Over the past few weeks, we’ve been honored and dazzled by learning in-person together in the SVARA bet midrash. For the first time in almost five years, we welcomed learners back to the cacophony of joy and insight that is unique to sharing physical space. As we come to the end of our summer Day Camps this weekend (we’re looking at you, Philly!), we’re starting to make meaning of these experiences as we imagine how to keep this magic alive as we gather together online for our upcoming Fall Zman.
Planning for Day Camp was a multifaceted process that included many experiments we sought to test and explore together. Through it all we’ve held the care, connection, and attentiveness to bringing our traditionally radical insights to life. Three places we’re reflecting on in this moment are how to craft the container of our bet midrash, COVID precautions, and the shift in our teaching and fairying teams. In this moment, one so fraught with the heaviness of political pressure, war, and continued conversations about COVID safety, it didn’t feel like a given that gathering would be easeful.
Many folks cannot attend in-person gatherings because COVID safety practices have become unreliable and altogether absent from many community spaces. We’re still gathering feedback from learners, but, from the 36 responses so far, 53% of respondents noted that SVARA’s in-person COVID protocols allowed them to feel comfortable and safe attending Day Camp, and 11% shared that, while our practices were more cautious than what they do in their daily lives, they were happy to support building a community of care. One learner shared gratitude in their reflection:
“I am verklempt. It was so powerful and healing to have COVID safety be the norm and well-implemented, especially at a time when many people are ‘moving on’ and leaving more cautious folks behind, despite continuous spread. I was able to relax and enjoy the experience more fully because of your commitment to accessibility. Myself and others who would not have come or would have been less likely to come otherwise, were there. I can’t thank you enough.”
Another offered:
“Really really appreciated the rigorousness of the covid protocols, felt safe and also grateful for the wisdom that our learning and culture is better when disabled people are present.”
One of our primary intentions for camp was to create a container for learners to access their svara (moral intuition) and share their wisdom freely. Our work in crafting a bet midrash that supports deep, rigorous, and joyful learning is necessarily focused on creating a way to hold the space of discomfort, and to celebrate each learner as a necessary shaper of our collective tradition. 78% of respondents shared that they felt more connected to SVARA following Day Camp. One learner reflected, “I have never been in a space where I could exist on every axis of my identity (queer, trans, Jewish, radical politics) and felt that I could be my full self. I felt home in a way I have not in other spaces I exist.”
Among the most animating aspects of Day Camps was our incredible teaching and fairying teams. So much has changed in the landscape of queer Talmud learning since 2020, including the expansion of our network of teacher trainees, which now totals over 80 people. Our Fellows are leading in so many incredible ways—across the country and internationally—and in turn their students are gaining access and insights into the tradition in incredible new ways. One learner shared, “Having so many SVARA faculty and fairies in one place at one time, and having a chance to chat with them before class and during breaks, was especially wonderful.” Another offered: “I was moved by the way that this program really foregrounded the beauty of queerness and queer life.” We are grateful to each one of our teachers and fairies who shared their insights from the front of the room at our Day Camps, who brought their students to the bet midrash in continuation of our yeshiva’s lineage, and who continually contribute in such beautiful ways to the expansion of tradition.
The text we’ve been learning at Day Camp helps ground us in the practice of being present with each other and unpack the importance of discourse and dialogue. Just as many of us are grappling with these practices in our own lives today, our learning took us through an epic divide: one that lived between two houses / lineages / families / communities. Or perhaps it was a calcified mindset of division between two schools within the same community. Within the Day Camp bet midrash, we filled ourselves up with Torah by raising questions of authority, gender, and the creation of communal norms. As we shift into the cadence and structure of online learning this Fall, we will continue to make these “Words-of-God” vital, living things. And, at the end of the day, maybe that’s the simplest way to describe what we’re trying to do here at SVARA: to bring life to Torah again! And to use the svara of our queer and trans lives to do it.
