Kitah Hey, Week 1

A week of Hebrew class under my belt! This doesn't mean my Hebrew's much better. But I have put in a lot of hours of class time.

The summer is going to be exhausting. Hebrew runs from 8:30-10, 10:30-12, and 12:15-1:00, Sunday through Wednesday (with slight schedule changes on days when we have to go to morning services). In addition, we have Wednesday evening seminars about Israeli history (in English), day trips around Jerusalem on Thursdays, and various other required and optional programs all summer long. And plenty of Hebrew homework in between.

I was placed into Kitah Hey, which is the highest of the five levels. Having not done much Hebrew since sophomore year of college, I was surprised (ok, shocked) that I placed so high, and a little terrified to start class. The class is about 12 people, although the number keeps changing as people switch up and down levels. Between half to two-thirds of the class has not spent significant time in Israel, meaning that the remainder has decided to make Aliyah, or has been here studying for a year already, and/or is dating someone Israeli, or served in the Israeli Army for over a year. It's a little intimidating. But while some of their speaking skills and vocabularies are far superior to mine, I understand most of what goes on in class, and I have heard that the class one level lower is doing much easier work. The people who have been switching between Hey and Dalet say that for several of them, Dalet is fairly easy, and Hey is somewhat difficult. I think I'm going to stick it out, and work to keep up with the class. I'm sort of looking forward to the challenge.

What do we do in Hebrew class? It's feeling somewhat similar to a high school English class right now. Part of the time we spend working on grammar, but there's always vocabulary included. Some of the time we're reading stories, also always with new vocabulary. We read the stories, talk about them, answer questions, and write an essay. Just like high school. We read the newspaper, with lots and lots of new vocabulary. I think the teacher is trying to prove that we really can follow what's going on in the world, as long as we have patience...and a dictionary! Yesterday and today we read an excerpt from a story by Amos Oz. Since people read him in English translation at home, I thought it was pretty cool to read the original...and learn that his writing is not too hard to understand! I have to write a (short) essay about that reading this weekend though. I'm not sure how much I'll like him by Sunday.

Tuesday afternoon we had an optional activity, the beginning of a five-part walking tour of the city led by one of the students in HUC's Israeli rabbinic program, Nir. Tuesday's tour was to show where his family first settled in Jerusalem something like 150 years ago, and then where they moved when they left the old city. The walk through the Old City was really cool. His great grandfather (great, great? I don't remember) had a store in the Christian quarter, so that's where we were walking, and we stopped right in front of his former store to talk about it. The current store owners were outside hanging out, and listened to everything he said to us, and then actually stopped him to talk for a minute afterwards. Then we went to the "Austrian Hospice," but apparently it was built as what we would think of as more like a Hostel, right on Via Delarosa, which Christians believe was Jesus's path before crucifixion. We did pass a big group of Brazilian pilgrims following that path. Possibly the highlight of the afternoon was on the roof of the hospice. We had to climb a LOT of steps, but the view was incredibly worth it. The pictures are from the roof. The first one is the Mount of Olives, where tradition teaches the Messiah will come first. If you can't tell, the hill is covered in graves, because since it's supposed to be the Messiah's first "stop," it's a popular burial place. The others are pictures in various directions from the roof. The Jewish Quarter is somewhat downhill, so it's hard to see.

Tomorrow we're going to many more historical sites, so hopefully I'll manage to make good use of camera then as well!