Catching Up and Torah Study in Eugene, Oregon

Catching Up and Torah Study in Eugene, Oregon


I am now working full time, going to college full time and in love full time, so I have neglected this blog for a while. In the next few days I’m going to upload essays and parshas I wrote days, weeks or even months ago.

Friday Nov 12, I met with Rabbi Maurice at Temple Beth Israel to discuss my conversion. I last met with him about 6 months ago. We discussed my progress and when to actually convene the Bet Din.

I showed him an enormous Jewish reference guide I’m making myself in Microsoft’s OneNote, with separate folders including History, Jewish Philosophers (with a separate folder just for Maimonides), Hebrew and Yiddish, Prayers and Rituals, Torah, Talmud, Midrash, Torah Portions, My Thoughts, Media (I’ve read or watched or want to read or watch), Kashrut, Jewish Feminism, Jewish Marriage, Denominations, the Arab Jewish Conflict, etc. He was pretty much blown away. Most of it is notes from books, especially the History one, which goes chronologically from Abraham to the present. I don’t bother quoting my sources there, but I do in the Philosophers, Torah, Talmud, etc.

For those of you who are new to Jewish terminology, portion and parsha are used interchangeably to indicate the weekly Sabbath reading from the Torah, the five books of Moses that Jews read in entirety on a yearly cycle. If you pick up a Torah, the portions are often listed after the Table of Contents. Jews worldwide in nearly every denomination follow the same schedule of readings (although an occasional group will read the Torah over a period of three years) and conclude the year with a ceremony, Simchat Torah, celebrating reading to the end of the Torah – and then begin back at Genesis on the same day! It’s one of many ways we are connected with each other, despite the vastness of the diaspora.

The Torah Portions folder is almost entirely written by me rather than quotes or thoughts from others. I do distinguish when I get an idea from Midrash or Talmud and usually reference it generally (i.e. Genesis Rabbah), rather than citing pages and sages. I rarely quote the text directly, partially because it usually begins: “Rabbi so and so said in the name of Rabbi such and such and Rav so and so…” and I would get so tired of typing I probably wouldn’t get very far. When using discussion from TBI’s Saturday morning Torah study group I will say “in Torah study” rather than naming individuals. I haven’t asked anyone for permission to quote them. I don’t really want to, either, for fear that people might speak a lot less naturally, in case one of the whopping four people who read my blog might have negative thoughts!

This Torah study group is fantastic; if you are ever in Eugene on a Saturday morning, you should definitely come by. The group varies in size from about 5 people to about 25 and exhibits the entire range of Judaism: those who lean towards Hasidism, or are straight from the Torah literalists, or consult astrology, or believe themselves culturally but not religiously Jewish, or are serious scholars, or are seriously-wanna-be scholars (me!), or are professionals in psychology fields, Israeli natives, conservatives, liberals, etc., etc. On my way driving in, I often think of seven or eight points I’d like to make, but often I am so fascinated to just listen and I may make only two or three points.

I will have time to write and upload about a quarter of the Torah portions. To search Torah portions on this site, just type the Book, chapter and verse, i.e. Genesis 12:1. I should warn that these are written rather quickly and include quite a bit of summary along with a few devar worthy bits. However, I have found that the observations of a thoughtful long time outsider are sometimes useful to someone who grew up Jewish.