State of the Liv

[liv]

Apart from getting incredibly over-enthusiastic about Talmud (it took me just about all of yesterday to write up this stuff, mostly fiddling with the HTML but it's also a large number of words), what else is going on in my life?

My last two open job applications are now closed; Keele called me for interview for a teaching job, but only gave me four days' notice and I told them I was in America and could I do a phone / webcam interview instead and they said no way, so I had to withdraw from that one. And Cardiff rejected me outright for medical teaching. I am more and more convinced that the kind of job I most want to do, and am most likely to be offered, is teaching at a new university or some other kind of further education situation, not a traditional post-doc. That probably means I'll be making my career in Britain. Anyway, we'll see, I intend to start again seriously with job-hunting when I return in August. In theory I'm supposed to be contacting labs around here on spec, but at this rate I'm not going to have time to do so.

My belongings arrived safely from Sweden. However, the delivery company, Maxtrans ignored my repeated requests for at least a couple of days' notice of when they were planning to show up. As it happened, Thuggish Poet was visiting and was able to receive the delivery, but really, if you're a removal firm, letting your customer know when you intend to show up with all their possessions seems pretty basic. I don't suppose many people are likely to be looking for Swedish removal firms, but I think they deserve to have this information findable on Google in general. So, Maxtrans are cheaper than the competition, and their drivers are generally friendly and pleasant to work with, but they are incredibly unprofessional about communication with customers. When I accepted their quote, we agreed a pencilled in pickup date and said that delivery would occur during the week I was going to be in England. They didn't confirm the pickup date until the day before, and only then because I nagged them repeatedly and refused to stop calling them until I got an answer. And then, after they had everything I possess stashed in their van, they suddenly decided that they couldn't make the delivery when they'd said, but it would be either the following Saturday or the Monday after that. I was angry about this already, since I was going to be in the US from Thursday, but they really compounded it by never actually contacting me to let me know whether it would be Saturday or Monday. Now, I was lucky because work was pretty flexible about letting me take a morning off during my last week there at minimal notice, and because my brother happened to be around to receive the delivery at my parents' place. But you can't really run a removal company just hoping someone will be home at the relevant time, if you never tell them when that time will be!

Living with hatam_soferet is utterly wonderful. We can have world-saving or silly conversations any time we want, and cuddle with no geography in the way, and we're pretty attuned about domesticity. I generally say I don't like sharing living space, but being hatam_soferet's houseguest is incredibly comfortable and pleasant. Even if hypothetically we could live together long term it probably wouldn't be a good idea, because we have geographical issues and she wants to have a dog or possibly kids eventually. But pretending house for the summer is just blissful.

Being surrounded by people who make Jewish observance a major part of their lives is an odd experience. It's partly that I'm used to my Jewish practices and identity making me the weird one, but this is New York, and I'm in notably Jewish-dense circles within that. And the idea of structuring my day and week around traditional observances seems awfully seductive when I'm among people for whom that kind of thing comes completely naturally (in the past, I've only really seen observant folk who are rebelling against the secular and assimilated society around them in some way). I do know it's a bubble, though; if I were not in New York, and if I were trying to fit my life around a full-time job rather than lots of fun Jewish study, it would be absolutely unmanageable and would end up just frustrating me and not at all making me a better person.

I don't have any contacts in Progressive circles here; if I did I might well be appreciating the beauties of confident, well-resourced, non-marginalized Progressive Judaism. hatam_soferet has already done the work of shul shopping and found two absolutely lovely congregations, a very lefty Orthodox one where they have beautiful, spirited singing and are extremely welcoming to women even though they maintain quite strict gender role separation, and a fairly right Conservative one which is fully egalitarian but otherwise has a pretty similar service style to the other. Both of those are places where I feel very much at ease; they are good communities and that counts more than denominational labels for me. And it's interesting that they are both shuls that are on the small side by American standards, but still, they are purpose built community centres with multiple different rooms for different aspects of community life, and they have really lovely modern architecture, and lots of Torah scrolls and in general take for granted a level of luxury that only the very richest European communities can aspire to. Unlike some American shuls I've experienced in the past, they aren't complacent, they are taking advantage of the fact that they don't need to put energy into boring practical things to devote that energy to building real, vibrant, welcoming communities. Drisha itself is not denominationally affiliated, but because of the kind of organization it is most people there are either right-Conservative or left-Ortho too.

