Upcoming Final

[debka_notion]

I'm rather nervous about my Talmud final now- I'm surprised I wasn't before. But I'm also feeling like obsessing over it now won't actually do me much good at this point. So- we'll see how it goes, but it's tomorrow at 9am, so after that I can nap, prep for my Hebrew reading test in the early afternoon, and then I'm into prepping for the take home exam, that exam itself, the paper and my application.

Outside of that, today was the last day of classes, and my Hebrew listening final was pretty reasonable, I think. A little weird, but reasonable.

And I went to part of (unfortunately I had to leave early) Rabbis Roth and Rabinowitz's talk on why they resigned from the CJLS- I really did respect what they were saying, and I was really relieved that neither plan on leaving JTS, or the Conservative movement. I was interested that their reasons were really quite different: Rabbi Roth disagreed with the halakhic reasoning of the Dorff/Nevins/Reisner paper, and Rabbi Rabinowitz took issue both with the halakhic reasoning and with the general make-up and format of the CJLS as an institution. What I thought was fascinating, in a sort of strange way, was that Rabbi Rabinowitz said that he'd go from a position that facilitated his resigning from the CJLS in protest to one that would be on the far left, "uprooting a principle from the torah", if it could be proved to him that doing so would benefit Jewish society as a whole and not just folks who are gay. I think that that's a really interesting position, although I somehow can't quite parse it into something that makes complete sense in my brain. It's kind of funky: at the same time I can see where he's coming from, from a traditionalist perspective, and I can also totally object, because how could he say that something that would improve so many lives Not be good for Jewish society at large? (At the same time, I suppose one could have made that same argument for the driving teshuvah, and that didn't help us any. But I don't think it's Really the same argument in this case. In the case of worries about this leading to the Conservative movement generally becoming a non-halakhic movement- now That worry I understand.) Rabbi Roth's issues were much more conventionally understandable from a halakhic perspective, although I'd Love to spend some time looking at what he was talking about in detail at some point. It showed me exactly how much I have to learn about the process and general hierarchy of halakhic authority and chain of transmission, which was both inspiring and intimidating.

Comments

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

One of the perks about being in cantorial school is that nobody ever tells us about sessions like this. It improves our resonance by keeping our skulls all echo-ey.

[hotshot2000.livejournal.com]

"because how could he say that something that would improve so many lives Not be good for Jewish society at large"

I think that's actually the crucial point and hits the nail squarely on the head. Unraveling the perceived integrity of a system which gives so many of its adherents the structure and meaning that allows them to do good in the world may indeed outweigh the needs of the comparatively fewer gay contingent. All decisions in life are a weighing of different values, and no matter how "good" a decision we make, someone's going to get hurt. If it helps, try thinking about something that might be good for the world at large but not good for the Jews. (Pick anything -- Israel's existence, circumcision, shehita.) How do you weigh that sort of thing? I tend to disagree heartily and mightily with Rabinowitz, and I wonder whether he's considered the full implications of this position, but I think he's really gotten to the core of the matter with this articulation.

(I also think the issues with homosexuality are more numerous, running right to the core of sexuality and the social implications of defining our identities by who we have sex with, which was the point of R. Levy's paper.)