Playing Tourist

Another guest blog, with my (Jessica's) comments in blue. Michael wrote first, in black. This week the time finally came to play my role as a proper tourist in Israel, which can generally mean only one thing: museum time! Since Jessica had only been to the Israel Museum to see one or two exhibits, I did not feel too guilty about bringing her back there to do some more exploring. I actually wanted to go back. And I still haven't seen the whole thing, so I'm looking forward to having more visitors to "drag" me back there! The Israel Museum is a large campus containing a main exhibit hall as well as a few smaller buildings for temporary or special exhibits. The first building we hit contained an exhibit of an odd sort: bread. Actually, first we hit the cafe, which was very good by museum standards. We had been warned by friends to go to the bread exhibit on full stomachs. But I digress. The entire building (2 small floors) was dedicated to exhibiting the breads used by different cultures for holidays, religious events, and milestone occasions. For example, there were parts devoted to challah, matzah, and Easter bread. It turned out to be a fascinating exhibit, since I had never given much thought to the significance of bread from a religious perspective (contrary to a good kugel, which has always held a special place in my heart—and stomach usually around Rosh Ha’shana). I thought it was interesting that while bread has always been important to Jews and Christians, it is only now in modern times gaining importance in Islamic culture. I also found it amusing that on every display showing a different type of bread, all real-but-preserved, there were signs in Hebrew, English, and possibly also Arabic warning that the bread was preserved and poisoned, so we shouldn't touch it or eat it. Mom and Dad, this one closes before you get here. Sorry.

The next stop at the museum was an enormous model of Jerusalem around the time the Second Temple was still standing. Even having visited the Old City and Western Wall in the last several days, it is hard to appreciate the significance of a walled city and the Temple without seeing the role it played in that era, both religiously and geographically. The Second Temple occupied an enormous part of the city, and the rest of the city was basically designed around the Temple. Without seeing a model, it is easy to visit the Western Wall without understanding why it is such a sacred location. Don't get too accustomed to having links in blogs. Or else demand that Michael shows me how to do it...if it's not complicated.

The third destination at the museum was a special, permanent exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving Biblical documents written before 100 CE. The museum hosts this exhibit in a unique structure that looks almost like a giant Hershey-kiss from the outside. Chocolate analogy. Bonus points! As you enter the building through a wide tunnel, you come to the center of the “kiss”, where a round fire-place-like structure sits in the center of the building. Wrapped around this structure, against a white background, is an enormous piece of the Scrolls. Sort of. Upon closer inspection, I found a caption reading “Above is a facsimile of…” At first I was a little disappointed that this grand structure was dedicated to displaying just a copy of the Scrolls, but fortunately, there were several equally interesting and original objects also on display including the Aleppo Codex, believed to be the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible (and by complete, we mean ignoring the huge chunks that have been lost including almost the entire Torah! The last couple chapters of Deuteronomy are apparently there. And a small scrap of Exodus is in the wallet of someone in New York.)

The rest of the museum was a more traditional display of Judaica items and an impressive collection of art including original works by Cezanne, Pissaro, and Gauguin and a sprinkling of Monet, Warhol, and more. While much the Judaica exhibit was predictable (candlesticks and Torah covers spanning 100s of years and several continents), there were a few intriguing items. My personal favorite was the candelabra-cube, a metal cube with holes carved on each side to hold candles for six different occasions including Shabbat, Chanukah, a normal dinner, and a wedding. Seemed like a pretty clever invention to me—one “candlestick” for every occasion—now if it had candles secretly stored inside, I would have been extremely impressed. One of my favorites was the "prayer ball" which appeared to be essentially a swiss army knife of prayers. It was the size of a slightly overgrown baseball, with about 5 or 6 silver sheets that came out with different prayers on them. The future rabbi in me thought it was cool!

By far, the most interesting exhibit on display in the museum was . . . wait for it . . . a Hebrew Union College diploma! In an exhibit about the role of women in contemporary Jewish life, alongside a special headcovering for women rabbis that looked like a kippuh with a pony-tail, the diploma from the 1980s was somewhat tucked away in a corner, but easily represented the most recent advancement of women’s roles in Jewish religious life. Go, Jessica! Most of the exhibit, placed upstairs in a small hall overlooking a replica of a synagogue, showed more "traditional" aspects of Jewish women's lives: head coverings, Shabbat candlesticks. The "progressive" corner was just that: a small corner including the kippah and diploma in a small, not well lit part of the display. Maybe it will expand eventually.

In addition to our museum time, I dragged Jessica back to the Israel Supreme Court for a tour, to satisfy the inner-law-student in me. The Supreme Court is just across the way from the Knesset (Parliament) and the future site of the Prime Minister’s office and lives in a modern building flooded with natural light. For the most part the Israel Supreme Court (ISC) functions in a similar manner as the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) with a few exceptions. First, the ISC does not always sit as a full panel of 15 justices; rather, most cases are heard by a 3-judge panel much like the Appeals Courts of the US but as few as 1 judge or as many as all 15. Second, ISC justices face mandatory retirement at age 70 unlike SCOTUS justices who serve life sentences terms. Third, the ISC hears petitions directly from any Israeli resident who claims his/her human/civil/natural rights have been violated by a government policy (and has $400). In the US, claims of violations of constitutional rights go through the same court system as any civil lawsuit and rarely advance to the SCOTUS. Fourth and most significantly, the ISC hears ~15,000 cases per year versus the SCOTUS’s ~70 cases per year. Stats like that make the SCOTUS look just as productive as Congress, but I digress. . . . Also, there are 5 women currently serving on the ISC, including the current Chief Justice, who is chosen purely on the basis of seniority, politics (for once) aside.

The third tourist attraction for the week was the Old City, a must-do for every visitor. If you're keeping track, we actually did the Old City a couple of days earlier. In many ways, one of the most awe inspiring parts of the Old City is simply walking through one of its gates. Seeing the city’s walls from far away and then walking through them gives you a sense of entering a grand castle or fortress (though the taxis driving in and out of the gates lessen that impact slightly). Inside, the Old City is a mix of tourist traps, private residences, religious institutions, and sacred sites. Oh yeah, and hundreds of tour groups. I think there are more English speakers there right now than Hebrew speakers. Ick. In some ways, the Jewish Quarter reflects the layout of the rest of Jerusalem with stretches of shops and restaurants (e.g., Ben Yehuda Street) and religious neighborhoods and institutions (e.g., Mea Sharim). However, the grounds of the Western Wall are second-to-none in religious significance, as demonstrated both by the number of people praying at, kissing, and simply visiting the wall as well as the security presence controlling access to the grounds. There is also a strong religious presence: the men and women are separated to approach the wall itself, women are required to be dressed "modestly," men must have their heads covered, cameras are not allowed on Shabbat or holidays, and the list goes on. It is governed right now like a very traditional synagogue. It also took me longer to finish my time at the wall, because I had trouble actually approaching it. The women's side is much smaller than the men's side, and therefore always crowded. It can take a while to actually get through the crowd and close enough to touch the wall. My biases aside... The most striking part of the Old City is how each of the city’s quarters (Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Muslim) are strictly divided, yet visitors flow seamlessly from one to the next. One minute we were walking along a string of Jewish shops selling expensive talit and artwork and the next minute we were surrounded by small vendors selling spices, cheap souvenirs, and employing high-pressure sales tactics. Passing neither a sign nor security, we had leaped from the Jewish Cardo shops to the Arab shuk all in a matter of a few steps. Not a security problem! The Arab shuk in the Old City is also a tourist site and a cool place to wander, but not for too long for the claustrophobic. Mom, you'll love the fabrics. We wandered around three of the four quarters before treating ourselves to the obligatory falafel pita and heading back from Old to New.

