Interesting Pieces of the Last Few Days

1. The woman who was the salad maker (yes, it's a specific job) in the kitchen had an asthma attack and was taken to the hospital on Friday. On Monday, she came in and basically told us she couldn't come back- it was too much exertion in the heat. She'll be working the last few days of the summer (for 4ish days, it seems like a bit of a joke, but no one asked me) with the chef's wife, who does beading and such things with the campers. So, we're now down one person.

2. I had a conversation last night with one of the older men in the kitchen about his discomfort with the idea of women rabbis, which was totally not based on halakha or anything like it, and seemed to be purely based on what he's used to, and his idea that women should be having babies and taking care of them- and if they want to learn some gemara in between when the baby needs a bottle, that's fine, but childcare is a woman's fundamental job. And to extend that to the rabbinate, he said that it just feels wrong to him that women should be called rabbi- that yes, the same issue used to be true of being a doctor, but there were reasons to change that, and he thinks that there aren't for women to be rabbis. The whole thing was full of arguments that I've certainly heard and read before- but not quite this bluntly, without any apparent awareness that this might be insulting or uncomfortable to a woman studying for the rabbinate.

It was a very odd conversation- especially when, towards the end of it, he admitted that if I called myself something other than rabbi, he might go to me for Jewish issues, but if I called myself rabbi (clearly, at the end of my training) he wouldn't. The differential that the title gives one still feels very uncomfortable to me- shouldn't the training and the knowledge make the difference, not which word that is supposed to convey that you have that training that you use?

3. The new dean of the rabbinical school was at camp today, and the rabbinical students had dinner with him (it was quite nice and relaxed, and I had the chance to have a little friendly chat with a classmate with whom I haven't really spoken all summer), and then he taught- and it was one of the only shiurim this summer that felt like a real shiur, that respected us as students. The source sheet was in Hebrew, and he quoted and translated from there.

Interesting Pieces of the Last Few Days

1. The woman who was the salad maker (yes, it's a specific job) in the kitchen had an asthma attack and was taken to the hospital on Friday. On Monday, she came in and basically told us she couldn't come back- it was too much exertion in the heat. She'll be working the last few days of the summer (for 4ish days, it seems like a bit of a joke, but no one asked me) with the chef's wife, who does beading and such things with the campers. So, we're now down one person.

2. I had a conversation last night with one of the older men in the kitchen about his discomfort with the idea of women rabbis, which was totally not based on halakha or anything like it, and seemed to be purely based on what he's used to, and his idea that women should be having babies and taking care of them- and if they want to learn some gemara in between when the baby needs a bottle, that's fine, but childcare is a woman's fundamental job. And to extend that to the rabbinate, he said that it just feels wrong to him that women should be called rabbi- that yes, the same issue used to be true of being a doctor, but there were reasons to change that, and he thinks that there aren't for women to be rabbis. The whole thing was full of arguments that I've certainly heard and read before- but not quite this bluntly, without any apparent awareness that this might be insulting or uncomfortable to a woman studying for the rabbinate.

It was a very odd conversation- especially when, towards the end of it, he admitted that if I called myself something other than rabbi, he might go to me for Jewish issues, but if I called myself rabbi (clearly, at the end of my training) he wouldn't. The differential that the title gives one still feels very uncomfortable to me- shouldn't the training and the knowledge make the difference, not which word that is supposed to convey that you have that training that you use?

3. The new dean of the rabbinical school was at camp today, and the rabbinical students had dinner with him (it was quite nice and relaxed, and I had the chance to have a little friendly chat with a classmate with whom I haven't really spoken all summer), and then he taught- and it was one of the only shiurim this summer that felt like a real shiur, that respected us as students. The source sheet was in Hebrew, and he quoted and translated from there.