(no subject)

[seekingferret]

As I mentioned a while back, freeradical42 and I, with help from a few other friends, planned to run a science fiction and fantasy themed Tikkun Leil Shavuot at Balticon. The tradition is to stay up all night studying Torah on the first night of the holiday of Shavuot to commemorate the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

I prepared a variety of textual sources to work with, but had no idea how to gauge what kind of turnout to expect. I printed ten copies of my source sheets, thinking that if we got ten people it would be amazing.

We got 20 people!

Not all of them stayed all night, but they stayed later than I expected, and people kept getting up to go to bed and then delaying because they wanted to keep participating in the conversation. It was not perfect, and there are things I wish I had done differently to make the conversation work better, but I am so thrilled with how it turned out. It was such a cool experience to be a part of.

I promised vvalkyri that I would post my source sheets, so here they are. Bear in mind that these are not source sheets for a carefully structured shiur, just texts we used to start what ended up being a wide ranging six hour long pluralistic conversation about Judaism and its relationship to the past and future. With cheesecake!

Source Sheet 1- Sources on the kosher status of fantasy animals

Source sheet 2- Sources on the future of Shabbat observance

Right clink and save link as.

Comments

[seekingferret]

:) Hope you also had a chag sameach.

[kass]

I did indeed! We had a lovely tikkun leyl Shavuot here, and studied a variety of diverse texts, though none quite as delightfully geeky as the ones you chose. :-)