Just realized after re-reading that there are several feminist rants from me in this one. Heehee. Oops. Didn't mean for it all to come out at once. :) Saroj: safe travels and see you soon!!

Shabbat Shalom and happy new year!!

Lessons Learned

So I thought that once I was done with exams and on vacation, I would be done learning for a few weeks. But as you might expect, somehow when I get out of a classroom, the learning starts. Things I’ve learned this week:

Freeze yummy cookies so that Santa won’t eat them. I guess I didn’t really learn that one, but that was my observation when I woke up the morning of the 25^th and realized that I had put my delicious box of cookies from home in the freezer before going to bed the night before. The thinking was really that they had been out for a week and it was time, but I suppose maybe there was some subconscious Santa-prevention going on. Sort of like the board that used to be in Grandma and Grandpa’s fire place in Great Neck. In reality, I am not sure there’s a city that notices Christmas less than Jerusalem. I played tour guide on Christmas day in the Old City, admittedly not all that well, but I did talk to some shopkeepers in Hebrew. While we didn’t make it more than a few steps into the Christian Quarter, there were no signs of Christmas anywhere else, other than the massive numbers of American Jews visiting on their vacations.

Storm drains are an amazing invention. We took a day trip to Tel Aviv on Tuesday, hoping to get to an arts fair that they have twice a week and that I can’t really do when I’m in classes. By the time we arrived there late Tuesday morning, it was raining lightly. The fair was okay, but it seemed that a whole bunch of the vendors didn’t come because of the weather, and most of the ones who were there had their tables covered in semi-transparent plastic, and would lift it if you looked interested. The street the fair was on was a pedestrian street, closed all the time to traffic. It also appeared to be the garment district of Tel Aviv, but none of the garments were made yet. As in, there were at least two dozen fabric stores down this one street. Maybe more. Mom, you were missed. (Well, sort of. We would have been there a lot longer if you had been there! Perhaps Dad and I will drop you off and meet you on the other end.) Eventually, we got hungry and headed to a street with a bunch of restaurants, including one where we were hoping to go again. Walking down the street was a challenge though. It started raining harder, and we noticed that Tel Aviv streets don’t have storm drains. This is a problem. It means that in a downpour, the water all rushes down the sides of the streets, but there’s nowhere to go except downhill. We tried crossing one street, only to realize about two-thirds of the way across that without an ark or bathing suit, we weren’t going to make it the rest of the way. That’s right, we turned around and just couldn’t cross the street at that corner! We had to go across the other way, and essentially cross the other three places at that one intersection instead. When we finally saw Max Brenner’s across the street, the restaurant we had been aiming for the whole time, we were sadly disappointed to realize that the entire block of the restaurant was surrounded by a 4-6 foot wide rushing moat. (It was literally the width of the cars parked on the side of the street!) Unfortunately, sacrifices must be made for a good meal, so we had to splash through the ankle-deep water to earn the deliciousness awaiting us inside. We sat there for a good three hours, not wanting to deal with the storm drain lacking city outside. But we learned another good lesson! Dress for the weather? Not exactly.

If you’re going to get stranded somewhere, do so in a chocolate shop. Max Brenner’s is a chocolate shop first of all. They also have real food, and the soup we started with was delicious (although it didn’t dry my socks or my shoes). But for the next three hours, we sat and talked and watched the other diners around us and inhaled the aroma of chocolate. And then when we were hungry again after lunch, we had some chocolate fondue. They bring out fresh fruit, marshmallows (kosher ones, but covered in chocolate it doesn’t matter as much), and “cake” which was more like pieces of churro, or sugar coated bread. They also bring you two separate fondue bowls, so you can choose two types of chocolate: dark, milk, or white. “Dark and dark, please.” I knew there was a reason Michael and I got along so well.

Bureaucracy is awful, but more bearable in English. We took a trip to the municipality office this morning to deal with a student reduction in renters’ property taxes that we were notified about during exams, and which had to be done before the end of the calendar year. We arrived as recommended, a few minutes before the offices opened at 8 am. We left around 10:30. In between, we dealt with several clerks who all gave different answers and couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English, wrote out an affidavit of monthly expenses, all in Hebrew, and successfully pulled a very Israeli “I was here earlier, so even though I left in the middle to go take care of something that wasn’t ready when I walked in, I’m not waiting in the over-an-hour-long line again so I’m next.” But we also succeeded in getting the reduction we came in for! Yay. It might have taken just as long in English, but I wouldn’t have misspelled every couple of words in my affidavit or had to have things explained to me quite as many times, quite as slowly. Success in a foreign language might be even sweeter though.

If you measure snow in millimeters, it sounds more impressive. We had heard that Jerusalem shuts down in the snow. The student services coordinator for my program warned us that the city shuts down, and when there was a little snow in the forecast, she even sent an email to the whole class, much of which is on vacation in America right now, advising us to stock up on necessities. It started snowing this afternoon! For the first few hours, it was really just pretty, but sticking on nothing but the trees. Later it made the sidewalks slushy and the streets a little slick, but the cars all pretty much disappeared. On the way to meeting friends for dinner, two double-length Egged buses drove by. Early evening, they’re usually packed. There were about five people on each bus. Everyone must have gone home early! Why? THERE WERE 10 MILLIMETERS OF SNOW!!! That’s right. An article on Ha’aretz online said that, in early evening. (There’s more now.) But doesn’t 10 millimeters sound a lot more threatening than one centimeter? Or less than half an inch? Maybe the DC area wouldn’t get so much crap for shutting down for an inch of snow if it was reported as 25 millimeters instead. Especially because Americans don't understand the metric system.

The guest blogger is too tired to add his opinions tonight (probably because he was up and at the municipality with me at 7:50 this morning), so expect some edits or a long comment tomorrow!

Guest blogger!

This message is brought to you by a special guest blogger (and the letter “C” for Chanukah). (And by Jessica as usual, in blue.) Chanukah in Israel has been a wonderful and delicious treat, except for one slightly ironic feature: exams. As much as we like to claim that Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas, it really seems to function that way here. All the decorations in stores and on the street are for Hanukkah; the restaurants and shuks have abundant platters of sufganiyot; and Israelis take their winter vacations during Hanukkah—except for HUC students. This seems to be the one time of the year that the HUC-Jerusalem program reverts to American practices for scheduling and instead of having HUC students go on a Chanukah vacation like the rest of the country, they stress over final exams, so many of them can travel home or abroad on (cough) Christmas vacation. (Or have visitors come to us! About half the class is around this break, with lots of visitors.) I only spent about 2 and a half hours at the airport waiting for my visitor's late plane, but I brought a paper to edit, and ended up talking to an Israeli grandfather for a good half an hour, all in Hebrew! Visitor and bags arrived, fully intact!

Notwithstanding the studying, reviews, and exams, this week has been a great chance to hear everyone’s exciting plans for break (and having just finished my own exams, to laugh at those still seeking the light at the end of the tunnel). And of course, finishing exams was a huge relief for everyone until they realized they are now a whopping 10% finished with school. Oh, to be in law school…but I digress… Exams were...well, they're over. I got both my 10-page papers turned in a day early, a take-home exam (hand written, 5 sides-of-page, in Hebrew), and three exams allllll finished. And help carrying more than a dozen books back to the library. You're welcome. Keyboard thief! A couple of people in the last exam, Thursday afternoon, even brought some wine to open when we finished. And then we realized we have to do this nine more times. Except that most of them will be in English.

