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.