Being surrounded by women is proving mostly ok, though it's not an environment where I fit ideally. OK, people who are studying at Yeshiva are not a cross-section of "women" in general, but even so, the average of the group is way more feminine than me. I generally prefer mixed groups for this reason, because I fall about in the middle gender-wise and usually find that both men and women accept me readily. At least there's an age range; having a few professional and retired women in the mix makes it a lot more comfortable than it would be if I were surrounded by 20-year-old college girls. My chevruta (study partner) for Talmud is really great, she's a psychoanalyst who is juggling study with work and we get on really well.

I'm being friendly, but not making specific efforts to initiate reaching out to my fellow students. And this seems to be working; most people respond to my general attitude of being interested in people and chatty and extrovert, and are prepared to be tolerant of my not fitting in, partly cos I'm not girl enough and partly cos I'm not frum enough and partly cos I'm nearly (but not quite!) the only natural scientist, and partly cos I'm a foreigner. Randomly, I met a fellow student yesterday who has just come back from working with smhwpf at SIPRI in Stockholm!

But I did have one of those "argh I fail at girl" moments the other day: someone cooed at me about how clever it was that I fixed my glasses and asked how I did it and then recommended me a cheap opticians. And I responded to this entirely innocently by explaining the circumstances of how the glasses broke and what I did to repair them and thanking them for their rec. It was only afterwards I realized that this kind of interaction is girl code for "I can't believe you're so uncool that you go around wearing broken glasses and you are too poor to replace them". Oh well, it's probably for the best that I didn't notice I was being insulted.

It's also rather weird that basically all the teachers are male and all the students are female. There are historical reasons for this, but repeating over and over again the experience of being in a large group of women students with a male teacher being pedagogic at us really underlines gender issues that I have a hard time thinking about. OTOH I had a really great conversation with a friend of hatam_soferet's (apart from the bit where I was so jet-lagged that I literally fell asleep in the middle, and wasn't forming my most coherent sentences), where I said something more emphatic than I meant about how it must be confusing to be an Orthodox girl and have the whole of secular society promoting egalitarian messages, while your home life and community are very gender segregated. And she said, speaking from personal experience, that actually being secular is more confusing, because you hear all these messages about how women are completely equal, but in fact women are paid less, less likely to be promoted, sexually objectified and body shamed constantly, and generally society isn't anything like as egal as it claims to be. Whereas in Orthodox communities, it is very clear that men have one role and women have another, and both roles genuinely are valued, it's not just talk. I'm not saying that the Orthodox way is better; I could hardly say that given that I am much more comfortable with the kind of activities that that community considers male. Just that I should take care not to be smug about how my life is so wonderful and liberated and assume that women in religiously segregated communities are necessarily miserable and oppressed.

Other bits of learning, apart from Talmud: I'm taking advanced Bible which is mainly studying the commentaries of Nachmanides, advanced Halacha on the subject of head covering and modest dress, and a couple of general classes, one on "narrative" and one on "liturgy". And an evening class from the aforementioned Orthodox-raised feminist on Jewish weddings and what space there is to make them more inclusive.

The rabbi teaching both Bible and liturgy is a very odd kind of teacher; having two classes with him back to back is quite an experience, because his method is pretty much to talk at you for two hours solid. He doesn't do any of the things that they always tell you teachers are supposed to, like give you pointers to the structure of his lectures or repeat things to improve retention or do anything interactive or vary the tone and pace, he just talks from lunch time until the end of the day. And at the time it sounds like he's just rambling on, but he actually has incredible depth of knowledge and I'm finding that it takes a few days for stuff to percolate and then I realize that I have in fact picked up a whole bunch of new insights. The trouble is that it's physiologically hard to stay awake when I'm sleep deprived anyway and classes are after lunch and there is nothing to grab my attention apart from a constant cascade of information!

