On February 2nd, the Beit Midrash Committee celebrated the inaugural Night Seder event in the Beren Campus Beit Midrash. The program attracted over fifty Stern students and was a huge success.
A lot of hard work went into this great event. Shoshana Klafter, co-president of the Beit Midrash Committee, admitted that “planning it was difficult and took a lot of time.” The committee spent considerable hours thinking about how they wanted to run the event in order to get a good turnout, while at the same time establishing night seder as a consistent community at Stern. In order to accomplish this, they decided to have three students and Rabbi Bronstein Yosef Bronstein, a member of Stern’s Shabbat Campus Couple, speak briefly, and then have an open Beit Midrash.
Three students spoke on the topics of learning Torah lishma, for its own sake, the importance of a Beit Midrash environment, and learning b’chavruta. Rabbi Bronstein took a break from the regular Tuesday night class that he gives in order to offer words of encouragement and praise about this new initiative.
Students were then free to learn either individually or in groups. The Beit Midrash Committee had source sheets and articles available from rabbis such as Rav Amital if students needed material to learn.
Jennifer van Amerongen, the co-president of the Beit Midrash Committee, said that the goal that the committee had in mind was “to help build a community of Torah Learning on our campus. Hopefully this will be a place for students with the common interest of learning Torah in their free time can come together fill the walls of the Beit Midrash with kol shel Torah [words of Torah].”
Van Amerongen and Klafter had been discussing the possibility of night seder for a while, and are excited that this idea was able to come to fruition. “I hope people enjoyed the event and will continue to learn in the Beit Midrash,” Klafter said.
Night seder at Stern will be happening in the Beit Midrash every night from 7-9 PM. The Beit Midrash Committee does not expect that every student will be there every night, but encourages students make a commitment to themselves to take advantage of this new initiative, and to “join for as long and as often as you want,” Klafter and van Amerongen agreed.