buying from women because they might be effectively cheating their husbands by selling property behind the husbands' backs. And a few examples of women who are an exception to this rule, such as the rich, generous women of Bei Mehoza who could give fancy jewellery to a charity collector since it was cheap by their standards.
The last talk was both about anti-racism and text study, but it was quite hard to capture the essence of it and also it's late, so I'm going to post these five and see if I can come back to R' Rivera.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-04 10:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 12:19 am (UTC)Black is the generally acceptable term in the US now; African-American has fallen out of favor because many Black Americans are not descendants of slavery and come from other parts of the diaspora.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 04:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 04:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 09:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-05 09:59 am (UTC)The reason Limmud went international is that it's basically unique: they are absolutely and resolutely non-denominational and pluralist. So they give Jews of all backgrounds access to high quality learning and the chance to meet other Jews we might not normally mix with in our communities. I have heard there's less need for it in areas of the US with a high Jewish population since most people have plenty of other learning opportunities, but it's huge in South Africa, Eastern Europe and other places. Like an SF con it is mostly run by a rotating team of volunteers (though it does have some actual permanent, paid staff), with lots of smaller opportunities to get involved as well.