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Today was mostly taken up with a Makom trip to Tel Aviv to meet with folk doing various sorts of social justice work. It continued my pattern of late of going new places and first seeing the worst parts of the city and meeting the people who offer services there, and encountering the rest of the city only later. (In Syracuse, we had a tour of the inner city and soup kitchens, food pantries, etc during our orientation week at the hospital, which meant that those were some of the first places I saw in town. In Tel Aviv, the first places I have now seen are south Tel Aviv, which is apprently not where people go when they visit, as it's where the bad neighborhoods are. We walked through a park that used to be quite empty until recently and was referred to as "Drug Addicts' Park".)
The speakers were quite good, and prompted an interesting discussion between one of my roommates and I afterward. The question was whether the study of Jewish texts is inherently a religious act for a Jew doing the study or not. One of the places we went was a secular yeshiva (we were there because they also do a lot of social action work, and purposefully are located in a really poor neighborhood, etc, and because for some reason JTS keeps working on building ties with them, I don't know why), and their thing was that these texts are part of Jewish culture, and one can study them without it having anything to do with religion. I felt like that was too simplistic, since they are texts written in a religious context, for religious purposes, and that is also their history and significance. On the other hand, I'm not going to tell people that they're doing something religious when they don't want to hear it.
This evening, H and I had made plans to get together for dinner and Boggle. He brought both dinner and Boggle over, and we had a very pleasant evening with scattered involvement from my roommates. So now I have leftovers, and he has a kippah I made him (the one he's been wearing is looking pretty faded, and given that this is one of those Things I Do, it only made sense...) We just missed out on making Shabbos meal plans together, but I'll swing by his place after shabbos lunch, most likely.
The speakers were quite good, and prompted an interesting discussion between one of my roommates and I afterward. The question was whether the study of Jewish texts is inherently a religious act for a Jew doing the study or not. One of the places we went was a secular yeshiva (we were there because they also do a lot of social action work, and purposefully are located in a really poor neighborhood, etc, and because for some reason JTS keeps working on building ties with them, I don't know why), and their thing was that these texts are part of Jewish culture, and one can study them without it having anything to do with religion. I felt like that was too simplistic, since they are texts written in a religious context, for religious purposes, and that is also their history and significance. On the other hand, I'm not going to tell people that they're doing something religious when they don't want to hear it.
This evening, H and I had made plans to get together for dinner and Boggle. He brought both dinner and Boggle over, and we had a very pleasant evening with scattered involvement from my roommates. So now I have leftovers, and he has a kippah I made him (the one he's been wearing is looking pretty faded, and given that this is one of those Things I Do, it only made sense...) We just missed out on making Shabbos meal plans together, but I'll swing by his place after shabbos lunch, most likely.