On night 6, Wednesday night, HUC had a Chanukkah gathering, with "significant others" (SOs) invited. They got to experience what we're getting used to: every occasion is reason to study some ancient text at least tangentially related to the topic. This time it was camels, flax, and responsibility. With rabbinic mentions (incorrectly) of torts and class action lawsuits. (Oy!) They also gave us sufganiyot and we sang songs. The life of a rabbinic student is never dull. And I'm the editor, so it's hard to disagree:) We did wonder a little about the scheduling on a night when most of us had at least one exam to study (cram) for the next day. On the seventh night of Hanukkah, one of the HUC rabbis led an oversized group of SOs and a few HUCers through Mea Sharim, an ultra-orthodox community, to see all of the Hanukkiyot in the windows and in front of the gates to their homes. The ultra-orthodox community is less a single group of religious Jews and much more a conglomeration of groups of mostly immigrant Jews whose clans collectively form a patchwork of ultra-Orthodox styles somewhat identifiable by variations in dress or custom. While it was interesting to learn about their community, to see their homes, and observe families together for the holiday, it was also a little surprising to see how unwelcome a probably-too-large group of 20 students was while wandering through their streets. Whether they all constantly feel like a tourist attraction or just a few outliers chose to express their annoyance (to understate it), it was not quite the “welcome a stranger to your home” attitude that I expected from the ultra-Orthodox. We were asked by one man to move on or leave, and we walked away, further into the neighborhood. We were asked by another one, less nicely, to please leave. We continued walking. The third person made no effort to be nice. He told us to leave, and then when our professor wished him a happy holiday, he started screaming. He pointed and started yelling "rasha, rasha, rasha!" (Evil one, evil one, evil one.) Many of the people who lived right there came out, but they neither joined him or stopped him. It was a frightening and somewhat depressing experience. We did leave after that, stopping on the way back to the twenty-first century to have a debriefing (in a church courtyard, actually). We debated whether we have more in common with these people or with non-Jews in our communities at home, and with whom our futures are more attached. Somehow, it all makes it back to rabbinic questions.

On a lighter note, yesterday was a much more appropriate way to conclude one holiday and immediately begin another one. It started with an early morning trip to the shuk to stock up for a big dinner. (Yes mom, I was out the door at 7:15am). (Jessica’s mom, I’m always an early riser and out the door early). (Jessica, OK, I’ll stop pretending). I was up first. But not by too much. The shuk was surprisingly empty, and some of the vendors were even closed, possibly due to Hanukkah vacations. Those that were open were stocked with Sufganiyot and Hanukkiyot in addition to the endless mountains of produce and other foods for sale. I was happy and grateful to have the help and company! We got more than a shuk-cart-full, and it was far heavier than usual. Potatoes, chicken, and veggies for 11 are not light. And obviously some treats: challah for french toast, chocolate-filled sufganiyot...

As soon as we returned home it was time to start the mad preparations for dinner in a race against the clock. I had to do some convincing that we really had to start right away. We did. The menu for the night included the traditional latkes, Israeli salad, chicken, veggies, pasta, and challah in addition to other things our guests contributed. And even if you recall Jessica “politely dissenting” (i.e., whining) from her lack of a food processor, don’t think for a minute that she caved and grated our ten potatoes by hand—I had to earn my accommodations! It's true. He did the potatoes and one of the onions, while I cleaned the living room around him. But I did the other onion after watching him cry like a baby through the first one. I cried too. Plus, considering neither of us had ever actually had to make latkes before that night, it was a mini-miracle of Chanukah that they came out just fine and a bigger miracle the apartment didn’t smell like latkes for the rest of the weekend. Grandma, we used your recipe, thanks! We finished making dinner just in time to meet up with our guests to walk to Shabbat services.

Unlike some other holidays, the Friday evening service does not change much for Hanukkah. However, the number of people in attendance certainly does. With an influx of visitors for the holidays, Shirah Chadasha was pretty packed with standing room only available shortly after we arrived. After another wonderful Kabbalat Shabbat and the rest of the service, we ran (not true) back to the apartment to heat up the food for dinner.

Our guests for dinner included both friends and their family, including a rabbi and his wife from Birmingham, Alabama. My friend Aaron's parents, not a random rabbi. We started the night by lighting a few Hanukkiyot (yes, that’s right—we went to Shabbat services, then lit the Hanukkiyot, then lit Shabbat candles. shhhhh.) , but I was mighty disappointed that this cadre of a rabbi and almost-close-to-being-almost-rabbis (10% rabbis?) didn’t break into a round of Chanukah songs, though I didn’t exactly volunteer to lead either. The conversation was a lively discussion of changes in reform Judaism, ways of keeping Jewish youths engaged with their religion, and the perks and hidden challenges of being a rabbi. Trivia for the night included the significantly growing number of women pursuing the rabbinate and becoming engaged in temple leadership and the benefits of tax breaks for clergy. Among the key pieces of advice we received for surviving as a rabbi was this: when entertaining a large group for Shabbat dinner, always hire help. Thanks for telling us that after the meal!

Good company, good weather (it's cloudy and gross looking today), and of course, great food (and tons of leftovers!) —a perfect conclusion to Hanukkah and a perfect start to Shabbat. Chag Samayach, Shabbat Shalom, chodesh tov (a good month) from the clerk at the supermarket, and Happy Holidays! From me too:)

Chanukkah Everywhere!

A bonus blog! I don’t think I’ve ever done two days in a row before. It sort of figures that it would happen in the middle of final papers and exams.

A few observations from this morning’s shuk trip. Chanukkah is everywhere! Every bakery had piles of sufganiyot, jelly donuts, displayed this morning. A week from now, and for another 50 weeks or so, you would be hard-pressed to find any kind of donut in Israel. This week, they’re hard to avoid. The various stores that sell assorted Judaic items and housewares usually have piles of kippot in the front of their booths, or at least that’s what I usually notice. Today, they were all Chanukkah. They were selling menorahs of all kinds, a whole range of candles, and lots of different dreidels. I’m sure I’ll be back there during the holiday to get myself a few Israeli dreidels, with the Pei, for “A Great Miracle Happened Here (Poh)” instead of the American “A Great Miracle Happened There” (Sham, with a Shin). What fun!

I also noticed some extra-special menorahs. They sell oil menorahs in Israel! I know they sell them in the states also, but only from a few places (as in, a few wholesalers. I guess I would know that. Thanks Mom!). I’m sure most people have never seen an oil menorah. Actually, I’ve never seen one lit. But at the shuk today, mixed in with the tables full of menorahs, were oil menorahs of all designs, and probably, of all prices. Mixed in with the piles and displays of candles were packages of wicks for oil. I was caught off-guard by it all! As someone a little afraid of fire, I won’t be lighting one of those, but the idea of it is so much cooler than the regular menorahs.

Even the supermarkets are full of Chanukkah. I’m sure the ones at home now are all decorated for Christmas, with special Christmas packaging on everything. (I saw a small Christmas display yesterday! The first one! Then I realized it was a Russian store. Of course. Then I moved on.) The supermarket here is selling cheap menorahs, a few kinds of candles, and lots of Chanukkah candy. I bet you didn’t know there was Chanukkah candy! There is gelt, of course. But in addition, there is the equivalent of all the different candy canes of candy, trees of candy, Christmas-dressed stuffed animals holding bags of candy… It’s all here, but for Chanukkah!

Yes, I’m easily entertained.

I saw one other thing today on my way home from the shuk that made me laugh really hard. It was a poster advertising some sort of lecture: adapting to life in the 20^th Century. Um…remember the year 2000? The debate about whether the 21^st century really started in 2000 or 2001? (Well, maybe that one was only in my house.) In any case, Israel being a century behind the rest of the world explains a lot.

I ordered my airport shuttle this afternoon (to pick me up and take me to the airport tomorrow afternoon!). I did it all in Hebrew, and the person on the end was responding in Hebrew! I suppose I shouldn’t get excited about this until it really shows up when I think it will. Shuttles don’t run very often on Shabbat. I’ll be sitting at the airport (homework in lap, probably being ignored in favor of stellar people-watching) for quite a while. But what do you expect out of the 20^th century?!

