This was my fourth Limmud Conference (and the 32nd year of Limmud). I keep meaning to write something about it afterwards but was never sure where to put it. There are some people who don't use Facebook, and who knows if they'd be able to read content I put there. I remembered this old blog so I'll try using it.
In future posts I'm going to write about individual sessions, this one is going to be about Limmud in general and practical details, most of which are in the handbook, but who has time to read the whole handbook?
I'd been hearing about Limmud for years from people who had presented or participated, and there had been some attempts to start a local Limmud in Jerusalem which I had been at, as well as other conferences in Israel somewhere along the same lines, the Edah Conference and Shaarayich, and in 2009 I had to travel to the US and decided to stop off there on the way. I haven't been back in the US since (There were some documents that I had to sign in person, which I found hard to believe, but I simply couldn't get some financial transactions performed without walking into a branch of my US bank and signing some things in front of a bank officer with a special stamp with florescent green ink.) but I've gone to Conference each winter
Most of the participants are from the UK but there are a good number of people from all over the world, so a note about getting there. It's at the University of Warwick, near Conventry, and while it's possible to get there on your own, there are coaches (buses, in American) from Golders Green in Northwest London and directly from Heathrow. I also heard something about a coach to and from Luton this year while I was there, but didn't get the details.
But a diversion about when Conference is. It officially runs from Sunday thru Thursday, but you can go for the Shabbat before, too. It's not as packed then as it is during the week, everyone fits in one of the dining halls at the same time then. And I prefer not to fly on Friday to avoid having to spend Shabbat in an airport in case of delays, so while some people from Israel take an overnight flight on Thursday night, get the coach on Friday morning, and hopefully get to Warwick in time for Shabbat, I come in on Wednesday or Thursday, stay with friends not far from Golders Green, and maybe get in a day of sightseeing in London. They also go to Limmud although usually not for Shabbat and we come back to London, I spend Shabbat with them and go back on Sunday or Monday.
There was a dinner for Limmud International volunteers (I'm on the Limmud Jerusalem team, we had our first Taste of Limmud event on Lag B'Omer earlier in the year) and some people from other Limmuds were staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Golders Green, but if you can't take extra time off from work, or don't want to spend money on a hotel, the Friday coach is a possibility.
Some practical details about the coach - order it together with your reservation for Conference, find out where and when it leaves (they should send you a letter or email but if you don't go to their website and look, and if you can't find it email them and ask before the last minute) and get there on time. The trip takes about two hours. In previous years there was a stop on the way there, this year there was a bathroom on the coach and no stop
There are also coaches on Sunday.
Now about accommodations. There a number of options, what I always choose is a single room with en-suite bathrooms (that's British for a private bathroom as opposed to a shared one) but there are also shared bathrooms, hotel style rooms, and rooms for families, but I don't know what any of those are like. I think the hotel and family rooms might be outside the Eruv, and while you can leave your key somewhere, you'll probably get contradictory information both about whether you need to wear your badge on Shabbat and whether you're allowed to wear it outside the Eruv.
One more thing about the Eruv, it doesn't include the whole campus. For the most part there are signs saying where it ends, but you have to keep an eye out for them (the map on the back of the program also shows where it is). And it's a bit tricky to get to the Social Sciences building without either leaving the Eruv or walking through the Arts Center which has electric doors so ask for directions.
Not everyone who is there for Shabbat keeps Shabbat, or has the same definition of what keeping Shabbat means, but the public spaces are Shabbat-observant. Also watch out for bathrooms in the public spaces that may have electric sensors, signs on the doors will warn about that.
I think that in order not to have Limmud endorse any stream of Judaism, it doesn't arrange for prayers, people do that themselves. In past years there have been Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform/Liberal (with musical instruments) services and this year we started a Shira Hadasha style Orthodox service with increased women's participation (a women leads Kabbalat Shabbat and a man leads Maariv, in the morning a woman leads Psukei D'zimra and a man leads from Yishtabach, also the Torah reading has both men and women reading and getting aliyot. The people who organize the services also bring siddurim and sifrei Torah, we didn't have our own Torah and had to wait for another service to finish with theirs which gave me time to look over the aliya I was reading one more time as well as drink enough arak to not be nervous about it but not so much arak as to forget the whole aliya. The regular Orthodox minyan was run by people from Yakar's branches in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and London.
