Rosh Chodesh Sivan!

Hi, its Rosh Chodesh today, and although Hashem has sent me the money to pay for the past few months, I will not be paying today, methinks. The Kollel acount is pretty bare.

This does not mean we will be walking around all grim and depressed. I try keeping a humble perspective, and that means that I accept that not I keep things rolling here. I do my part (-that was an overstatement. Indeed, I have been pretty lazy about doing my part and soliciting people and offering them a slice of Olam Haba. Oh well!) and He who provides for all Mankind does the heavy lifting. So its never me!

We shall soon make our monthly Rosh Chodesh party, consisting of soft drinks and cake, maybe some Super-snacks and Bamba too, and it serves as a celebration of Rosh Chodesh and a rememberance for the party that was held in the time of Chazal, when they would be Mekadesh the new month themselves. (See Shulchan Aruch 419) But for the Kollel it provides a venue for me to talk about Kollel goals and what we are doing right or wrong, and also to say anything motivating that I have.

Last month we re-introduced the saying of Chaburos, where each person speaks to the group once a week about the subject being studied. It can be a capsulation of the various laws and approaches, if it be a particularly intricate peice, or it can be something novel the person has discovered, often it will be resolving difficulties and explaining hard-to-understand parts. Each person need not speak long, and often will only speak for seven minutes or so. The average is 15.

Ayhow, we once used to have a rotation system in place and it somehow fell apart, and now we reinstituted it. We also added to it a volentary additin that the folks speaking would write their talk down. Often writing brings up entirely new directions and explores additional approaches.

Besides the value in having a daily talk explaining the subject matter, the person speaking 1. learns how to present before a group, 2. he developes the ability to collect his thoughts and express them clearly in writing, and 3. it spurs him on to acheivment, because he really needs to know his stuff well. It is a make-things-happen proccess.

Seeing how well things worked out, we are adding two new ones; One is that I will b”n utilize the first fifteen minutes of the second seder (3:30-3:45 pm) to review past Gemarah. I will focus on reading one page a day, just the Gemarah itself. If I manage Rashi and a Tosfos or two, that would be icing on the cake. Two is that just for this month I will seek out opportunities to compliment and empower other people and build them up, instead of critisizingand tearing them down. I need to do only one compliment a day. Both of these should be noted in writing; the daf that I reviewed and the comliment I gave.

If it works out, we may institute this into the general Seder of the Kollel, and make regular review mandatory. It is always a challenge to get people to review. It is generally felt to be boring and sheer repitition, and people are mighty reluctant to go for it. But we do need to try!