liv | Rab school life (Reply)

Not quite my first full day off since March but not far off it either. I aten't dead but I have badly run out of time for keeping in touch with people. Anyway the headline is, I have sort of finished my third year of rabbinic training although like every year there's this weird limbo between the end of teaching in mid-May and the actual end of the year first week in July.

I visited a Hindu temple! Including visiting the actual shrine with the gods. I won't bother recording boring monotheist confronting actual idols feelings. But I'm glad I got the chance to do a full trainee clergy tour (it's open to general ~~tourists~~ visitors as well).
I observed some wedding related things, a first meeting between the engaged couple and their rabbi, a wedding class, which is like ante-natal classes in that it's mostly a chance for people at the same life stage to meet each other, and finally the actual wedding in a fancy London hotel. It was very informative to have a peek behind the scenes. Like I generally know how Jewish weddings work, but not all the stuff the rabbi does in terms of planning.
The Archbishop of Canterbury showed up somewhat unexpectedly and expressed sympathy over terrorists attacks on Jewish targets. We were mostly crowd scene in a flying visit, we didn't even get a handshake and a 'good luck with your studies', but it's novel being part of an organization that an Archbishop visits in official capacity!
I led an open service where the community had invited about 50 local dignitaries and interfaith people and I had to run the service while explaining what I was doing and why.
Also led part of a large bar mitzvah with a congregation of around 300, which isn't a massive big deal but is on a different scale from most of what I've been doing so far.
I spent most of the academic year doing a massive academic deep dive into a single Biblical verse. This project has taken up probably half my college time since November, which is a bit disproportionate to how many marks it's worth, but it was very interesting locating, reading and translating a bunch of primary sources and trying to put a novel argument together.
Celebrated Second Pesach with my Rab School friends. This is not actually a thing, historically it was when you got a do-over for Passover sacrifices a month later if you missed the first one, but my brilliant colleague pointed out that we're rarely going to be able to celebrate actual Passover together from now on so we should start a tradition. It was really cool, just letting a bunch of professional liturgists let loose while we drank four themed cocktails instead of four glasses of wine. (For complicated ritual reasons we weren't sure if four blessings over wine was appropriate.) Actually I did in fact end up celebrating Pesach with my family this year, for some reason I didn't get any work, so we had first Seder at my brother's, which was the first time for my generation hosting, and bittersweet but really successful. And last night Seder at OSOs' using their amazing new table which comfortably seats 12.
Visited the Cairo Geniza, not actually for the first time, but this one was a class trip so we looked at some stuff relevant to our extremely cool module on Jews in the Mediaeval world. And used the excuse to take my classmates to some classic Cambridge places, the Maypole and Hong Kong Fusion. We gave each other small gifts to belatedly mark being halfway through our studies, and it was really lovely.
I did some work experience in a Jewish special school. I was actually quite impressed; of course you don't get the whole picture on a work experience day but it really seems to be doing things right.
We got an amazing new library. After languishing in the basement for 40 years, we now have a beautiful, well lit, mostly sound-proof space where the books are properly organized. Perhaps too well lit in fact; the student who used to be an art historian was having hysterics over the fact that the original Chagall drawing is now displayed in direct sunlight, and the rest of us are going, wait, we have an original Chagall just casually chilling in our library?! It is officially open to the public Tuesday and Wednesday. Having access to this amazing place just coincides with getting to the stage in my studies where I'm using the library for more than just reading the obvious course set texts. There are lots of things that are difficult about training to be a rabbi (like living in London for 5 years on a shoestring), but I get to play in the library and it is genuinely awesome.

Coming up: I'm going to two conferences this month, one for the newly formed Progressive Movement (combining two previous small denominations) and one international but held in London. (I'm glad Covid levels are actually low for the first time in 5 years, but I would have attended anyway, these are going to be the best networking opportunities ever.) The usual fortnight of random extra classes after the end of the main part of term has been condensed to three days because of the conferences, bracketed by the viva talk of our sole ordinand and then her actual ordination ceremony.

Further on into the summer I'm being helpful Jewish person for a long-running Jewish-Christian forum in Germany. And starting what will be my fourth year placement at Wimbledon Reform. In contrast to the first three years when I was here, there and everywhere, most of fourth year I'm going to be attached to that one community, so it's more like I'm a kind of assistant minister and less just showing up and leading services or teaching one-off classes. I'll miss the variety but it's clearly very relevant to actually practise doing a rabbi-type job.

Do I have a life outside Rab School? Sort of, but it's mostly quite domestic, spending time with my partners when I can. I've just had a couple of days visiting my MiL and getting my first sunburn of the year walking in the Malverns. I've managed to visit

angelofthenorth once, and occasionally get my act together to drink tea with

hatam_soferet, but other than that totally failed to see any of my friends or even email or call them.