by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

January 24, 2008

So one yeshiva girl turns to another girl and says, “Where do you go to school?” Upon hearing that the second girl attends public school, the first girl says, “Wow! You really know your brachas [blessings]!”

Now that’s a Limmud moment.

Want to learn about the Russian revolution in Israel? Wondering how to pray if you don’t believe in God? Eager to do a close text study of the stories of Dina and Tamar? Want to do all these with top scholars and study alongside people who represent a diversity of experience — ranging in age from 15-85 and coming from across the denominational spectrum? Welcome to Limmud, NY, an annual celebration of Jewish learning held in the heart of the Catskills.

This year’s fourth annual conference, held at the Nevele Grande Resort in Ellenville, NY, over the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, brought many more New Jerseyans than in previous years. At nearly 100 out of 893, participants from the Garden State are still a minority, but the numbers are growing. And everyone interviewed for this story promised to return next year and get more involved.

The four-day conference is modeled on British Limmud, a weeklong conference begun in England over 25 years ago that attracts more than 2,000 people each year. The NY version is supported by UJA-Federation of New York, the Pickower Foundation, Bikkurim: An Incubator for New Jewish Ideas, and other foundations.

Just two people staff Limmud New York year-round; it is run almost entirely by volunteers — over 200 of them, including Penny Arons of Montclair. Arons, who sits on the steering committee of Limmud NY, has attended since the first year and has organized Camp Limmud, the children’s program, for three years.

Sessions begin early in the morning and run until late at night, offering eight to 12 choices at a time, including presentations on culture and the arts and sessions on ritual, prayer, Jewish law, history, Talmud, feminist discourse, universalism, and everything in between.

“As adults, if you’re not in the profession of studying Jewish texts, you rarely have the concentrated time to engage yourself intellectually like this in a recreational setting,” said Ken Gold of South Orange, who attended this year for the second time with his wife, Marcy Felsenfeld, and their two young children.

At 50, Deborah Arbit of West Orange worried the program would be full of 20- and 30-year-olds, but that’s not what she found. In the long-faded glory of the Catskills, children who never heard of the Nevele raced by seniors who fondly remember vacationing there in younger days.

“It’s young folks, old folks, middle folks, and I’m having a great time,” Arbit said. She enjoyed the fact that “there are people here from all walks of life” and pointed to the intensity and breadth of the presentations.

Jonathan Kahn of Livingston was impressed that such an event could be arranged by volunteers; he also appreciated the diversity for more personal reasons. With two children, ages seven and nine, who attend Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, he has chosen not to belong to a local synagogue and occasionally attends Shlomo Carlebach-style synagogues instead.

But with so many sessions and instructors like Everett Fox, Daniel Nevins, Alicia Svigals, Rachel Elior, Eugene Korn, and Elyse Goldstein, how do you choose? Limmudniks have various strategies for winnowing down the choices in each time slot. Gold said he tries to get out of his comfort zone; he leans toward cultural sessions, particularly the music sessions, and raved about one on Ladino music.

At the same time, “I try to do some things I normally wouldn’t do.” So he picked a session on halachic, or Jewish legal, perspectives on music and Shabbat. “Now, I don’t study Halacha and it’s not something that normally interests me,” Gold said. “But I followed the rabbi through the text, and it was interesting.”

Arbit was more systematic. “I look for topics I’m interested in but I also look for people with expertise in the area.” Volunteerism at Limmud extends to the presenters, who are almost entirely volunteer; she looks for those at the tops of their fields from whom she believes she’ll learn the most.

While some participants feel pressure to get the most out of every second at Limmud, Laurie Levy of Mountain Lakes, attending for the second time, takes a less pressured approach. “Two years ago I thought I had to do everything every day,” she said. “I didn’t want to waste a minute. Now I realize there’s time to relax, come to the bar, have a drink, talk to people. I even stayed in my room and cut a few sessions to do some work, and it was okay. I didn’t feel guilty about it.”

Highlights are as individual as the people attending, but often focus on time spent outside the formal learning. For Kahn it was a spontaneous hangout session in the corridor one evening with a friend, a rabbi, and some other folks who had wandered by. For Gold, it was mealtimes, a chance to meet new people.

For this reporter, it was watching her son slide down snowy hills on his belly during a Shabbat morning hike billed as “experiential prayer.” The grownups were encouraged to meditate on God’s presence in animal tracks, a roaring waterfall, and the crunch of snow; the children’s prayers were, well, a bit more active.

If the best times at Limmud are the unplanned ones, you could follow the path of your correspondent’s sister, Martha Ginsberg. On her way to meeting me at a screening of What a Wonderful Place, a film on immigrant workers in Israel, she got sidetracked into a musical jam session between two talented Limmudniks, Avi Fox-Rosen and Noah Solomon. She never made it to the film.

“I heard the music coming from inside and I was drawn in,” she said. “It was amazing.”

That’s a Limmud moment.