More Than Mishnah

In the wake of the COVID lockdowns of 2020, SVARA launched a daily learning experiment to help sustain our community with Torah. That experiment became the Mishnah Collective—and while I wasn’t yet on the team when it began, I can’t imagine anyone anticipated what it would become. More than five years later, the space has shifted in so many ways, but one thread has remained constant: an extraordinary, unwavering commitment to life-giving study. Together, we have shared in rigorous learning, community building, laughter, disagreement, and joy. Today marks our very last session together, and in a few short days, we will gather to honor the end of this journey with a Mishnah Collective siyyum. We hope more than anything that you’ll join us.

Many Mishnah Collective learners have carried immense burdens during our time together—illness, the death of loved ones, financial instability, and profound grief about our deeply broken world. And still, day after day, they have returned to learn. Again and again, people have turned to this space for healing and comfort, trusting Torah and the community to hold their tender and broken hearts. I think I speak for many when I say that I hadn’t quite imagined what it would look like, and feel like, to approach the end of Mishnah Collective. The kind of learning we did together didn’t feel short-term or temporary; it felt like a living laboratory of how to shape the future of Judaism by diving into the past. Mishnah Collective became a place to honor access and consistency, a place that reshaped our yeshiva’s vision of what queer Torah can be and how we can help it reach as many people as possible. 

Teaching and facilitating within a space like this has been an honor in every sense of the word.

As Mishnah Collective’s coordinator and director, I’ve attended countless sessions and have had the joy of compiling the recap emails for almost every session we’ve held (there are hundreds of them!). Through this work I’ve received a lifetime of Torah from our teachers’ khopps and participants’ commentary. My learning has come not just from the texts we’ve studied, but also from the loving feedback from learners who wanted to help craft Mishnah Collective into a maximally accessible space. My mind is especially on Dr. Rabbi Richard Ruth, of blessed memory, who was one of the first learners I ever had fairy hours with many years ago. His candid feedback about how to make our learning materials more accessible impacted not just Mishnah Collective participants, but nearly every SVARA learner. His presence is still felt every day at MC, and across the entire yeshiva. The Torah that has come out of this community, from accessibility guidelines to text commentary, is dizzying not just in its magnitude, but its quality. 

Ultimately, though, it’s not the size of Mishnah Collective’s wisdom that made it so incredible. It was often the small, every-day aspects of this space that made it so magical. MC Teacher Chava Shapiro offered that their favorite part of MC is, “Every time the waterfall begins of chevruta appreciations! The way that people are able to hold one another’s learning with such care and gratitude in the short time we all have together is inspiring every time.” Olivia Devorah Tucker, a fellow teacher and cornerstone of Mishnah Collective, has similarly been lit up by one of these “little gifts” of daily online learning: “All of the gorgeous artwork that we surround ourselves with! Inherited Judaica, handmade daf designs, the Radical Jewish Calendars ~ the beautiful ways that we invite each other into our homes. Putting the bet (house) in bet midrash!” From the enormous compilations of Torah to the tiny moments of camaraderie, there is truly no space exactly like Mishnah Collective.

As SVARA shifts, we’re fostering new kinds of learning—offerings that would not have been possible without the community building and feedback of our Mishnah Collective learners. These were essential in making sure SVARA would continue to be a home for rigorous and radical Talmud study: whether in the years-long journey our Gemirna Kollel students will soon be starting, or within the drop-in discovery happening during our next pilot of Daf Shenati (more on that soon). While this moment of reflection leaves many of us bursting with gratitude for all that MC has given us, it’s also a moment full of grief. Losing a stable, loving space like this one can be profoundly unmooring. We hope the physical manifestations of MC’s wisdom—in the Berachot Pocket and Yoma Learning Guide—will continue to be a source of strength and healing.

You all have forever shaped my life, this yeshiva, and the unrecognizable Jewish future we build little by little, word by word, every day.