New Haven native and Kippah-wearing, esoteric philosopher, Jared Gimbel, is the President of the Yiddish Club and the only observant Jew larping on campus. Jared, while on a sugar high from a chocolate ice cream bar, sat down with the Argus to talk about his mystical outlook in life.
Argus: What do you bring to the Wesleyan campus, in your own words, of course?
Jared Gimbel: Aside from my voice, which is very loud and I haven’t noticed any down sides to that quite yet at all, I am able to bring the certain mystical and soulful side to Judaism and to religion in general that perhaps people might have happened to have hidden from their eyes, especially in the eyes of Israel and the media. We live in a day in which many of the canonical texts of scripture in all of the religions are heavily hidden from us and we don’t know their contents. I happened to have maintained my ties to the outside world unlike many other yeshiva students and maintaining a double life between the religious community and the modern world, especially the gaming sphere as well. I tried to reconcile my great interest in the humanities and try to realize how my religious tradition ultimately fit into it. Wesleyan has ultimately been the answer for that in the respect that it manages to become much like the mystical traditions—a unifying theory for all studies under the sun.
A: What’s your favorite food?
JG: If it weren’t so dangerous I would definitely pick Israeli falafel in Northeastern Jerusalem but it happens to induce euphoria to a degree that I just know it can’t be good for you, or anyone else.
A: You’re a COL major, why?
JG: One thing that has always intrigued me, especially in the College of Letters, has been how language has tied in with Judaism in general, and how the Jews have influenced language and Hollywood in general, and how a symbiotic relationship formed between the two of them. ADDIN AudioMarker 755 One of my goals concerning COL is to one day bring a water gun to class.
A: What do you think is missing from campus?
JG: Well, volume. And not in the scientific definition. I just want this to be a place of endless energy where there should absolutely be no doubt of time. That would make both Socrates and me continuously happy and had Socrates lived in that world perhaps they wouldn’t have given him the hemlock.
A: So, in conclusion, what makes you a WesCeleb?
JG: First off, I have looked at, in fine detail, the Kabbalistic texts and the mystical tradition in Judaism without dying and going insane, which has already been something that some of the Talmudic sages were not quite capable of. Also, behaving like Socrates in many public places in Usdan, trying to start conversations out of turn, just simply shouting for shouting’s sake in addition to trying to start arguments whenever possible and perhaps being the most notorious class loud mouth ever, without having as much as an empty bottle thrown at me.