Shiur Beis

Shiur beis has been that out of reach, cool-club, better-than-gimmel, plane that I’ve had my subtly wishful eyes on since we got here. Until now there was no way I could handle shiur beis, but not anymore.

Of course, toward the end of the zman stress increases around the yeshiva in anticipation for the ferheirts (oral reviews) we all have to pass. This is especially so for me and Adam since we’re chavrusas and are shooting to get moved up from shiur gimmel to shiur beis.

Ah shiur beis. I don’t know exactly what they do, except it’s more in depth and advanced than shiur gimmel. To me, shiur beis and aleph are like the cool-club-frat-houses of YG while gimmel and daled are just where everyone else goes if they didn’t get the invite. Well, it’s not really like that at all but I have a odd way of looking at things.

I’m really sick of shiur gimmel anyway. At the beginning of the year we needed shiur gimmel. We sucked. We could hardly do anything, but we got an excellent shliach who taught us the first hour in the morning and, thanks to him, we managed to come well prepared for shiur in the morning. Then we started to get the hang of what was going on, started to learn more efficiently with our shliach in the morning, and began to keep a steady pace ahead of the shiur. By the next zman R Cohen suggested that we and another pair of chavrusas drop our shliach, so we did. We began learning by ourselves without the guidance of a shliach and it was a little difficult, but we just got up and found help every so often when we needed it. We needed help less and less, and started to cover more and more ground everyday until it got to the point where it didn’t make sense to go forward because there was no way the shiur was going to get as far as us. Then shiur started becoming a drag, the whole shiur getting stuck on an issue that we already understood and wanted to move forward.

I figured out how to fall asleep without getting caught.

I do well on my tests in comparison with everyone else. I saw some report graphs consisting of a pink line, me, hovering over a blue line, everyone else. I suppose that’s a good sign. What really counts though, is the ferheirt. That’s when you get the one-on-one. It’s given by whoever gives the next highest shiur, in my case R Leches (I think I spelled that right).

It’s fun and stressful at the same time. You walk into a room. He’s sits one ones side of the table and you on the other. He opens up casually. So the Gemara says such and such, does that fit with what Rav holds? You answer. You give the reasoning behind it according to what you learned in Tosfos. Easy, you explained exactly what you learned and rattled it off exactly how it’s written in the book. Wrong. It was the right answer, but it doesn’t make sense, see? Don’t you see that answer doesn’t make sense? I know that’s what you learned but it made sense to you? Ugh….stalemate, moving on. Then it goes what happens when such and such a thing happens. Easy, you give all scenarios and opinions. Oh really? Is that all the time? Are you sure about that? Then you go crazy. Did I forget a detail? Am I correct? What am I not seeing? What is it!? Yes I think so! What’d I miss?! Yes! That is my final answer! Now what am I missing?! Nothing. You were right all along (!@*&##%@#!).

And it goes like that for 50min…and I really had to use the bathroom.

Finally the last few minutes; so, you want to be a shiur beisman. And we explained why we felt it best to move up. He said it would be hard, but Gimmel had gotten to be like stale bread; sure you can eat it, but who wants to?

So do we move up? Well it turns out that….