Exploring Jewish Space: A Critique of Limmud Keith Harris It is a deeply engrained tradition in Jewish learning, that in order to approach a phenomenon about which we want to learn, we have to ask the correct questions. Indeed this questioning attitude is perhaps the greatest and most enduring tradition in Jewish scholarship. Yet what sort of questions we should ask is less often considered. Usually we ask 'what' and 'why' questions; 'What does this passage mean?' Or, 'Why does Rashi say such and such?' Yet there are other ways of asking questions that open up radically new insights into the Jewish world, questions of time and space, questions of 'where' and 'when'. By asking these questions of the Limmud conference I want to show how situating our Jewish concerns in time and space can show us new directions in the development of Jewish life in Britain. Limmud is a conference that takes place each year for five days over Christmas in the UK. It began in 1980 with 80 participants, primarily as a conference of educators. It has grown to the point where in 1997 there were 1200 participants. The content of the conference is 'educational' in its broadest sense. Between 8am and lam there are five to ten sessions taking place - from Jewish music and comedy performances to Talmud shiurim. Space and Time As dimensions along which social life is organised, space and time are taken for granted in much lay and academic thinking. They are absolutely inescapable features of everyday practice and discourse. We use metaphors such as 'mapping' a particular intellectual 'terrain' or securing a firm 'grounding' in a particular subject, for example. We rarely stop to think what such spatial metaphors actually imply and why they are so omnipresent. As Edward Soja (1989), following 39