Shabbat shalom, happy Chanukkah, and goodnight!

Visitors galore!

I really can’t wait to be done with the end-of-semester work! Also, my current-favorite-people list keeps growing, which is a nice way to get through papers and exams. Up there right now: Michael, arriving in a day and a half, Saroj, coming in January, Monica, coming the end of January, Mom and Dad, coming in February, and Grandma, coming in April. There’s still time to come visit in March! It may be a little nuts to have constantly revolving visitors for almost two months straight, but I am definitely looking forward to lots of love from home. And perhaps some cookies.

Sunday night, a visiting faculty member from the Cincinnati campus sponsored a dinner for the Cincinnati-bound students. There are twelve of us, plus a bunch of husbands/wives/etc. It’s a great group! Also at the dinner was a fourth year student who is studying in Jerusalem this year, but has been at (and will be returning to) Cincinnati, so he was also great to talk to about the city. I’m really looking forward to starting the program in the States, where the focus is really on studying to become a rabbi more than learning Hebrew. As we’ve been told by numerous students ahead of us, once we get back to the states, it will really feel like rabbinic school. I’ve also been told to enjoy the pace of academics in Israel (well, except for this week), as it picks up a lot next year.

Monday was a day I wasn’t really that worried about until late Sunday night, when it occurred to me that HUC more or less does its best to make me stressed out. Everyone in my class has to co-lead, with another rabbinic student and a cantorial student, one service this year. Almost all of them are weekday morning services. (Yes, and then we’re considered prepared to lead Rosh Hashanah services when we return, and hopefully to have a monthly Shabbat pulpit all year long. We’re still a little puzzled too.) They make the one service leading opportunity into a big deal, requiring lots of supervision and preparation, and after the service, there is a formal service review with some of the faculty, where they offer suggestions. I have led plenty of services before though, and from going to Shacharit almost daily for six months now, I also know the service itself more or less inside out. Except that when a dozen different people ask you whether you’re nervous about leading services, eventually something inside kicks in and decides to get nervous. Awesome. Happily, everything in the service I had any reason to be nervous about was right at the beginning. I wrote the service introduction, about trying to find 100 blessings in every day. It seemed to go well, and I will include the text of it, if you’re interested, at the end of this posting. I also led Ashrei, which is a lot of Hebrew and a lot of singing. I got through it without a problem, which is always nice. The service itself went really well, with only one little hiccup in the middle which had nothing to do with us. In the middle of the Torah service, an enormous news camera came into the sanctuary. After some nervous moments, a couple of faculty members went to go kick out the camera crew, who of course refused to leave. A cell phone rang. The video-sidekick answered it. Dave continued chanting Torah, without noticing the chaos to his left. Eventually the crew was more or less dragged out of the sanctuary, and it was discovered that they were supposed to be filming the Israeli rabbinic students’ service. Thanks, guys. Our review was fairly painless. Most of the comments included the disclaimer “it will come more easily with practice.” How I wish we had the opportunity for more practice! But I know I have more than enough coming to me eventually.

Wednesday is our Israel Seminar day. This week we were studying the Haredim, the ultra-orthodox. We had a speaker who is an anthropologist who has studied Haredi women specifically. As she spoke, and things sounded really familiar, I realized that I had read her book for a class in college. (Debbie, you did too. Educated and Ignorant.) She spoke mainly about how Haredi women are educated, but their education also includes some indoctrination, so that they maintain the lifestyle. It is as if they are educated to be as ignorant as their ancestors, at least in some ways. It was actually an interesting lecture, which is always a plus! After the speaker, we divided into two groups to go on field trips. My group went for a walk in Mea Shearim, the main Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem. I had been there before, but our guide took us on back streets and into neighborhoods where I had never been. The poverty in the neighborhood is incredibly striking. Many of the men study during the day rather than working, so they live off of child-benefits and welfare, in small apartments, in neighborhoods where the houses resemble the inner city, but the residents are all incredibly religious. The neighborhoods are fairly segregated. The different groups of immigrants settled together, so we walked through “Poland,” and our guide pointed out “Russia,” “Hungary,” and some others. For the most part, it seems that although from the outside we group Haredim together, they are in reality separate groups that don’t mix all that much. Most of them don’t own computers, televisions, radios, or receive newspapers. It makes it a more interesting process to find out the news, but it also makes it easier to keep out the modern world and any news you don’t want to hear about – or don’t want your children to hear about. Instead there are huge notice-boards lining the streets, and anyone who prints anything can plaster it up there. They were mainly advertisements for lectures, some major news stories (major, like boycott El Al because they flew on one Shabbat recently to clear their backlog of flights from a Friday strike), and notices of funerals. It is so insular and so amazing to see what a completely different world lives only a 15 minute walk from school.

Today was the last day of classes! I celebrated tonight, by doing my liturgy take-home exam. I actually also had a Hebrew in-class essay today and a Development of the Alef-Bet exam today during class, with a rabbinics class in between. Neither of them was painful, but it made for a long morning. I went shopping with friends for a little while in the afternoon, and I have been home since then, working, doing laundry, and trying to get myself organized for the last week’s push of work. Hopefully I’ll manage to get a lot accomplished in the next 40 hours or so until Michael shows up:) But with my Friday track record, that would be a major accomplishment. It’s a better-than-usual incentive though, so we’ll see what happens.

I have gotten a few email updates from my mom that she has heard from some people who have received Pesach Project letters. At some point the people in charge will give me official notice and you’ll get a real thank-you, but it will probably be a while still. So for now, THANK YOU!!

Off to bed. Eeeek! Except I just looked behind me and realized I have three loads of (clean) laundry to deal with first. Don’t think my life in Israel is too exciting!



My service intro follows...

היה רבי מאיר אומר: חייב אדם לברך מאה ברכות בכל יום.

In Bavli Menachot, we read that Rabbi Meir said that a person is obligated to recite a hundred blessings every day. It seems like a lot of blessings, especially on those days that seem more filled with homework and stress than happiness and praise. The way I see it, there are two ways to go about finding 100 blessings from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep.

There is the route that Rabbi Meir intended, starting with about 50 blessings in the Shacharit service, and adding all the required brachot throughout the day.

As Reform Jews, however, we may have to look a little harder for our hundred blessings. Instead of praying formally, using words that are hundreds and thousands of years old, we can challenge ourselves to thank God in our own words for ordinary things. A blessing, in essence, makes something ordinary into an extraordinary moment of holy time. Even waking from a night’s sleep and emerging from the bathroom are moments worthy of praising God and offering a blessing. By not always engaging in formal prayer, we have this challenge of finding one hundred such ordinary moments every single day and thanking God for each and every one of them.

As we pray together this morning, try to think about the meaning of each blessing. Pay attention to how each ordinary moment is transformed into something holy. And as you go on your way after services and for the rest of the day, try to find the remaining 50 or so blessings for today. A good conversation with a friend, a funny email, a thoughtful listener, a well-melted bagel toast, a moment of clarity in Hebrew class, a happy memory you had forgotten about. All of these times could be moments of blessing, times to remember God, and an opportunity for holiness as we go about our days.

Yummy break

It’s Friday afternoon. I was on a roll. I went to the shuk and supermarket, came back home for an hour or so, went for a good workout at the gym, enjoyed their far superior showers, came home for lunch, and made banana chocolate chip muffins. (Those bananas, eek.) I was excited that I had been so productive! And then I looked at the clock. Shabbat starts in an hour. Arrrgh! Less than an hour (since at some point I’ll have to change and get ready for Shabbat) is definitely not enough time for me to get homework out and work on it, so this is the alternative! I should really give up on expecting to get homework done on Fridays, at least until the days get longer again.

