Care to elaborate? A cursory reading of the article doesn’t reveal any mentions of the topic’s effect on the chavruta institution. I’m not sure if you mean that highly intellectual Jews are more enthusiastic about “returning to their roots” or the inverse, that Jews with very little academic level have invaded the Synagogues in a religious version of Eternal September.
Something closer to the Eternal September, but a little more complicated than that. (Disclaimer: I don’t have any sources for what I’m about to say. I’m more generalizing based on my own experience when I was Orthodox and the general impression of the community.)
One has among those who have become Orthodox a large number of very different people. Some of them are very intelligent but have little to no background knowledge. Others are not so bright and have no background. Others have are not so bright and have a little background, etc. Moreover, the general lack of background means that most of them can’t form chavrutas on their own, since they didn’t grow up with the large amount of basic experience about how the system works, what sort of approaches work and which don’t. Much of that knowledge is procedural and not stated explicitly. So, as a result, a lot of these people are pairing with people of much more background knowledge than they have but might be not as bright. There are other complicating factors; for example, some Orthodox Jews form chavrutas with less religious, less educated, Jews deliberately trying to rope them in further.
The whole situation is really quite complicated, and there’s an unfortunate lack of serious anthropological or sociological work on what is happening at a broad level, so I don’t have any thing to rely on other than my own impressions.
Would you care to repost this on the chavruta thread? I think this system could pique our interest, and if we’re going to emulate it we might as well learn more about what works and what doesn’t, what fits us and what doesn’t, and how we can improve on it in our own special way and make it ours.
Care to elaborate? A cursory reading of the article doesn’t reveal any mentions of the topic’s effect on the chavruta institution. I’m not sure if you mean that highly intellectual Jews are more enthusiastic about “returning to their roots” or the inverse, that Jews with very little academic level have invaded the Synagogues in a religious version of Eternal September.
Something closer to the Eternal September, but a little more complicated than that. (Disclaimer: I don’t have any sources for what I’m about to say. I’m more generalizing based on my own experience when I was Orthodox and the general impression of the community.)
One has among those who have become Orthodox a large number of very different people. Some of them are very intelligent but have little to no background knowledge. Others are not so bright and have no background. Others have are not so bright and have a little background, etc. Moreover, the general lack of background means that most of them can’t form chavrutas on their own, since they didn’t grow up with the large amount of basic experience about how the system works, what sort of approaches work and which don’t. Much of that knowledge is procedural and not stated explicitly. So, as a result, a lot of these people are pairing with people of much more background knowledge than they have but might be not as bright. There are other complicating factors; for example, some Orthodox Jews form chavrutas with less religious, less educated, Jews deliberately trying to rope them in further.
The whole situation is really quite complicated, and there’s an unfortunate lack of serious anthropological or sociological work on what is happening at a broad level, so I don’t have any thing to rely on other than my own impressions.
Would you care to repost this on the chavruta thread? I think this system could pique our interest, and if we’re going to emulate it we might as well learn more about what works and what doesn’t, what fits us and what doesn’t, and how we can improve on it in our own special way and make it ours.