Advanced Halacha is in fact a bit too advanced for me. I was placed in the beginners' class, which is where I really belong as I've never learnt Jewish law formally before and my Hebrew is a little shaky. But I got really frustrated with it because instead of doing what the course description said, which was studying Maimonides' writings on health and care of your body, the class kept getting distracted into random sophomoric discussions about what people think about medical ethics and health policy issues. Plus, I was very much hoping that a class on health and healing would get into disability issues and at least problematize healthism and body shaming. But no, we seemed to be taking it for granted that dieting and athleticism are Good and illness and disability and being fat are Bad, and I don't quite have the confidence to stand up and challenge all those assumptions. So I asked to transfer into the advanced class, which is fascinating but we tend to zip through about a thousand years of development of Jewish law without pausing for breath. Given that in Talmud I needed a week to grasp one strand of one argument, this is a bit much. The lovely thing about being in that class, though, is that most of the other students are vastly intelligent and knowledgeable, and although my Hebrew isn't quite good enough to keep up, just sitting listening to them batting sources around and creating highly complex structures is great fun.

The Jewish weddings one looks like it's going to be very good (it's weekly so we've only had the introductory session so far). There have been many hints that it's heading in a queer and gender theoretical direction, while at the same time I'm actually learning some of the key texts on how marriage works in traditional Judaism. Which of course is very helpful for understanding a section of Talmud which deals quite a lot with weddings and such. And "narrative" sounds like the kind of thing I'm allergic to but in fact it's taught by the same rabbi who is doing Talmud so brilliantly, and it's a very fun general class.

Snippets of learning you might enjoy: hatam_soferet and I put together this response to what was in fact a rather mediocre lecture. We travelled back on the subway together, and tore it to shreds and then rebuilt it the way it should have been, with hatam_soferet being brilliant and me contributing stuff I learnt from Limmud a couple of years back.

A casual aside in the Bible class (which is made almost entirely of apparently casual asides!): the rabbi mentioned that of course it's obvious that Moses was really in love with his father-in-law, not his wife, and then went on to prove it with multiple textual justifications. Slashers eat your heart out!

Learning the Mishnah from Kedushin so that I would have some clue what was going on in the Talmud class, I discovered that it is possible to be betrothed to an unborn child, but not to one who is still a twinkle, the child has to be at least conceived before a betrothal is valid!

And the best one: in the class about modesty, we started with the original Talmud discussion about what constitutes obscenity, and there's a line which taken out of context literally says the buttocks are in no way obscene. Apparently there's quite a major commentator, the Rif, a Mediaeval guy who made a summary of Talmud including only the practically relevant bits, and who was quite widely studied from the 12^th to the 20^th century, who actually took this out of context reading. He concluded that women can wear whatever they like, all the Talmudic discussion about obscenity is just playing around with hypothetical legal issues...

Comments

[403]

...and there's a line which taken out of context literally says “the buttocks are in no way obscene”.

What are they trying to say, in context?

[liv]

It's actually a bit bizarre, it's talking about situations where there's too much obscenity going on and you're allowed to recite the Shema. And it suggests that if a husband and wife are accustomed to lying in bed together, back to back with their buttocks touching, that doesn't count as obscenity. He's totally fine to say prayers, even major ones like the Shema, in that situation.

The stuff I'm learning is about how there's three categories of obscene: men and random women who are not close relatives or their wives, men and their wives, and men who are trying to recite the Shema in the presence of their wives. The last category is the most interesting, because to a first approximation, men aren't allowed to look at non-wife women at all, and men are allowed to see their wives in any state of undress, cos they're married and they're allowed to have sex, let alone see eachother naked. But men who want to recite the Shema need to ask their wives to cover up a bit, and the exact definition of what's sufficiently covered up generate much discussion.

[kass]

Thanks for this glimpse of your Drisha experience. The immersive study I've done has been in other environments, and it's fascinating to consider the places where what you describe matches what I've experienced, and also the places where it really doesn't. *g*

[doseybat]

Wow, I didnt realise I was missing out on all your entries by not checking DW separately from lj! My communicability is compromised atm by the unfortunate combination of no interweb at new BatFlat, still no mobile interweb, and no time for interweb at work either. All I have been managing is an occasional scan of lj and I thought your lj feed thing was still working. When are you back in the UK?