Banana muffins. I thought my hand mixer (which is at home in a box somewhere) was a sad state of affairs after my mom’s stand up mixer. But alas, making banana muffins with no mixer at all…that’s sad. I have discovered the ideal combination though: a fork works better for the first few added ingredients, especially the butter/sugar combination. A wooden spoon works better once there is flour involved. Just in case you’re stuck with rotten bananas and no mixer in sight and a pile of work that should be done instead. (Mom: enjoy breaking in the new mixer today! I can’t wait to taste the results next week! Michael: next week!!)

Also, I miss Firestone Library. I really didn’t think that day would come. We’re all writing several final papers these days. The problem is, we all take the same classes, so the paper topics are not all that varied. So there has been a run on books relating at all to liturgy, Reform Judaism, and modern-ish European-Jewish history. There is no other school with a library we can borrow from, let alone a whole group of schools. On top of that, I got spoiled with Princeton’s journal subscriptions. I could expect that if I found a citation of an article that would be useful to me, I could get my hands on that article. Online, if it was written in the last five to ten years, and in the stacks if it was older. I’ve learned this week how much of a blessing that was. Here, I can get an article if it’s in one of a small handful of journals, and not too old. I’ll get over it, but it’s frustrating.

The pictures from the tiyul are still coming, as are ones from Thanksgiving. I’m getting a bunch from Kate tonight, assuming I remember my flash drive, and they will be posted soon after, once I sit down to do homework that can be put off.

Earlier this week, program administrators decided that the American rabbinic program (mine) should have more interaction with the Israeli rabbinic program with which we share a campus and faculty. They got us a pizza lunch on the premise that if you throw them in a room together with food, they’ll talk. Strangely, it worked! I think that at least some of the success was related to our having a lot of work right now, so a lot of the Americans didn’t attend. There are over 50 of us and only about 25-30ish of them, so it’s usually easy for us to clump and ignore each other. But this time, we actually did some talking, which was nice. The woman I was talking to (in English) didn’t understand something I had said, so I repeated it in Hebrew. She commented that my Hebrew was good! Granted, I only said one sentence; it wasn’t really a fair sample. But I think that slowly, I am getting better with the speaking. A lot of my best practice comes from a somewhat unexpected place, and it’s not Hebrew class. Visiting my Ethiopian family every week, I get almost two hours of solid Hebrew-speaking time. We don’t always talk a ton, since their Hebrew isn’t really any better than mine, but any time we want to make ourselves understood, it’s Hebrew only. I know one word of Amharic, which one of them taught me a couple weeks ago, and they know one word of English (“bye”) without necessarily realizing that it’s an English word, since all Israelis use it. Hebrew it is. I think I’m getting at least a little better. Hebrew class practice doesn’t really count, because it’s not at life-speed. I can talk as slowly as I want, ensuring that my verbs and genders come out correctly. (If they don’t, they get immediately corrected.) With the family, I have to talk fast to get the point across. When I’m wrong, sometimes the kids correct me, and sometimes they don’t. I usually notice my mistakes though and silently correct myself. (Jessica, he’s a boy. Masculine not feminine. There’s only one of her. And so on.) A fascinating life I lead, obviously.

Yesterday we went on a field trip with the class most of us refer to as “hieroglyphics.” In reality, we have been studying the development of the Hebrew alphabet, but ancient Hebrew looks a lot like hieroglyphics. And you can trace the letters back to the pictures they came from! One looks like a hand, since it’s the letter that starts the word ‘palm’ (as in, palm of hand). The first letter of water looks like water. And so on. Anyway, the plan for yesterday was to go as a class to the Israel Museum to look at some artifacts we have been studying with ancient Hebrew writing. (We look mainly at grammatical structures and how they changed over time. Shockingly, I really like the class.) The professor, who we also have for biblical grammar, is incredibly organized and brilliant. I think he’s amazing, as I might have mentioned before in connection to the grammar class. We arrived at the museum, and he took us directly to the exhibit we were aiming for, since we didn’t have that much time. We got to the door and learned that the exhibit had been closed for renovations…starting about 3 days before. He was shocked and disappointed, as we all were. He was ready to tell us to just explore the museum on our own for the hour, but we asked him to show us something else instead. (Clearly, a highly respected professor!) So instead, we went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls! They are not written in the ancient alphabet, but they are still really cool, and although he claimed not to be an expert or anything, he is a fountain of information. I would have loved to see the stuff we’ve been studying, but this was a great backup.

I’m ready for vacation. And also to go get ready for Shabbat and sample my muffins. I’d write more, but there really isn’t all that much going on right now. We’re going into the last week of classes, and then exam week. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

Caesaria, Tzippori, Tiberias, Tsfat, Haifa

I’m back from Haifa, and now having had a day to recover, I’m still tired. But school starts again tomorrow, so I’m trying to get this written before I get bogged down in the craziness of the week.

We actually started this tiyul on Monday night with an introductory session with my rabbinics professor. He is so incredibly educated about the rabbinic period, and I actually love listening to him talk. He gave us some background information about the places we would be visiting and showed some slides of archaeological discoveries, some of which we saw on the trip in person.

Wednesday morning we met at the college early in the morning to get on buses and head north. (Dad argued that 7:30 isn’t really that early. To be ready to be social with more than 50 future colleagues, or more than 70 of anyone, that’s early!) A couple of hours later, we arrived at Caesaria in northern Israel. This city is a major testament to the Hellenistic influence over Israel. We divided into our three study groups to tour the ruins, starting in the theater. Our educator told us that the acoustics aren’t as good as they used to be, because where there is now a beautiful view of the sea behind the stage, there used to be a backdrop to reflect noise back to the seats. Another group’s educator apparently disagreed, because in the middle of our text study, we saw five of the HUCers with the most amazing voices run up to the stage, and then we heard them, from way up in our seats, singing beautifully. (What did they sing? In multi-part harmony, first we heard “Gin-gy. Hi Gingy. O-phir. Mo-she.” Those were our three educators. Then we heard, also in beautiful harmony, the Oscar Meyer Weiner song. It’s never sounded so beautiful! They had some non-HUC tour groups doubled over in laughter as well.) From the theater, we moved on, walking through the hippodrome and then to a crusader village. We also saw a beheaded statue of one of the emperors, but of course three days later, I no longer remember which one. Oops.

From Caesaria, we got back on the buses and drove to Tzippori, where the Sanhedrin met for a while under Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, the editor of the Mishnah. We did some text study there, and heard stories about the lives of the ancient rabbis while we were standing on ruins of what was probably a Jewish village, so the stories could have taken place in that exact spot! Clearly, I enjoyed it. I guess I’m heading in the right direction! We saw the remains of a huge house from that time period, which given the mosaic glorifying drinking, was probably not a Jewish house. We looked at some related texts, including one on how bathroom location was an indication of wealth. Seriously. We then went into the remains of an ancient synagogue where a huge mosaic was found on the floor. The mosaic was surprising when it was first found, because some of the images, such as a giant zodiac, are not generally thought of as very Jewish. Lots of historians have rationalized the discovery, and subsequent discoveries of similar images in other synagogues of the time, as a portrayal of Jewish time and possibly of creation. Or else the way that Hellenization crept in everywhere, including the synagogues. After all of the groups had been through the ancient synagogue and finished studying texts for the day, the whole group gathered in the synagogue remains and prayed the mincha (afternoon) service together. It was actually an odd feeling, because we were facing the back of the synagogue. This one was oriented towards Rome, not Jerusalem, so when we prayed facing Jerusalem, we were turned backwards from the way it had been built. Apparently the Greeks and Romans were more influential than anyone likes to believe.

