A New Environment, and More

I've been learning at Drisha this week (the first of four weeks that I"ll be there). It's been an interesting experience, and a fascinating place. I've never studied in an single-gendered learning space before, so that aspect has been interesting in and of itself, although I'm not entirely sure that I can really describe the effect that has on the experience yet. I am fascinated by the fact that out of my 5 teachers, in a program for women that has an agenda about women's learning and competence, only one of my teachers is a woman (and she's a JTS grad student). (That is not to say that I don't appreciate my teachers- they're a fascinating bunch in and of themselves.)

The people in the program are a fascinating mix too. Socially, we have women from HUC and from Monsey and many points in between, and as far as background in text-study goes, the range spans from someone I know from college who spent a year in Israel between high school and college, to a convert who is very dedicated- but who is still working on reliably sounding out words in Hebrew (but she's also following along when there is material in Rashi script- I'm impressed, certainly). (Also delightful is the fact that the book she needed was the exact same one that I got for free from a classmate. I'll eventually get the set, and don't need it in particular now- I was delighted to pass on something to get her started in her collection of bible commentary...)

The learning is a bit all over the spectrum. My halakha class has some delightfully challenging stuff, and a teacher who pushes us and explains things very clearly. My Gemara class includes some interesting and useful analysis: but many of the folks clearly have even less background than I do, which makes things a little slow. Another Gemara class is sort of all over the map, as is Midrash- and Tanakh is very puzzling, and we don't seem to be doing any Tanakh, but instead we're looking at different comentaries approaches to certain topics (the class topic is sin and punishment)- but without looking at the actual text first, really. However, the teacher is rather entertaining.

The chevruta situation is fascinating- some classes, chevrutot have started getting settled, in others we just seem to fall together into pairs each time, based on who's there and what's going on. I imagine things will settle out eventually, but in the meantime it's remarkably low-stress, for something that often gets people (me definitely included) rather wound up and tense. I'm enjoying that aspect of it, although not all of my chevrutot are what I'd like ideally. However, several of them are working well, and another may be on its way to that goal.

Today I went to a going-away/aliyah party where I expected to know one or maybe two people, to stay for half an hour and to leave. Instead I saw several friends and met friends of theirs, hung out for nearly two hours, and went with some of them to a shul I had not previously been to for mincha/ma'ariv. So it has been a social day. And tomorrow I'm off to Florida for a long weekend, with jakal88, to see his grandmother and then my own.