But as the sessions piled up and I had to make more tough choices and miss more great classes, a funny thing happened: I started getting interrupted. As I went from class to class, I kept meeting more and more people.
Soon the conversations themselves began to pile up. An impromptu talk about the state of Jewish education in Los Angeles with a macher from The Federation. Encounters with an Ashkenazi professor who is a world-renowned expert on the Sephardi world; with an educator in my neighborhood who gives bar and bat mitzvah lessons to autistic children; and with a filmmaker from Jerusalem who is studying and documenting the halachic dilemma of donating organs within the Orthodox community.
I met a woman studying to be a Conservative rabbi who organizes Friday night services where the prayer melodies are always changing, a physician who prescribes natural substances to balance brain chemicals, a meditation teacher who thinks Jews do way too much thinking, especially at places like Limmud, and a successful television writer from Hollywood who once saw something on a license plate that encouraged him to become Torah observant.
As I kept meeting more people and having these impromptu moments, it struck me that our lives are filled with great conversations that never happen. These are not conversations that call for a lunch or an appointment or even a phone call. They’re conversations that happen when you bump into people; the kind of conversations, perhaps, that you would see among people who live, shop and hang out in a close-knit neighborhood.
I did not even consult the program before signing up for LimmudLA. I went for the conversations, not the classes. The classes help set up a framework for meeting people with whom you share values. People were far friendlier than normal at LimmudLA, something I also notice in a good shul or in a yoga center. People feel safe and they open up. I do notice more reverence in a yoga center than at LimmudLA with respect to cell phones. No cell phone goes off when Guru Singh teaches.