From Tzippori, we drove to Tiberias, where we had some down time in our hotel before dinner. The hotel itself was an interesting place. It was a hotel-museum to Dona Gracia, who was one of the people to establish the Jewish community in Tiberias in the 16^th century. Among other things, there was a rack of costumes in the lobby. I still haven’t figured that out, but a few of my classmates did play dress-up at some point. The whole class went together to dinner (on HUC) at Decks, apparently the best restaurant in the area. It was fabulous! It was presented to us as an all-you-can-eat meal; as soon as one dish was empty or close to empty, it was refilled AND the next food came out. To make it even better, it was a (kosher) meat restaurant, so we got good meat as some of the never-ending courses, including some sort of beef skewers that were a highlight and goose, which was delicious, although some of my table-mates yelled at me a little for cutting off the massive amount of fat. Apparently it’s part of the experience and deliciousness, but I had plenty of experience and deliciousness without it. So there. We were also served crepes for dessert. It was delicious. We had walked to dinner, so we essentially rolled back afterwards, where I hung out with my tiyul-roommates Hayley and Cassi, and then went to bed.

Thursday morning we were up really early again. (How early is really early this time? We had to be downstairs for morning services at 7:15. And they didn’t feed us until afterwards.) I realize I tend to rave about good food, but such is life. Breakfast was delicious. An excellent balance of the Israeli – salads and cheeses – and the American – pancakes with chocolate sauce, among other things. We went to Tsfat, where mysticism took off. We did more text study and visited three old synagogues which were all beautiful and so completely unlike anything you would find today. As we walked into the first one, I remembered being there on my NFTY trip nine years ago! Although I have probably been to many of the sites we have visited this year, I remember almost nothing from that trip, for no reason I can figure out. So when I see something familiar, I get excited. But I digress. In one of the synagogues, there was a geniza with glass doors. A geniza is a place where any paper that might have God’s name on it is deposited, and when it is full, it is buried, so that the name of God is never thrown away. This one had doors that you could see through, and it has clearly been used for a very, very long time. It was really interesting to peek inside. Among other things, there was a very old Torah scroll, off its rollers, in the geniza. After the synagogues, we went to visit a kabbalistic artist, someone who studies the mystical parts of Judaism and uses them in his art. He had a lot to say. I find the mystical stuff interesting, but I think I am far too rational of a person to get very excited about it. The art was beautiful, but the explanations of some of it made it a little too out there for my taste. After that, we had free time to eat and explore the city on our own. Tsfat has zillions of little shops and artists, and I was excited to go into some of them. I am looking forward to going back, possibly in February with my parents when they come. (YAY for booking tickets!)

After Tsfat, we went to Haifa, arriving in the late afternoon. We were given free time for the rest of the day. Some friends and I asked the hotel manager where we could find a good restaurant for dinner. He gave us directions and told us it would be about a 10 minute walk. We headed in that direction, and after about 20 minutes got to the beginning of the street he was talking about, but nobody got excited about any of the restaurants for a while. After 45 minutes of walking, we were all pretty hungry. We settled into a Thai restaurant and had a fabulous meal. One of these days, someone is going to have to explain to me why Jerusalem doesn’t have any good ethnic food, but the rest of Israel seems to. Somehow, a bunch of my classmates stumbled on the same restaurant. I was there with a group of nine, and while we were eating, there were somewhere around 25 HUC people in the restaurant, and another big group showed up as we were leaving. I think we were the only ones who walked. We decided to walk home as well, in part because we were really full, and in part because we had passed some bars that looked good. We stopped in one of them, about halfway back, to get a drink. Since apparently Haifa is like Jerusalem in that you can’t go anywhere without seeing HUC people, we ran into our professors, who had just finished dinner where we were going to have a drink. Apparently this place also had great sushi. When we got back to the hotel, I had more roommate time and then slept happily, although never for long enough.

Friday morning we went to the Leo Baeck Education Center, a middle school/high school affiliated with Progressive Judaism, although most of the students there would identify themselves as secular Jews rather than reform or progressive Jews. We had services at the school, led by their rabbi/educator. With his playing guitar through the reader’s Kaddish and Aleinu, I have altered my opinion of guitar use during services: there is such a thing as too much. It was a little odd. I don’t think he stopped playing it at all, except during the silent part of the Amidah, until the Mourners’ Kaddish at the end of the service. After services, we had a brief tour of the school. It looks like no high school I have ever seen! It is on the shore of the Mediterranean, and the whole inside is gorgeous, modern, and decorated with tons of art. I am pretty sure the building is nicer than most universities. After our tour, we divided into smaller groups and met with students at the school. I am constantly impressed with Israelis’ command of English. These students, from 7^th to 10^th grade, had much better English than my Hebrew. I know they study it in school starting when they are really young, but it still surprises me and amazes me every time. It was really interesting to hear their opinions on all kinds of topics. The school does an exchange program with the Rashi School in Boston. The kids who had been through the program already said that they felt more Jewish in Israel than Boston, even when they weren’t doing Jewish things, and even though the Boston kids might have been more traditionally observant. They couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Israel. One HUC student asked them what they wanted to do in the future, and they all told us what part of the army they wanted to go into. It was a really interesting look into Israeli minds. It echoed a lot of what we talk about in our Israel Seminar, but to hear the same opinions directly from kids was still fascinating.

After an unexciting lunch, we got back on the bus and slept most of the way to Jerusalem. We arrived at about 3:30. Shabbat started at 3:56. (In two weeks it starts moving later again!) I slept well last night. I worked hard today. I drafted a paper. Michael arrives in less than two weeks. I have a ton of work to do between now and then. It’s bedtime. Pictures soon, I really promise. I have lots of procrastination to do these days, so it will happen. Mazel tov, Abi and family! Safe travels, Debbie! Happy studying, Michael! Becky and Lev, your turn to book a trip? Goodnight.

Beit haMishpat haElyon

A midweek posting so I’m all caught up before I disappear for a few days…we’re going to Haifa!

On Sunday, my Hebrew class and another class went to visit the Israeli Supreme Court, beit hamishpat ha-elyon. It was a much better trip than I expected! It was definitely a huge plus that our tour guide was incredibly patient with us, so if we didn’t understand something the first time, he explained it again using different words. He hardly spoke any English, so we were dependent on Hebrew the whole time, which is actually really helpful for forced-Hebrew-listening skills! The building itself is beautiful. It’s really modern, as you might expect in a country that wasn’t independent until the 40s, and didn’t build this building until the 1980s. It also has tons and tons of symbolism, including the type of stone they used on some of the walls inside (Jerusalem stone, of course), the many skylights and windows, the shape of the doors and hallways, and so many other things. It also makes no secret that while it is a court of justice, it is really a Jewish court of justice. Almost all (if not entirely all) of the symbolism was explained using biblical passages. For example, the doors to the courtrooms are shaped like gates, because in the bible, the judges are described as sitting in the gates. There are lots of skylights, because justice is described in the bible as coming from above. There is a mezuzah on every door. We were there for about two hours, and we spent most of the time touring the building and learning about the justice process. There are no jury trials in Israel, which is the biggest difference from the US court system. (Michael wants to go visit when he’s here too. I’m sure after we go in a few weeks, I could write a whole essay on the differences. But I’ll do my best to spare you that!) We also got to sit in on a part of a trial, which was exciting but somewhat anti-climactic, since the lawyers were of course paying no attention to the American students sitting behind them. The whole trial was in very fast Hebrew, so we understood little of it. But it was a trial of a man who borrowed 250 shekels from a friend, and when the friend didn’t pay him back, he stabbed him. A stabbing for about $60? Probably not worth it. But we had to leave before the verdict was announced. I noticed two things about the trial itself that I thought were really interesting. One was the setup of the room. All of the lawyers sit at one table that is in a U-shape, with the judge(s) at a facing U-shaped table in the front. So the prosecution and the defense share a table! I’m not sure that would go over well at home. Also, the judge interacted a lot with the lawyers. When she didn’t understand something or had a question, she asked. It was more of a conversation than a presentation. I thought that was really interesting. This man’s fate rested in one pair of hands! (Israeli Supreme Court cases have anywhere from one to thirteen judges, in an odd number. This wasn’t such a big case, so it got one. Decisions about the border fence, for example, get between nine and thirteen.) Also, the Israeli Supreme Court currently has half women. They’re way ahead of us! Clearly, since I just wrote a ton, I enjoyed the trip. Which is good, since it appears that I’ll be returning there soon…

