Got a whole ass train to myself today. God, do I love being alone with my thoughts.
Reading, metro rides and music on the way home is the only thing that’s keeping me sane after my research work.
I’ve met so many people with Alzheimer’s and let me tell you, our brains are such fickle little mushes. I met a 68 year old woman with a PhD in Physics, who published multiple books and scientific articles, and she’s having a hard time recognising her own children. Barely can remember her name (after several prompts), concepts of money and time vanished. I just wanted to say, take in everything, the good and the bad, because things are so fleeting.
@harryhoney-bee I put on my kurti today and thought of you because of all the green 😂
Hello friends! How is everyone? It’s been a while since I posted on here, things have been very busy and I’ve sort of fallen off the tumblr hook oops 😅
It’s mind blowing how fast the end of the semester is approaching~ sometimes it still feels like January !!! There have been highs and lows since the last time I checked in, but I’m so grateful to have the experiences I’ve gotten and be able to see my growth over the semester. I’m excited to be continuing in this lab over the summer and to keep the research going :) hopefully I’ll remember to take more pictures ahahah
I’ve not discussed my internship experience so far because I was waiting for the perfect time to do it once I am done but I am now starting to realise that there is no such thing as perfect timing for anything in life! I also haven’t written a blog post in months! So here’s a glimpse into a day in my life as a research intern at a neuroscience research lab!
9 AM.
I start my day by trying to get to the lab on time, so that I can catch up with incoming e-mails, as well as journal while drinking my morning coffee! This is also the time when I plan out the tasks of the day that I would like to accomplish and catch up with fellow interns, which are all fellow neuroscience masters students! They’ve been making my experience at this internship really fun!
10 - 12 PM.
Focused work time. Currently, I’ve been sat at a desk running GLM analyses on the previously collected fMRI data for our research project. I need to run 144 model comparisons in total, as they are all part of our data analysis and because I will be looking at neural correlates of social decision making for my thesis it was important for me to learn how to run this analysis with SPM (a toolkit for fMRI data for MATLAB). Thankfully, I did not need to develop my own pipeline code for this analysis because it was kindly provided for me by a PhD student at our lab who collected the fMRI data before I started my internship. I just go through my list of GLM’s that I need to run and adjust the main script as necessary.
12-1 PM.
Dedicated lab lunch time. We have an open space lab, which makes it easy to interact not only with fellow masters student interns, but also PhD’s and post-docs, as well as our lab PI’s, so we always end up eating lunch together.
1-5 PM.
More focused work time. As I’m running my GLM analysis on a PC, I’m able to multi-task and work on other things on my MacBook. Last week I was working on a group project paper for one of my courses that I had to finish this semester about Alzheimer’s disease. However, since I submitted it successfully I will now need to focus on writing my thesis. I haven’t started yet and I will have about two months of dedicated writing time to finish my analyses and writing the report. Other tasks depend on what I have scheduled for myself that day.
I usually leave the lab after 5 pm and take the evenings off! It’s been tremendously helpful with finding good work and life balance, which is important for me because I struggle with perfectionism and could end up working days on end! Having evenings for myself or socialising helps with productivity, so it is nice to have dedicated work and relaxation time during my days. It helps me with stress and motivation, as well as general productivity and focus!
I hope you found this post somewhat insightful or entertaining because I had truly missed writing blog posts! If you would like to read more from me, click HERE to see other blog posts! You can also follow my studygram HERE for some inspiration!
Several things have happened within the last few weeks! I re-sat that exam in Edinburgh, completed my research internship in Germany, and came back to the states and moved into my apartment at my home uni! :-) I won’t have my exam results for several days, but it went smoothly and I’d appreciate some positive vibes! Germany was just amazing and the internship was a life changing experience for sure. It feels great to be back with friends but it also feels so foreign. I feel a bit confused, but am working through it. Excited for classes to start, nonetheless!!
Reform Judaism Founders in America: Isaac Mayer Wise, David Einhorn, and Max Lilienthal
By Josh Daniels, Former Research Intern
Josh Daniels is writing a two-part series of blog posts on the intellectual foundations of Reform Judaism. See his first post here.
