hatam_soferet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hatam_soferet) wrote2005-12-08 11:48 pm
hatam_soferet) wrote2005-12-08 11:48 pm
(no subject)
I had such a long day. Worked at home from 8 until 9.30, and then went to JTS to learn with a Pardes chum, and inadvertently walked into a talk about gay rabbis,* and hung about in the beit midrash for a while working on stuff (chasing up references which seemed fine at the time but now I try to find them again have mysteriously vanished), and had a long phone conversation about how much to charge for writing a Torah, and went up to YU, where nothing of interest happened. After it had dragged to a close around 7, I thought 'thank goodness, home,' and then realised no, now down to the East Side to teach a new bat mitzvah (another of those girls who are having an Orthodox Service and getting the message that they don't matter), and then over to the West Side to talk to a couple about their ketubah, and by then it's 10-ish and it takes three-quarters of an hour to get home on account of having to change trains and it being a bugger of a wait.
The learning was meta-interesting: we were reading tehinot, non-liturgical supplications, usually said by women (to compare them to liturgy and observe things which made them different) in Yiddish. The interesting part was that with a few vowels I could actually read it pretty well, and if I remembered more German verbs I'd have got most of it. It was a completely new feeling of understanding a language I didn't think I could read at all.
* specifically whether gayness is allowable, and the speaker implied that the answer was to ditch the halachic system, which I can see as a possible answer,** but his arguments were irritatingly crude.
** That is, it's not the one I'd choose, but I can see how one would arrive at that conclusion
The learning was meta-interesting: we were reading tehinot, non-liturgical supplications, usually said by women (to compare them to liturgy and observe things which made them different) in Yiddish. The interesting part was that with a few vowels I could actually read it pretty well, and if I remembered more German verbs I'd have got most of it. It was a completely new feeling of understanding a language I didn't think I could read at all.
* specifically whether gayness is allowable, and the speaker implied that the answer was to ditch the halachic system, which I can see as a possible answer,** but his arguments were irritatingly crude.
** That is, it's not the one I'd choose, but I can see how one would arrive at that conclusion