Cookies and the Best Chavrutas Ever!

These two topics really have no connection.  In fact, the second one is really the main topic, and the first part is what was just randomly on my mind right now. Well, it isn't so random because I just ate two cookies, but why is that significant to you, you might ask. Well , let me tell you the story of the cookies.  Every Tuesday, a bunch of girls volunteer to get together and bake cookies and sell them in the Rova for a good cause, kind of like an Jewish version of the girl scouts.  Every week they sell all of the cookies that they made.  They usually begin baking cookies at around 2:00 and start to sell them at around 4:00.  However, I leave to go volunteer at the hospital at around 2:30. So, how did I get not only one, but two of these cookies? I pre-paid my friend Melissa! So she saved me two cookies and even though I had to walk all the way over to her apartment to get them after dinner, when I got them and took a bite, I realized that it was all worth it because it was so yummy!

Chavrutas
What's a chavruta? Wiki defines it as a traditional approach to Jewish study in which a pair of students independently learn, discuss, and debate a shared text. I have many chavrutas who are all super awesome.

1. Avigayil: Sundays 8:00-9:00 PM
We decided that we wanted to learn the group of books in Tanakh called Trei Asar.  These are 12 twelve books on the last 12 prophets of Israel.  We are about halfway through the second prophet called Joel.  We skipped the first one, Hosea, because Avigayil said that it's really inappropriate.  


2. Previously: Rebecca... Currently: ?: Sundays & Wednesdays Machshava
From the first day of class when Rebecca and I sat next to each other, we decided to learn in chavruta together during this class.  Machshava is a 3 hour long class and for about and hour every class we learn in chavruta either before or after our teacher lectures.  Rebecca and I both did pretty well on the Hebrew sources, however, our main difference was that if there was a word we didn't know or couldn't translate exactly, I would want to skip it, but she kept her dictionary beside her to look it up.  As the days went by, we realized that we were both learning from the other.  She would realize that some words are just not important enough to take the time to look them up, and I would start looking up some of the words to understand the text better and learn more Hebrew.  We were soon joined, one at a time, by three other girls, Julia, Giselle, and Arney, who had lost their chavruta either to another class or for some other reason.  I too in turn lost my chavruta, so now we just have a large chavruta of people who lost their chavrutas.


3. Previously: Esther... Currently: Amy : Mondays and Thursdays Chumash BeIyun
Esther and I started out as chavrutas for the first couple of weeks of this class.  Eventually we were joined by Rinat who switched in to our class and Amy who lost her chavruta.  Our teacher, Rav Yonatan, wasn't too happy with people being in a chavruta with more than three people, so Amy and I split off from Esther and Rinat (who were eventually joined by Eliana who switched in to out class too).  The day Amy and I started our chavruta, I was wearing my torah bowl shirt.  On the back of our torah bowl shirts, it says the names of everyone on the team and it says "captain" next to mine and Ahuva's name.  That was the day she started calling me "captain." A few weeks later a new nickname came up.  When you talk about someone that you are learning in chavruta with, you call them your chavrusa, but to make it a term of endearment you might make it 'chavrusi.'  Amy loves this term and she whenever she sees me she addresses me in the most high pitched screechy voice as "CHAVRUSIII!" Rav Yonatan found this quite amusing and he sometimes likes to make fun of it because it is pretty funny.


4.Joelle: Tuesdays 9:00-10:00 PM
In our Gemara Bekiut class we learn a lot of gemara so Tuesday nights is our catch- up/ revision day.  Gemara is a very hard topic so we always have go over what we learned many times so that we can know it properly and remember it.  We used to have about a half hour during every class to review but our teacher cut that out because he wanted to teach more during the class.  Joelle is a great person to have as a chavruta because she's a great listener. The way it usually works is that I go over what we did in class by reading from the gemara and explaining it and Joelle goes "uh- huh" every once in a while.  No, I'm just kidding, Joelle contributes a lot to the chavruta because if there's ever a line or a section that I don't know, she either knows it or is able to figure it out. 


Tonight when we were learning Leora asked me to mention her in my blog... Hi Leora! It was actually her and Joelle's idea to write this blog post so thanks guys! Joelle also wanted me to mention to you to please feed the fishies at the top of the blog by clicking on the tank with your mouse. Shalom V'lehitraot!