After Maariv this year there was a kiddush, what it said in the program was that food would be available for children and hungry adults but it turned out just about everyone was hungry. Then there was a session (an hour long) followed by dinner. The food on Shabbat is meat (there are vegetarian options, but order in advance if you want it, and don't switch at the last minute if you think the vegetarian choice looks better, at least not until all the vegetarians have gotten their food). During the rest of the week it's dairy (although you can register for a meat dinner one night, no extra charge, or buy hamburgers at night near the bar, I haven't tried the meat dinner and I wasn't hungry enough for a burger, although one night it might have been a better use of time to not go back for seconds for dinner and grab a burger later on.
The food at Limmud isn't anything to rave about, and of course one of the Limmud core values is "complain about the food" (that last bit is not really true), but it's not bad. You won't go hungry, and some of it is even good. But it helps to know how it works.
On Friday when the coach arrives the dining room (one flight up in the Roots building) has sandwiches, and fruit. Friday night and Shabbat lunch are in the dining room one more flight up in Roots, trays of food are brought to each table, and usually keep coming throughout the meal. There's a cold breakfast on Shabbat morning which many people sleep thru although it goes on for a while so if you get up late you can choose if you want to eat or daven.
Seudah Shlishit is just a snack, it's not that long after lunch (this is the winter in the UK, Shabbat is out early but there's dinner on Saturday night.
There is (almost) always tea and coffee available and usually biscuits (cookies) with it. Remember that this is England and queuing is important but not terribly efficient. Patience helps. The coffee is not the greatest and I discovered that the sugar packages were smaller than the ones I'm used to in Israel, but putting a lot of both into a cup made something that kept me awake. There was coffee made in a French press served weekday afternoons in the Terrace Bar this year but the one cup I had while flavorful wasn't as strong as I like it. And there were days that the sessions I went to kept me no where near the brewed coffee. I also had a small supply of coffee bags (like tea bags, but with ground coffee), enough for one or two cups a day,
All the food is free (well you've already paid for it) except for the burgers and drinks at the bar. The location of the bar moves around from year to year, this year there were two of them, a noisier bar in Roots and a quieter one in the Student Union (which was also where the brewed coffee was distributed). There are a few beers on tap (and one alcoholic cider), some bottled beers (they sometimes ran out of wedges of lime or lemon for the Corona) wine, and harder stuff. I think they make mixed drinks. The volunteers behind the bar did a very good job this year and even knew how to correctly pour a Guinness, although sometimes they have trouble and all that comes out of a tap is foam, be patient with them (or order something else). You can also get soft drinks and packets of crisps (bags of potato chips). And squash is not a vegetable but a fruit flavored soft drinks.
Weekdays, there's a hot breakfast, although I usually didn't wake up in time for it. (There is also a choice of morning minyan, that wasn't even within the realm of possibility, notice how detailed my observations about the bar were ...) I made it to Chavruta two mornings, and there are pastries and yogurts there (but no coffee, I ran to the dining room one flight down, went in through the out door to skip the line for food, and got hot water and sugar to combine with my coffee bag) and one time went back to the dining room after Chavruta and grabbed a bowl of cold cereal, they had stopped serving hot breakfast by then. Another approach is the walk-and-grab breakfast, where you walk through the dining room grabbing anything you can eat on the way to a session without spilling, such as fruit, pastries, yogurts. You're not supposed to take food out of the dining room but no one has ever said anything. This year there was a new grab 'n' go breakfast (that's what they call it, walk-and-grab is not an officially sanctioned form of feeding oneself) in the Library Cafe where there was the same things as at Chavruta but also trays of porridge (oatmeal) that you could spoon into styrofoam cups and eat at your first session. And sometimes there was enough left there after the first sessions for second breakfast, in case you're feeling like a hobbit.
There is the same choice for lunch, you can go get a hot lunch at the dining room, although I usually don't because you miss a session eating lunch (I try to go to as many sessions as I could, although some people prefer a break), there are grab 'n' go lunches in the Library Cafe and Ramphal where you can get sandwiches (I ate a lot of tuna, which for some reason also contains corn) and hot soup. Every day I went back and got another cup of soup but that wouldn't work if everyone did it ...
Dinner is more complicated. There's no grab 'n' go, and there are two partially overlapping sessions, so you either go to the earlier session and then go eat or eat first and go to the second session. And you never know which of the two dining rooms dinner is going to be in. Someone will direct you to the first or second floor of Roots. Or you might wait in a queue (line) for a bit and then be sent to the other floor. One night I wanted seconds but by the time I got there they had switched which level was serving food.
In previous years the upstairs dining room had long tables, and you'd be seated next to whoever you were standing next to in the queue and platters of food were brought to the table, but this year there were round tables, lines to get food, and you could sit wherever you wanted.
Oh yes, in the UK dessert is called pudding, even if it's cake, and it almost always comes with a yellow custard sauce.
That's probably all the practical details, future posts will be about the sessions I went to.
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