Another short update

Hey all sorry for the near complete lack of postings over here on this blog but I have been extremely busy. With work at college, my placement, stuff relating to co-charing the student society and of course Limmud sessions (I really wish that I had made more progress with those than I have). Anyway I am still more or less enjoying my classes, the fact that they all have a more practical focus this year is defiantly a good thing.
I am still loving my placement down in Kingston, but the journeying down there and back is very tiring. I am looking forward to Limmud, seeing old friends again and the like, but its going to be a stressful/trying end to my year.
So all in all I am busy and stressed. (So about par for the course really).

In addition to my duties down in Kingston I have been to both Reading and Hendon (not sure if I had down that before my last update or not.)

This weekend has been particularly busy I went with Emily to FPS for Friday night, then around to dinner at LJK's house for dinner. Saturday I was down in Kingston the journey made more interesting because of TFL., was more lengthy than usual.

Today I went with a KLS trip to the Jewish Museum in Camden, and shortly I'm heading out to NIF dinner. So it has been a long and busy weekend with not a lot of recuperation from the school week.

On the bright-side Dr Who was amazing. And I am still very much enjoying working out with Danielle (My personal trainer).

But that's all I've got time for. I'll try and post again before too long.

A brief update

Hey guys. I have managed to squeeze a weekend out of my timetable to go home. Its always nice to get back to Stoke however briefly and who knows when I'll be able to come back up here again. I am still very busy although more or less on top of things. This is largely thanks to the fact that although I have lots of assessments things are not as insane as they were last semester.

I am enjoying my classes both the practical ones as well as the more utilitarian ones. I think that this is down to the fact that all courses are now more focused on what we'll actually be doing once we are out there. This is all to the good as this is getting nearer and nearer.

I am also enjoying my placement, as well as going down to teach the Kabbalat Torah group I have now lead a service there so it really feels like a real thing now. I have also paid a one off visit to Reading (which also counts towards my 4th year placement). This does mean that I am going to be perching on a much more regular bases so I am going to stop posting them here, unless there is a particularly important reason for me to do so.

As i mentioned in my last post I am busy with my sessions for Limmud in December, so all in all busy but a positive busy.

Outside of School/placement I am still continuing with Daf Yomi we are now in tractate Shekelim, I have also started training/working out with a personal trainer. At first it really felt a little like being hit by a brick wall but it is defiantly starting to get easier and I feel so much better already. I think its really necessary because already taken a toll on my physical health.

All in all I am very busy, but in a good way, but am generally pretty happy with how everything is going.

Last post for a little while

Hey Guys so this is going to be my last post for a little while. Nothing bad is happening its just that I am very very busy. First off there're class nothing to awful but enough to keep me busy on top of that Emily and I have our duties as co-chairs of the student society, and of Rabbinic students for Pro-Zion.

Then there is limmud, for which I have taken on rather a lot. But I am excited about it nevertheless, then there is my placement. So end result is I am very very busy and want have much time for blogger. I will try not to fall off the end of world completely though.

At school my class are still interesting although challenging emotionally but I think my internship is going to be great I am learning a lot and its fun and really and truly why I got into this whole business in the first place.

Today I went down to Kingston and taught/interacted with the Kabbalat Torah Class. Who are great and it was defiantly a fun activity. On Thursday I celebrated my birthday it was quite low key I went to the Dignity with Emily, Haim, Sam, and Hannah I didn't drink because I was going to meet with my personal trainer.

It was a really nice night great conversations, tasty food, and lovely friends.  The next day I meet up with Danielle and the training was easier than last time but still it made me very tired so I cam home for a rest.  In the evening I went off with Emily to Southgate Progressive Synagogue. And then today it was off to KLS.

I still have a bunch of reading to do for next week and I need to work on a few details for upcoming events.

settling into my fourth year

Just the title of this posting is a little scary. But yes it does feel as if this year is settling into place, much faster than usual and although I am academically going to be a lot less busy this year than I was last I think that I will nevertheless be busy enough that I don't know when I get to blog again so this posting might have to do for a bit. (Although I might make a post Birthday blog post in about a week).

So, my classes at LBC look good and the assessments do not look to bad at all, in fact I think that I will enjoy doing some of them. We also have a nice balance between the academic (which is now at MA level) and the practical which is nice.

But additional reasons to be busy, firstly Emily and I are co-chairs of the Student Society, which is more work but hopefully we will be able to do a good job in representing the needs of the student body and in working towards making the college a happier place. Additionally Emily and I are really pushing 'Rabbinic Students for Pro-Zion'. This will be a lot of work but I am really excited and keen about it so this is good.

