Speakers’ notes and summaries available for some sessions

Zev Clementson • Robert Daum • Laura Duhan Kaplan 

 

The choices were difficult. LimmudVan ’14 had seven concurrent sessions. Every hour, Limmudniks had to pick one session to attend and six to skip.

 

 

Zev Clementson

Presenter Zev Clementson saw the issue from both sides, as a presenter and a learner. “There were so many interesting presentations, it was frequently hard to decide which one to go to,” he says.

 

 For anyone who missed his  presentation “Jewish Texts in the Digital Age”, Clementson has provided  a link to a PDF copy of  his presentation along with his speaker notes for each slide.

 

“Limmud was a fabulous learning experience  – thanks again for all your efforts,” he says.  “Kol hakavod!”

 

Clementson is a computer consultant who has created educational programs for Hebrew and Yiddish, and has three Hebrew/ Yiddish applications in the Apple App store.

 

 

Robert Daum

Robert Daum, director of the Iona Pacific Centre at the Vancouver School of Theology,  analyzed an especially elegant rabbic poem attributed to “our rabbis of Yavneh. ” His talk was based on an article he had published in the Jewish Quarterly Review. An abstract of his article is available here.

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Duhan Kaplan

Laura Duhan Kaplan, spiritual leader of Or Shalom synagogue, presented on the question, does God have gender?

 

“Yes, says Genesis 1, God has gender: both genders, male and female, as well as various stops along the binary continuum,” she says. “But not exactly, because gender as we know it is only a reflected human approximation of the Multifaceted One who began to create heavens and earth.”

 

 

A summary of the session’s text study is on Rabbi Laura’s blog on  Sophia Street.