Jeff Seidel Student Center

There's this thing here called the Jeff Seidel Student Center. I'd like to compare it to Chabad; it's a religious family who invites students into their house for Shabbat and Jewish learning-type things. Only, the family's not Chabad, and the house is more than a house - it's a student center with (supposedly) wireless and computers and a tv and free laundry. They also have this program, $$$ for Learning, where you attend a weekly lecture followed by chevruta learning every Sunday night and earn $60 a month, $100 a month if you also attend lectures at a yeshiva. Doing the math, that's $7.50 an hour, but I don't think I would do it if I wasn't interested in the learning in the first place.

I went to the student center for the first time tonight, mostly for the promise of free Chinese food. The Chinese was fairly awful--okay, really awful--but the lecture was interesting. A Rabbi Friedman talked about the different levels of pleasure--physical, love, meaning, and spiritual. It actually made me think; he said that you should be able to give up one for the next, though you don't necessarily have to. Would one really give up love for spiritual fulfillment? Not infatuation--he talked about the counterfit pleasures on each level (drugs for physical, infatuation for love, looking good but not thinking/acting good for meaning)--but pure love, like mother for child. Is spirituality inherently higher than love, or is this a religious belief? How inherent are our religious beliefs?

I had a good time tonight. I did get the talk about the invalidity of my conversion, and Tzipora (the head of the program for women) did say some obviously biased things about Conservative and Reform Judaism, but I can either keep my mouth shut about certain things or try to refute them when they're too outrageous. (There are more women graduating from Conservative rabbinical school because men no longer feel it's their place, they need to find something different? BS.) Overall, though, I think it will be good. I'm glad; I feel like this kind of learning is a big part of the Israeli experience--or at least, the religious Israeli experince--and I'm glad to be able to take part in it.