Itinerantdaughter's Blog

 My friend, and classmate!, LV on an atheist’s love for Talmud:

“There are few individuals that fit this bill, but I was fortunate enough to know of one of them. Rabbi Ysoscher Katz had been a Satmar rabbi who taught a popular Talmud class in Borough Park before leaving that role to chair the Talmud department at Open Orthodoxy’s flagship rabbinical academy, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a place that aims to reconcile Orthodox Judaism with contemporary ethics. I enrolled in an early morning Talmud class that Rabbi Katz taught to students from an array of Jewish backgrounds, in a classroom on the fourth floor of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Arriving on my first day, I clutched a cup of coffee in my hand and found a place at the end of the big wooden table, amongst women in yarmulkes and bareheaded men.

“Rabbi Katz arrived, a young bearded man in Orthodox-style dress. He passed out photocopies printed with that distinct talmudic architecture: a center block of words in a bisected frame of commentaries adorned with columns of smaller text. The paper felt illicit in my hands.”

Kinda upset I didn’t have a cameo but what can you do?