Then there is Limmud, not the Limmud Chervaruta Project but the conference itself, where I will be presenting sessions. So busy there as well.

One of our classes this semester is on 'research methods', part of which is looking forward to preparing us to write our Rabbinic Thesis. This too is making this year feel both very real and very different from those which have come before. As if, the end is if not in sight then as if it will be insight once we get around this next corner.

Outside of College, I am getting more and more excited about my 4th year placement at KLS. Last Saturday I went down to see how their Saturday Morning services work. And it was a very special occasion, so it will have been both more crowed and livelier than normal. But nevertheless I think that working there is going to be a truly great experience.

Outside of both work and College I am working with a personal trainer (yes I know) so far I have only had one session the aftereffects of which I am really starting to feel. But I think that it is important to do, because my life style hasn't exactly been helping my overall health and in the long run I think it will make me fill a lot better.

So generally I am busy again but its a good kind of busy. And I have definite markers lying ahead so it feels as if I am making progress with the year. Next week my birthday, then a very early Hanukkah, getting ready for Limmud, the end of the school term, Limmud, essays and exams. (By which time we are already into 2014).

The spring semester is always a bit broken up and then the year draws to a close. But I am not thinking about next semester yet. There is a lot to keep me focused on the here and now. But all in all I am stull really happy and enjoying my 4th year.

First week at school and a very busy weekend.

I have completed my first week of my fourth year and I have to stay that I am very upbeat about my courses, there is a good range of classes covering a good mixture between vocational/practical and purely academic. Last week was a little disrupted because of the festivals, but now the HHD season is finally and fully over I can get on with normal work under a normal schedule.

On Wednesday I had lunch in the NNLS succah and on Thursday I returned there for the evening service, and then it was the weekend which as it turned out was rather busy. On Friday I headed down to KLS, where I shall be spending my 4th year placement, this was just to do some legal/adminestive  things.

I then returned to Central London and went to the Routes (LJ) supper-club which was great. Good company (more people than usual), interesting Torah and wonderful food. Then on Saturday I went to Finchley Progressive Synagogue (it was a Bat-Mitzvah) so very busy. Sunday I went to LJ Educational Networking seminar which was very interesting and one of the first times that I represented KLS formally.

I am, I have to say, rather tired. But I am nevertheless looking forward to the first uninterrupted week at school.

New School Year

On Monday a New School Year will start my fourth at rabbinical-school, and I think I am, for the first time entirely upbeat and positive.  I am really looking forward to it my classes which looking manageable if challenging and my practical placement.  Although looking forward to school starting is normal for me, there had to be a reason after all that I lingered in the groves of academe as long as I did. It was not however, how I have experienced rabbinical-school. My first semester was engulfed in chaos, see the blog for 2010 if you are interested. And although I was settled and looking forward to restarting school for my second semester it was defiantly tinged with sorrow that my YII was drawing to a close and I would soon be parted from Israel and so many great friends with whom I had shared the most life changing (and best so far) year of my life.
My second year got off to a rough start too and I was sufficiently unhappy that it clouded my fourth semester as well. I think looking back that I was probably depressed (and because I didn't know it I was getting treatment).
And although I was more settled in my third year I cannot say I was every really really looking forward to my work and classes restarting.
But things are different now, I am impatient for it to start, and I am feeling up-beat so much so that I am certain that the little things that go wrong (as is certain to happen from time to time) will be a source of humour and colour in my life rather than big deals.

On Friday I had a meeting with my new personal trainer, all part of the get healthy campaign. I also discovered a rather interesting leftwing book shop and came away with a couple of books.

So far succot has been pleasant, and although I don't have a succah (first floor flat and all that) I do have a lulav and Etrog.

The project for Limmud is all but done. Part of my activities for tomorrow are making another view of it. I am meeting up with Matthew, Mandy, Ali and prahapes someother friends tomorrow afternoon/evening.

All is basically well.

Yom Kippur sermon two

Yom Kippur Morning 2013

Rabbi Mordecai Yosef Leiner (1801-1854), the Ishbitzer Rebbe, was a radical, idiosyncratic and indeed iconoclastic thinker and Hasidic teacher. He was the most novel thinker to emerge from the most radical school of hasidic thought, that of Kotzk-Przysuch, sometimes referred to as 'the Polish-School'

The Ishibitzer was a colleague-disciple of Kotzker Rebbe, more often known as Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859). Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk was in turn the disciple of Simcha Bunim of Peshisha (1765-1827). Together these three great teachers provided leadership to this most innovative of hassidic communities. After the deaths of the Ishbitzer in 1854 and Rabbi Mendel in 1859, the radicalism of their movement ceased and it became like any other hasidic dynasty. Indeed by the middle of the 19^th century the early light and fire of the hasidic movement had largely gone out.

