Journey into Zionism: Spiritual eccentricity

It's track 2.5 of OTZMA, and for that reason I am currently "homeless" (by the technical definition) for a three-week period and squatting at a volunteer guesthouse in Jerusalem, whose name I will omit to protect the anonymity of those involved. It is my (quite possibly misinformed) understanding that the guesthouse serves as somewhat of a long-term hostel for volunteers from abroad, or a safe haven for young adult migrants to work, sleep, and eat together in religious communism. The permanent residents call us "chevre", which I'm pretty sure means "group of comrades" in Hebrew, and we take turns participating in "toranut," or "breakfast preparation for the chevre duty." That's right, everyone gets a chance to wake up at 6:45AM to make giant buckets of oatmeal and scrambled eggs.

In addition, our comrade leaders are very big on guitar-playing hippies with masculine names like "Pesach" and "Ariel" accompanying our kitchen labor with repetitive songs about liberal selflessness and Mother Earth. We even drove two hours into the Dead Sea region for a midnight stroll in the desert and ten minutes of solitary meditation while munching on fire-roasted potatoes and onions. It's all quite endearing, but there are times when I'd like to welcome the Sabbath bride without being smothered by spiritual eccentricity, which is why I hope to be kilometers away by noon on Friday.

But if you know me at all (and I'm guessing at least 10% of you don't) you should know that this is all right up my alley. I'm totally all about living in communism with the added bonus of my friends cooking me a fabulous breakfast every morning! However, you should know that the real reason I'm in Jerusalem is to participate in a three-week seminar at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Oh, here we go.

Going into it, I expected that Pardes would pretty much be my death, since most of the classes are based on intense discussion and deliberation of ancient texts from the Torah, from rabbinical commentaries on the Torah, and from rabbinical commentaries on other rabbinical commentaries on the Torah. Emphasis on MY DEATH. However, I've found my first impressions of Pardes to be quite the opposite, if the opposite of death is 8 ½ hours a day, five days a week, of laughing my face off at the circumstances.

First of all, for me the name "Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies" conjures up an image of an academy built of Jerusalem stone, with marble hallways and beautifully decorated chambers of antique mahogany workstations, all surrounding a finely landscaped courtyard with a fountain and perhaps a statue of Maimonides or Moses. That being said, Pardes is located in an office building behind a Mazda dealership, with half of the classrooms on the first floor, and the other half up five flights of stairs in another part of the building. And while all of the OTZMA-specific seminars are held on the ground floor, we all must ascend the staircase every hour or so to study in the beit midrash.

You see, the beit midrash is this magical room with too many books and too little air ventilation, where students are free to be loud and passionate about Jewish texts in a vibrant and encouraging environment. The beit midrash is apparently the only room in the building where true independent learning can take place, because every time an instructor finishes lecturing on this Torah portion or that rule of Kashrus, we all take our photocopies of the Talmud or Mishna or whatever and head upstairs to devour the texts in groups of two or three. Oh yeah, it has also become quite apparent that learning is not possible on one's own, and we instead must find a "chavruta", or communist study buddy, to work with. It's quite fascinating, really, and whenever I'm in the beit midrash I can feel the ADD wheels churning in my head as my chavruta and I are compelled to people-watch rather than read the assigned material.

But the best part of this whole experience is the chance to observe the English-speaking world’s nerdiest Jews as they study religious nonsense in their natural habitat. I watched a kippa-wearing mensch passionately throw his hands into the air as he bellowed out the verses of the parsha; I attended a lunchtime ceremony for a woman to publicly proclaim that she had finally finished writing out the entire torah on notebook paper; I listened to a baby howl in terror of the roaring enthusiasm as her bearded father paraded her around the beit midrash. Who cares if the classes bore me to tears, and so what if the instructors don't consider me a real Jew (on account of the atheist thing); having had this experience, I will always know that even on the most intolerable and miserable days of OTZMA, there are far worse ways that I could have spent an entire year in Israel. And baruch hashem for that.