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…