Once Reform Judaism began to spread to America, it encountered a very different environment than the one it came from back in Germany. Politically, the American Constitution promised rights to religious freedom, preventing the government from sanctioning the liturgy, practices, and limitations of religious reform as was the case in Germany. From a theological standpoint, there was no central orthodoxy established in America in the middle of the 19th century which could curtail reform, certain small Jewish communities in places like South Carolina notwithstanding. Despite the open-ended possibilities for reform, the directions the movement took in America roughly followed along the paths set down in Germany by Holdheim, Zunz, and Geiger. The atmosphere of religious freedom and optimism in America is summarized by an article by Abram S. Isaacs in the 1899 edition of the American Jewish Year Book:
“…the marked changes that have followed successive landslides of immigrants to American shores have demanded broader and more effective agencies, and given, to a certain degree, shape and direction to our community. While in many countries the medieval spirit still prevails, making the Jew a wanderer and an outcast, on American soil he seems to be preparing a distinctly new era, and, composed of representatives of every clime and nationality, American Israel meets with full confidence the currents of the time.”[1]
Like in Germany, reform in America manifested in areas of liturgy, religious education, positions on intermarriage, and many others. As early as 1824, “The Reform Society of Israelites” founded in Charleston, South Carolina adopted the reform Hamburg Temple prayerbook. As immigrants continued to bring Reform Judaism to America, the positions of Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim would both find proponents on our side of the Atlantic.
Portrait of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1899) by James Landy (1888). Cincinnati, 19th Century. Collection of Yeshiva University Museum, New York, Gift of Dr. Hyman Bogomolyn Grinstein.
Isaac Mayer Wise was born in 1819 in Germany, and came to America in 1846. He championed the views of Abraham Geiger, such as the position that reform was a project which should take place within the whole of the Jewish community, and not on the periphery.[2] Wise and Geiger can be considered the more conservative strain of reform in the 19th century. While not necessarily associated with what we now know as the Conservative movement, these two thinkers retained the importance of such ideas as the unity of world Jewry, the preservation of Hebrew as the language of prayer, and the aversion to intermarriage.
David Einhorn, c. 1860, artist unknown, Jewish Museum of Maryland, L1987.018.001. http://jewishmuseummd.org/2013/07/museum-insights-july-19-2013/
As Wise became one of the main supporters of Geiger in America, David Einhorn promulgated Samuel Holdheim’s ideas. Einhorn, at first, was a severe critic of Wise. Einhorn attacked Wise’s project of “the unification of all American Jews” and “the creation of a distinctly American Judaism.”[3] English was to take the place of German, primarily in the realm of education. Einhorn was appalled by this, believing that the distinctive European brand of Reform Judaism should be “confined to a cultural elite – a German-speaking cultural elite to be specific.”[4] Wise and Einhorn were both heavily involved in the many conferences held in the mid-19th century, all aimed at implementing reform. The two would trade colorful insults in their respective periodicals, but ultimately, both were able to solidify their visions of reform into institutions of American Judaism – Wise with his Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Einhorn with his contribution to the official ideology of American Reform Judaism.[5]
From the website of Central Synagogue. http://www.centralsynagogue.org/about_us/archives/our-senior-rabbis-through-the-years
Last, there is one more reformer to mention who became a dominant figure in the Jewish Reform community of New York: Dr. Max Lilienthal. Lilienthal’s role more clearly paints a picture of what the details of American reform looked like. This reformer was Dr. Max Lilienthal. Born in Munich in 1814, Lilienthal came from a wealthy family which recognized the benefits of both a religious and a secular education. He studied both at a yeshiva “and became one of the first rabbinical candidates to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Munich, where he became imbued with the discipline and values of Wissenschaft, the historical-philological study of texts.”[6] He emigrated to New York in 1845, where he became the rabbi of three German Jewish congregations. His contributions to The Occidental, the first Jewish periodical in the United States, tells us what the project of American reform looked like. An article about Lilienthal’s activities as rabbi from 1847 describes the institutionalization of a process of confirmation, which entailed that “every boy at twelve years of age, and every girl at eleven, is to receive preparatory religious instructions from the chief Rabbi himself… These instructions are to consist of the knowledge of religion in general, but particularly the principles of the Jewish creed and its revelations.”[7] The article also details the order and conduct in the synagogue during prayer services, the establishment of a rabbinical court, specific marriage laws, and the provision of reliable kosher butchers. Throughout the article, the author continuously mentions that his formulations of all of these elements of the Jewish community are “in accordance with the strictest rules of orthodoxy, as laid down in the Talmud and the Shulchan-Aruch.”[8] The types of contributions made by Lilienthal that I think are most interesting are the interpretations of texts with an eye for historical contexts. For example, one of his articles in the Jewish publication known as the Asmonean contained an article denying “that the Talmud had the status of divine revelation, arguing that historical research concerning its authors would remove their ‘halos’”.[9]
All of this just scratches the surface of the actions of these three great reformers. They took the spirit of reform which was ignited in the synagogues of Germany and not only made them relevant for Jews in an American context, but much of the work they had to do involved building all of the infrastructure required for such a community to exist. Even more importantly, these thinkers and their disciples created long traditions of thought which enabled Jews to engage meaningfully with many other elements of society, such as Enlightenment and secularist values, while maintaining a robust and honest connection to the spiritual heritage of Judaism.
