Neuroqueer Talmud | The Oven and the Outcast - R. Eliezer and Rabbinic Violence

Neuroqueer Talmud is back!

This 8-week series, “The Oven and the Outcast: R. Eliezer and Rabbinic Violence,” is an approach to learning Talmud that centres neurodivergent, disabled, and queer ways of thinking, questioning, and relating to text and community.

Neuroqueer Talmud treats the rabbinic tradition as something alive and unfinished. It takes seriously the rabbis’ own struggles with power, exclusion, disagreement, authority, shame, and belonging. It asks what happens when the beit midrash becomes a place where some voices are heard as Torah, and others are treated as dangerous.

We’ll be learning the famous story of Tanur shel Akhnai, the Oven of Akhnai, from Masechet Bava Metzia in the Babylonian Talmud. This is often taught as a story about majority rule and the triumph of rabbinic authority. We will read it differently: as a story about rabbinic violence, communal exclusion, and the cosmic consequences of humiliating a person whose Torah the community refuses to receive.

Our underlying lens of reading the sugya will focus on how communities handle difference. It’s about who gets to belong. It’s about what happens when disagreement becomes isolation, when authority becomes harm, and when the gates of heaven remain open only for the person who has been wronged.

We’ll learn using the SVARA method - close reading in chevruta, deep attention to language, revision of our text each week, and letting real questions drive the learning rather than rushing to answers. We will move slowly, word by word, line by line, paying attention not only to what the text says, but to what it does.

Dates: October 11, 18, 25 + November 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 - Check below for your local time (automatically adjusts based on your location)

Full tuition for this 8-week beit midrash is €400.

The real cost of running this course is higher than that. Preparing and teaching a serious Talmud course takes many hours of work outside the live sessions: text preparation, training, lesson planning, accessibility labour, and the ongoing work of holding a learning space where people can bring real questions without needing to perform a false version of themselves.

If you are able to pay the full amount, please do. If you are able to give more, that is deeply appreciated and helps make this learning possible for others.

At the same time, this beit midrash needs to be as accessible as possible. Neuroqueer Talmud is built for people who are often priced out of serious Jewish learning: disabled people, neurodivergent people, queer and trans people, students, unwaged people, underpaid workers, and others living within systems that make learning harder to access.

So please use the coupon codes as needed:

HEZI-HEZI gives 50% off.

REVA-REVA gives 25% off.

Use the code that makes the course possible for you. You do not need to explain or justify your situation.

If neither of these options makes the course accessible, please reach out. I want everyone who wants to learn Neuroqueer Talmud to be able to do so. No questions asked and no explanations needed. Just let me know what works for you.

If you have any questions ahead of signup, click here. If you’re ready to learn, please sign up below!