Monday was another slightly frustrating day in Hebrew. The news days are up and down for me. Monday was down. I felt like the teacher was teaching to the few students in the class who really understand the news the first time we watched it (it was TV this week), and not to the majority who need to go over vocabulary first, and then watch it, discuss it, watch it, discuss it again, and sometimes watch again before we really understand what’s going on. So I was a bit frustrated after class. After all of my Monday classes, I ran into my Hebrew teacher from the summer, who is just one of the nicest and friendliest people here. She saw that I was upset and asked how class was going, and I told her about the news day from that morning. She knows it’s not my favorite activity, so she was sympathetic, and told me to speak up and tell the teacher to slow down! Of course she’s right, but it’s always hard to admit that I’m having trouble keeping up. I mentioned that our next class after that one was biblical grammar. She grinned and basically said that she guessed I was really good at that class! That made me really happy, that she recognized that I actually have a strength in Hebrew class. It just isn’t listening to the news. That whole conversation was in Hebrew. Even though she’s no longer my teacher, she refuses to talk to me in English. I actually appreciate that on some level.

Tonight was another trip to the absorption center. We made masks this week, just for fun. We also found a puzzle that pairs Hebrew letters with animals that start with the same letter. It was really interesting to watch the different kids try to do it and realize that I could tell from the way they did it exactly where their Hebrew skills were. The parents, who are also struggling to learn Hebrew, enjoyed watching the kids do it and trying to help out a little. I posted a zillion (or so) pictures from the last two weeks. This week’s pictures all have masks involved. Last week, there were a bunch of neighbors over for a while, so the kids look like they’ve multiplied.

Tomorrow morning bright and early, my class is heading to Haifa for a few days! I’ll be back right around the beginning of Shabbat on Friday, and I will try to take lots of pictures while I’m there and fill you in on the trip soon! And it will probably happen, since the alternative is starting to work on my various final papers.

Thanksgiving in Jerusalem, Pesach in Russia

That title sounds pretty weird to me, too, but that’s my reality these days! Starting with the present, Thanksgiving in Jerusalem. A friend of mine decided that she wanted to host a bunch of people for thanksgiving, but realized several problems in that plan early on. It’s hard to find big, whole turkeys in Israel. (The eating kind; the political kind is as easy to find here as they are in the US.) She only has a toaster oven, not a full sized oven, as would be necessary to cook a hard-to-come-by turkey, even in the event that she found one. A lot of people have this problem. We have a real oven, but it’s smaller than a normal one at home. Some of her favorite side dishes were dairy, and a lot of the class keeps kosher, not mixing meat and dairy. She actually prefers the side dishes, and realized that most people held the same opinion as her; the turkey itself is not the draw of Thanksgiving for most people. Her roommate is Canadian. He has never celebrated Thanksgiving. Thus, sides-only, dairy Thanksgiving was born. Thanksgiving night, between 35 and 40 people crammed into an apartment where most of the living room furniture had been moved to the bedrooms, to better squeeze people in. We sat on the floor, the plastic porch chairs, the couch, or we stood. It was potluck. The food was delicious! And I bet you’ve never seen so many different kinds of potatoes on one table before. Just like any other Thanksgiving, we were all stuffed, and there were tons of leftovers. It was a lot of fun.

I had a little trouble with Thanksgiving this year. I have never been away from home and my family for Thanksgiving, and this was both of those with a vengeance. I got lots of voicemails, emails, and IMs though from family and friends, making it feel like I am a little less far away. Thank you!!

There is one other holiday for which I have never been away from my family. I have done seders with family every single year, which will make this Passover difficult as well. However, I may be so busy that I won’t even notice! Every year, a group of HUC students travels to the Former Soviet Union, specifically communities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, to help run Passover seders for underserved communities. These are communities in these places which have Jewish populations, generally toward the less religious end of the spectrum, which for one reason or another do not have a rabbi or other real Jewish leadership. So we descend in groups of two or three, equipped with a Russian-Hebrew haggadah and a translator, and we apparently run 4-6-more seders and other Passover activities over about 5 days. Then we get transported back to the closest major city to wherever we are, and we get another couple of days to tour and enjoy the completely new surroundings. The whole trip is student-planned and student-run. I am chairing the committee in charge of, basically, the seder. We make sure we know the Russian-Hebrew haggadah that we all use backwards and forwards, we teach our classmates how to run a seder (which means we all have to know), and we come up with lots of ideas for adapting a seder to all different sizes and types of groups. I’m really excited about the project, and thrilled that I’m working with a great committee on something I really enjoy. The project’s website is now up and running, at http://www.pesachproject.com/. Check it out! It's beautifully designed by my friend Kate, who is here this year with her fiancé. In her real life, she's a graphics designer. Don't bother looking for me in the various pictures. They're from last year's trip. You also might be receiving a slightly-less-personal letter from me and HUC about the project soon. I can promise a note on the bottom. Look forward to it!

It’s now about a half hour before Shabbat starts this week, and I haven’t talked to anyone from the US yet today. I think you’re all still in food comas and sleeping. I find it a little sad (and far away) that I’m preparing for sunset, and you’re still asleep. It’s also a little funny that I can go to the shuk and have a conversation with a grocer all in Hebrew, go to the supermarket and help some confused Americans decipher the Hebrew on their purchase (“magic tea box”), do four loads of laundry (it’s a small washer), go out for hot chocolate and homework with a friend, meet up with a friend from home for a little while, start outlining a midterm, and get ready for Shabbat…all before you wake up. It does make my day feel slightly more productive.

There should be more pictures of my Ethiopian family and of Thanksgiving night soon, but so as to not drive everyone crazy with millions of cameras, I didn't bring mine. I'll get pictures from friends once they post them.

Shabbat shalom, and I hope I get to talk to all of you soon!

Working Shabbat

First on my mind right now (although not in my usual chronological order) is the idea of doing homework and other work on Shabbat. In the materials they sent us before coming to Israel, I laughed at the juxtaposition of ideas in the HUC Year-In-Israel book. In one paragraph, it tells us how much time we will be spending in class (a lot), on homework (a good chunk) and on other required activities (a significant amount). Soon after, they mention that especially in Israel, we should try keeping Shabbat to some degree, at least by not doing homework. I tried that for much of the summer. Over the summer, I was in ulpan, and while I had Hebrew for five hours a day, I only had Hebrew. There just wasn’t all that much homework. I did have to think about it and plan ahead, because Shabbat ended late over the summer. And I really enjoyed my Shabbats! I had all day to read things for fun, catch up on sleep, hang out with friends, and talk to people from home. I really did enjoy the day of rest. But then the school year hit for real. During the year, I’m in class all day, getting out sometimes around 4 and sometimes later. Add in other required programs and activities and my self-imposed requirements (i.e., going to the gym and enough time to talk to people from home), and there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Friday hits, the first day of the weekend, and post-daylight savings time, Shabbat starts really early. It’s my “free day” to run errands, since stores aren’t open on Saturdays, and usually cook something for Shabbat dinner. Even on my most productive of days recently, I can get some homework done, but not enough. Shabbat has become a heavy work day, and I hate it, but I don’t know how to get around it. It is the only day of the week without any obligations, which means I should be able to get a lot done. But it’s hard to reconcile doing homework all day when so much of the city is enjoying the holiday. I would love to go back to the days from the summer of enjoying the holiday, and maybe I just need to find a way to compromise, like enjoying part of the day and working hard for part of the day, but it’s a hard balance to find. I guess that’s what the rest of the year (and the next four, and probably beyond) is for.

