An Interesting Afternoon

I don't have classes Tuesday afternoons this semester. So this week I took margavriel up on his offer to do some learning of piyyutim with interesting gender concepts, and then we went to a lecture on the Samaritans that was given at YU. It made for quite an interesting afternoon. The learning was an interesting experience- it's an area that's totally new to me, and seems to delight in obscuring its own topic quite a bit, so it was a little bit uncomfortable at first- partially also because margavriel has invested what is clearly quite a bit of time and effort in the field- so it was rather like a tutorial, when it came to the actual words and style and such. Conceptually, I had more to add.

The lecture was a fascinating event, not so much because the information was terribly new or gripping, but because it was given by a Samaritan who was trying to sound like an academic, (or possibly even trying to be an academic to some extent) but who was presenting very clearly internal and biased views. He claimed that Samaritan Hebrew was preserved precisely from the Hebrew of Second Temple times with no changes- a claim which just can't be true: no spoken language works that way. But we did get to hear a few sections of Bible read in their pronunciation, and to see their script, which was pretty darn nifty. The man himself seemed to reveal some rather significant holes in his conceptual vocabulary in how he answered questions- he seemed to skirt around issues without even being totally aware of doing so. But it was interesting to see someone present that tradition as the Right tradition with a perfect and uncorrupted history, etc. It was interesting more as a sociological observation of how people present their own tradition, especially to a group who would seem to see them as both closely related and Other. I wish I could have gotten more about the ritual life of modern Samaritans out of the lecture, but what I got was an interesting observation.

What was truly fascinating and totally unexpected was the conversation that we had with the professor who sponsored the lecture afterwards, after the guest speaker left. He asked where we were from, how we'd heard about the lecture, and after hearing that I was a student at JTS, he gave us each a printout of a Samaritan mezuzah (it's a one-line text, and quite interesting to look at), and started talking about his theories about Jewish history, and scholarship coming out of JTS vs YU vs HUC (that YU fusses around with Rishonim, JTS fusses around with Talmud, and HUC fusses around with Bible, as far as the ways that they deal with and manipulate text to justify their beliefs and practices), and how the division between formal religion/text-centered religion and folk religion is artificial. But he got into this Long diatribe about how much he disagreed with a particular professor at JTS (with whom I've never studied; I certainly don't know the man even by sight, and am not at all sure that I've even seen him, although I may well have done so). That part of the conversation he interacted almost exclusively with margavriel, and faced him and stood very close to him and in general wanted him to be the person with whom he interacted- but very clearly wanted me to be focused and listening and hearing his points. And then he acted very pleased when I made some analogies to things I was more involved with (i.e. more modern versions of some of his concepts). He rather interestingly pretty much accused JTS of not liking rabbis- which I think is very odd. If anything, the folks I've studied with here (admittedly, very few folks), seem to want to restore more autonomy to the office of the rabbinate and to admit a wider variety of halakha as valid, which would seem to be enriching the position of a rabbi, to me... But well, he felt very strongly about it. I'd never seen an academic be that personally passionate about something like that before. It was fascinating, as was his body language and choice of whom to address (although I don't really know what to make out of the latter issue).

An Interesting Afternoon

I don't have classes Tuesday afternoons this semester. So this week I took margavriel up on his offer to do some learning of piyyutim with interesting gender concepts, and then we went to a lecture on the Samaritans that was given at YU. It made for quite an interesting afternoon. The learning was an interesting experience- it's an area that's totally new to me, and seems to delight in obscuring its own topic quite a bit, so it was a little bit uncomfortable at first- partially also because margavriel has invested what is clearly quite a bit of time and effort in the field- so it was rather like a tutorial, when it came to the actual words and style and such. Conceptually, I had more to add.

The lecture was a fascinating event, not so much because the information was terribly new or gripping, but because it was given by a Samaritan who was trying to sound like an academic, (or possibly even trying to be an academic to some extent) but who was presenting very clearly internal and biased views. He claimed that Samaritan Hebrew was preserved precisely from the Hebrew of Second Temple times with no changes- a claim which just can't be true: no spoken language works that way. But we did get to hear a few sections of Bible read in their pronunciation, and to see their script, which was pretty darn nifty. The man himself seemed to reveal some rather significant holes in his conceptual vocabulary in how he answered questions- he seemed to skirt around issues without even being totally aware of doing so. But it was interesting to see someone present that tradition as the Right tradition with a perfect and uncorrupted history, etc. It was interesting more as a sociological observation of how people present their own tradition, especially to a group who would seem to see them as both closely related and Other. I wish I could have gotten more about the ritual life of modern Samaritans out of the lecture, but what I got was an interesting observation.

What was truly fascinating and totally unexpected was the conversation that we had with the professor who sponsored the lecture afterwards, after the guest speaker left. He asked where we were from, how we'd heard about the lecture, and after hearing that I was a student at JTS, he gave us each a printout of a Samaritan mezuzah (it's a one-line text, and quite interesting to look at), and started talking about his theories about Jewish history, and scholarship coming out of JTS vs YU vs HUC (that YU fusses around with Rishonim, JTS fusses around with Talmud, and HUC fusses around with Bible, as far as the ways that they deal with and manipulate text to justify their beliefs and practices), and how the division between formal religion/text-centered religion and folk religion is artificial. But he got into this Long diatribe about how much he disagreed with a particular professor at JTS (with whom I've never studied; I certainly don't know the man even by sight, and am not at all sure that I've even seen him, although I may well have done so). That part of the conversation he interacted almost exclusively with margavriel, and faced him and stood very close to him and in general wanted him to be the person with whom he interacted- but very clearly wanted me to be focused and listening and hearing his points. And then he acted very pleased when I made some analogies to things I was more involved with (i.e. more modern versions of some of his concepts). He rather interestingly pretty much accused JTS of not liking rabbis- which I think is very odd. If anything, the folks I've studied with here (admittedly, very few folks), seem to want to restore more autonomy to the office of the rabbinate and to admit a wider variety of halakha as valid, which would seem to be enriching the position of a rabbi, to me... But well, he felt very strongly about it. I'd never seen an academic be that personally passionate about something like that before. It was fascinating, as was his body language and choice of whom to address (although I don't really know what to make out of the latter issue).