But for a while, maybe as much as sixty years, the hasidic school of Kotzk-Przysuch was radical indeed. Somewhat anti-nominal these three leaders, and their hasidim were concerned more with the deeper meanings of the halakhah than with a minute details of its extremities. They were also radical in liturgical terms as well making alterations to the siddur and attempting to really pray the prayers (a concern shared by other early hasidic groups as well).

There teachings are challenging, not so much because they are intellectually difficult but because of what the implications are. It is not by chance that many of the sayings of these three teachers are recorded in both Liberal and Reform prayer books. But their teachings are not just challenging, they also reflect the personal challenges these three teachers faced, ones that were reflected in contemporary and latter western philosophy and philosophers, such as Soren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and latter the existentialist.

All three, Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshisha, the Kotzker, and the Ishbitzer face problems of Jewish life and Judaism which are all too recognisable to us today. Rabbi Simcha Bunim, for example, was trained as a pharmacist, wore western dress and even attended treater performances. He was very concerned with how an authentic and meaningful Jewish life could be continued in the modern-world, his successor the Kotzker was also concerned with authenticity although in his writings his concern with authenticity has been transformed into a burning concern with אמת truth. For Rabbi Menachem Morgensztern anything short of the complete truth was falsehood and tantamount to idolatry.

What we have of the writings of all three of these teachers is from their students, they wrote nothing first had themselves. While the records of Simcha Bunim and the Kotzker are short and in a simply (very easily accessible style) those of the Ishbitzer recorded in the two volumes of the Mei HaShiloach are couched in complex language and though the prism of kabbalah and kabbalistic metaphor. Although unsurprisingly in the hands of the Ishbitzer familiar kabbalistic concepts take on new (and sometimes radically different meanings).  

This is the most palpable feeling I took away from studying some of his writings, the sense of the 'shock of the old'.

In his re-reading of Biblical Narratives, characters who are normally presented negatively, Esau, Zimri (whom you may remember was stabbed though the loans by Pinchas) and indeed others.

Such a radical re-taling of Biblical narratives from an unusual perspective is both useful and I would say necessary because familiarity the feeling that we remember what the Bible says, or what we think it says.

Can blind us to what it actually has to say to us, here and now. Familiarity does indeed bread contempt.

On Rosh HaShanah we are unlikely to hear the radical theological challenge of the Akadah, because we have hard it read so many times and know before we even start that in the end God will intervene and Isaac will not be sacrificed.

Today's Torah reading(s) also offer the challenge of familiarity parts of readings at least will be familiar, or even very familiarly from the liturgy both traditional parts and, indeed new parts in Liberal and Reform prayer books. Parts might even be familiar from popular culture such as the opening monolog of Transporting.

But wether our reading is familiar or less familiar it still carries a powerful and radical message. One addressed both to the individual, but also to the community to which that individual (that we belong). A message of the conditionality of the covenant, but a message that reassures that not only is power to act within our hands it is within our very being.

God begins his address to the Israelites, though Moses by saying, You (in the plural) and then listing the types of people, in summary Everyone was there. Then there is a rather unusual verse:

 And not only with you do I make this sworn covenant, but with those who are standing here with us       today before the Eternal One our God, and equally with those who are not here with us today.

The classical commentators ask, reasonably enough if everyone was standing before God, who are these others? And one of the answers offered is that they are future generations, us included.

 Just as during Passover and the Sader the individual is meant to feel 'as if', they personally had been redeemed from Egypt.

 

Here too, the individual can (maybe even should) feel as if the choice of entering into the covenant, or not had been set before them.

 No, it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.

 

And as Simcha Bunim and the Kotzker would have argued it is a personal and personally authentic covenant.

On the subject of Teshuvah (repentance) the Ishbitzer was again unusual in his thinking he did not really think of sins as a problem. For him what was the real problem was the belief that once you had sinned that was that. Indeed for the Ishbitzer this was Adam Harisson's sin. Not eating from the tree, not blaming eve but the belief that once he had sinned that was it.

Again as our reading this Yom Kippur reminded us, the ability for returning is within us all.

 Gamar Hatimah Tovah.