Our Israel seminar this week was on secular Judaism in Israel, which led to a lot of really interesting discussion and information. As Americans, when we think of secular Jews, we think about people who are Jewish in name, but really do almost nothing Jewish. Secular Jews in Israel are generally contrasted with the Orthodox. As in, Jews who do not follow the commandments and live an almost entirely Jewish lifestyle are considered secular. However, the majority of these secular Jews attend a seder on Passover, hang a mezuzah at home, keep some level of kashrut, light Chanukah candles, and so on. And of course, they all speak Hebrew, so they could (in theory) study Torah and follow a prayer service at will. These secular Jews aren’t really sure what to do with the Reform Jews in Israel. Some of them lump us with them, as not-Orthodox and therefore secular. Some of them see us as a separate movement. Some of them just see us as some level of religious, and therefore while we agree about many, many things, and in Jewish lifestyle we are not far apart, they are not willing to classify themselves with us. It’s an interesting phenomenon. We also talked about different secular groups who are trying to get these secular Jews more active and more educated in Jewish life, through secular but Jewish schools, adult education, social action, and some other projects that sounded very similar to Reform Judaism at home. We also had a very brief discussion, cut short by time restraints, about a list of Israeli dilemmas presented to us. For example, a café next door to a yeshiva (religious school) wants to be open seven days a week, but the neighborhood feels that it will violate their feeling of Shabbat. Does it stay open? Pork is hard to find in Israel, so a kibbutz begins raising pigs and making a great profit. Some people see this as a horrible development, and propose banning the production of pork in Israel. Should the ban go through? And on and on and on. We discussed the difference between separation of church and state in Israel and in the US. A major difference is in the language. Their translation of the phrase translates back to English as a separation of religion and state. The US doesn’t separate religion and state! Religion is definitely tied to the state; the separation is in religious administration and requirement. Israel could never separate religion from the state, but separating the religious administration from the government could do wonders. It’s fascinating and sometimes frustrating to live in a religious democracy.

Thursday afternoon I went with some classmates to Museum on the Seam, a museum on the border of East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem, and also more or less on a border between religious and secular neighborhoods, and just barely out of the Old City into the New City. Their famous exhibition is now a traveling exhibit on tolerance and coexistence. (Ever seen the t-shirts that say “Coexistence,” where the C is a crescent, the X is a Jewish star, and the T is a cross? They’re from this museum.) The current exhibit, however, is about fair labor and exploited laborers. They do a great job of making it a multi-media presentation, with photos, paintings, videos, sound, and more. It talked about day laborers, prostitution, modern day slave labor, and more. It was really well done and really interesting, but we were all somewhat struck by how much it wasn’t Israel-centric. A good portion of the exhibit (although not all of it) was about Israeli labor, but the museum could have been appropriate anywhere in the world.

Thursday evening was HUC Casino Night, with all proceeds going to the Former Soviet Union seder project. (Summary: about half of the class is heading to the FSU during Passover to lead seders in all sorts of different communities. We do all the planning, organizing, and fundraising. More information coming soon, I promise.) Our whole moadon (lounge/café) was decorated and looked great. There was an auction for items donated by places in the city we all use, from a cup of coffee to large gift certificates to great restaurants. There were poker tables and blackjack tables. There were beverages and desserts. Our admission fee gave us a bunch of play money to participate in the games. I didn’t do any gambling, but had a great time hanging out with my friends and giggling at a professor and the director of the Year-In-Israel program bartending, and laughing over the money that had different HUC personalities printed on them. (Drinks, for example, cost a Mendelsson.) Pictures of Casino night (and some friends hanging out afterwards) are being posted shortly.

Clearly, I am really not looking forward to finishing my homework. Again.

About the Pictures

I think some explanations are in order if you’ve been looking at my pictures.

A couple of days ago I posted the Duma pictures, and I’m going to add some from my friend Mara’s collection tonight as well. The Duma Simulation was a history project. We were reconstructing elections in 1906 Russia, when they attempted, for the second time, to at least pretend there was a semblance of democracy there. Clearly, it worked well. We were supposed to be simulating the elections in a Jewish town, with all of the major Jewish political parties represented, plus the communists, plus a group trying to convince the Jews to move to America, plus the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredi Jews, who in reality wanted nothing to do with the Duma. Hence the pictures of them protesting outside. I was asked to help run the Duma, meaning that I was not part of one of the parties, but instead, with a friend, organizing the speakers and the rest of the evening and then basically running the program and the elections. People were less-than-excited about having a four-hour program on an evening in the middle of midterms, but it turned out that most groups got into it and really had a good time. There were flyers hung all week long advertising the different groups, which confused a lot of visitors, but amused all of us. The evening of the Duma Simulation is what the pictures show. People came in costume traditional for their group, or just in matching outfits. The communists wore red. The America group wore assorted American flag shirts, red, white, and blue, and baseball hats. There were lots of women with scarves over their heads. The haredi group came in traditional Jewish dress, including all four women from that group arriving looking very pregnant. A few of the groups brought “traditional beverages.” My co-chair and I decided that we could not dress like any of the groups, but that we had to come in some sort of costume. So we thought about the spirit of democracy and decided on the most democratic type of clothing we could come up with: togas! So we showed up to the Russian Duma elections in togas. If you’re curious, the America group won the election, closely followed by the Zionists and the Bund, a Russian-Jewish workers’ group. (In reality, the Zionists at this time period did not get nearly this much support.) I hope that clears up the crazy pictures!

The other new set of pictures is of my Ethiopian family. A group of us from HUC goes to the absorption center every Tuesday evening, and with a partner, each of us is assigned a family. My roommate Karen and I are partners, and I brought a camera tonight. The kids had a great time posing for pictures and then immediately looking at them on my digital camera afterwards. We’re going to try to print out a few of them to bring back next week. Some of the kids have stickers on their faces. They just like to put stickers everywhere, and that’s the best explanation I can give. The fact that Karen and I weren’t covered with stickers this week was a nice change. There are five kids in the family, ranging from about 11 down to 2. The oldest and youngest are girls, and the middle three are boys. They are adorable. I communicate most with the oldest girl, who is the most talkative and has the best Hebrew of all of them (including the parents) by far. The rest of the kids are talking to us a little more each week. The parents hardly speak any Hebrew. They are incredibly welcoming. Every week, the mother makes coffee for me and Karen, and they put out a bowl of apples. I don’t usually drink coffee, but apparently on Tuesday nights, I am now a coffee drinker. The apples we have there are amazing. I keep buying apples at the shuk, but I haven’t gotten any really good ones. But the ones we have there are amazing every single week! Tonight we played with a puzzle, play-doh, some cards, and Karen and I found some dot stickers and played “pin the nose on the smiley face.” It was a good activity for a few minutes, and then they started pinning the dot stickers on themselves. And the TV. And each other. It’s so much fun! [Michael: you might get to meet them! I think we are planning to go the first Tuesday night you’re here, even though it’s our exam week. Will you come?] Sadly, I can’t post names with the pictures. With the language barrier, and the fact that their names are Ethiopian and not Hebrew, we haven’t managed to pick up on them yet. Which is only okay, because I don’t think they know my name or Karen’s name either. Enjoy the pictures!

That’s all I’ve got for now. I really should be studying. And also posting pictures. More soon!