[NHC] Bits and pieces

In no particular order. (As always, let me know if I should translate/explain terms.)

• My morning class was an artist's beit midrash, which ended up meaning that each day we looked at sources on one word of this year's theme (v'samtem et devarai al lvavchem) in hevruta followed by open creative time, based on the sources, or other prompts of the day, or whatever inspired us. There were far more sources than time, so we chose a sprinkling of them more to get ideas flowing than to be exhaustive. Oh, and the day words were 'place' (or 'put'), 'words', 'My', and 'heart'. I found myself often more drawn to particular ingredients to play with (interesting paper, or paint, or pastels, etc) rather than particular prompts, though I did end up making things that were sort of on topic, as usual relying more on words than on images, since I feel in control of language, but lacking in the ability to get images out of my head onto paper intact. I knew some of the other people in class were artists, and it showed; I very much liked some of the pieces other people made.
  
  
• My afternoon class was totally head-focused, a look at the book of Leviticus, which is often seen as boring and/or irrelevant. The teacher had sent out a big packet of sources in advance, so people could print them or just bring them in their laptop, and we didn't get through all of them, by any means. It didn't matter because the conversation was so compelling. Sometimes there was hevruta time, sometimes it was the whole class, but either way, it ended up being much more interesting than most people generally consider tumah/taharah and korbanot to be. I'd happily have taken a class twice as long (or more) with this teacher; I felt like there was much more to learn than we had any chance of addressing. The teacher was of the opinion that we do have a system of tumah/taharah currently, but he didn't convince me that it's more than vestigial, other than for menstruants (and the reason that is still around is due to other parts of the text, not where it references tumah/taharah, which I'd not really paid attention to before). I'm not really sure how else to summarize this without getting into lots of details, which I suspect I won't actually manage to write up.
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